George Walkden at New Books in Language:
Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze? Or slow-moving but inexorable farmers from Anatolia?
These are just some of the many possibilities discussed in the scholarly literature. But in 2012, a New York Times article announced that the problem had been solved, by a team of innovative biologists applying computational tools to language change. In an article published in Science, they claimed to have found decisive support for the Anatolian hypothesis.
In their book, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis make the case that this conclusion is premature, and based on unwarranted assumptions. In this interview, Asya and Martin talk to me about the history of the Indo-European homeland question, the problems they see in the Science article, and the form that a good theory of Indo-European origins needs to take.
At the site you can hear the hour-long interview. Thanks, Trevor!
Update. Discussion of some of the issues raised in the (very long) thread below continues at Eli’s Indo-European Etymology Blog.
Ooh, nice. I’ll have to listen to it this evening.
Together, the recent papers on the genetics of the Corded Ware/Battle Ax people make it highly likely that the non-Anatolian branch of IE expanded with the brown-eyed, lactose-tolerant hordes of the Yamnaya culture.
I had a brief conversation with Asya Pereltsvaig, one of the authors, at Razib’s blog, following up on this conversation (not that I contributed a lot of insight here, but she had some comments):
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/open-thread-july-26th-2015/
Pereltsvaig’s blog, http://languagesoftheworld.info/ is pretty rad.
From your comment there (the thread is closed):
The Hattic language is well enough known to tell that it was very different from (P)IE indeed (see the German version for a bit more on the grammar). But your point stands: Anatolia is really large, and the finding that it was linguistically diverse in the Bronze Age cannot come as a surprise under any hypothesis about the PIE homeland.
According to one of the two genetics papers, the Yamnaya people represent a mixture of local Eastern Hunter-Gatherers = Ancient North Eurasians and immigrants from the south who were similar to present-day Armenians. The other paper didn’t investigate this issue in the first place.
Thank you Hat. Can I ask a methodological question?
(This isn’t a comment on the “computational tools”, but on the philologists’ groundwork that they relied on.)
The discussion makes quite a bit of the ‘anomaly’ of the so-called Tocharian languages not fitting in to the models from the “innovative biologists”. (They don’t fit because the Tarim basin is so geographically remote from IE homelands, so the models provide no explanation how the languages/their speakers migrated there.)
These languages are identified as Indo-European from their sound pattern. Furthermore there’s a claim that the A and B variants are not mutually intelligible. [Wikipedia]
My methodological question is: how could anyone tell these languages are IE?
According to Wikipedia, the Tocharian languages are extinct, known only from manuscripts. So how do philologists have any idea what they sounded like, particularly with enough accuracy to divine whether their vocabulary derives from PIE + consistent sound shift?
OK you’re going to tell me “the comparative method”, hermeneutics, yada yada. How does this differ from the cabalists, or voodoo?
(And I know that Tocharian is by no means the only language ‘family’ attributed as PIE but long extinct and known only from scraps of manuscripts).
These languages are identified as Indo-European from their sound pattern.
No, they’re identified as Indo-European the same way other languages are: by consistent patterns of phonetic and morphological relationships. If you scroll down the Wikipedia article to the Proto-Tocharian section, you’ll see a table with examples like “PIE *pḥ₂tḗr “father” > PToch *pācer > TB pācer, TA pācar” and “PIE *(h₁)eḱwo– “horse” > PToch yä́kwë > TB yakwe.” Any single apparent cognate might be pure coincidence (this often trips people up who encounter a familiar-looking word in a foreign language and leap to the conclusion it must be related to whatever language they’re familiar with), but if you have entire series of words where Toch. p corresponds to p in (say) Latin and Greek and a corresponds to a and so on, then the only logical conclusion is that those languages are related. There is no doubt whatever that Tocharian is an IE language; it was recognized as such almost immediately, unlike Albanian, which hid its IE origins under a heap of borrowings. If you want more information on how the comparative method works, marie-lucie has written some excellent comments explaining it which I am too lazy to try and find at the moment, but the Wikipedia article will give you a head start.
The keys to Tocharian were the known scripts (Brahmi and Manichean) in which the texts were written, and the fact that they were evidently translations of Buddhist scriptures (though secular material has also been found for Tocharian B). With the scripts known, the pronunciation was known, nearly enough (at worst it represented a slightly older version of the language spoken at the time).
Mere inspection showed that the Tocharian material was fairly close linguistically to the Pali originals, in a way that could not have been the case if Tocharian were a Turkic language, say. Given parallel texts, it was possible to work out the sound-changes separating Tocharian from Pali, and then triangulate back to PIE.
Voodoo and cabalism are religious movements. The comparative method is the common core of all historical sciences, including evolutionary biology: the Museum of Comparative Zoology has been employing the method since its founding in 1859.
AntC: These languages are identified as Indo-European from their sound pattern
No competent linguist would identify a language as belonging to this or that family just from its “sound pattern”. You need resemblances of vocabulary (not always obvious because of sound changes) and especially morphology (eg noun and verb structure, pronouns).
Perhaps by “sound pattern” you mean the pattern of sound correspondences between Tocharian and other IE languages, which can be detected from a comparative study of the common vocabulary. For instance, the Germanic family is identified partially by the pattern of initial consonant correspondences in otherwise almost identical words, such as the p/f correspondences in Latin pisc-is but Scandinavian fisk, German Fisch, English fish, and similarly for several other consonant groups. But that is not the only thing that makes this family part of IE. Similarly, there are probably some correspondence patterns which are typical of the Tocharian group.
It is true that some languages are only attested by “scraps”, such as the inscriptions in some of the ancient languages of Italy, too scanty for decipherment, so that their affiliation is doubtful, but the Tocharian family, especially one of its two languages, is much better attested than those. Even if the manuscripts have deteriorated into “scraps”, there are enough of them to get a very good idea of the languages they are written in, especially since many of them are translations of texts known from Indian languages.
As for how to determine the actual sounds of these languages, the documents are written in variants of Indian scripts which are known, so that they were able to be read before they were understood. A few of the sounds may have been hypothesized from correspondences and from the knowledge of the kind of sound-changes likely to occur in certain circumstances (such as word-initially, before some vowels, etc).
Albanian, which hid its IE origins under a heap of borrowings
Not its IE origins; that was always obvious (një, dy, tre, katër, pesë, gjashtë, shtatë, tetë, nëntë, dhjetë), and was nailed down by Bopp in 1854. What wasn’t obvious was that Albanian is a separate branch of IE. There were similar problems with Armenian, which was first thought to be an aberrant Iranian language, but actually has two layers of Iranian loans.
(And yes, numbers aren’t 100% reliable: Chamorro now uses un, dos, tres, kuatro, sinko, sais, siette, ocho, nuebi, dies instead of hacha, hu-gua, tulu, fatfat, lima, gunum, fiti, gualu, sigua, manot. But still.)
David Marjanović,
Right. Pereltsvaig then introduced additional details of the specific Anatolian-origin hypothesis which, she advised me, are incompatible with what we know about Hattic. I had not known about those additional details beforehand, so obviously I had nothing intelligent to add further. I continue to believe that the argument they originally presented in the interview didn’t work because it did not specify those details, but it seemed no more than pedantic to belabor that point.
The old Chamorran (sp.?) numbers look curiously similar to Javanese
“The old Chamorran (sp.?) numbers look curiously similar to Javanese”
Actually those languages are pretty closely related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda%E2%80%93Sulawesi_languages
As with any other expansion, the settlement patterns are kind of a jumble.
MIchel,
Here‘s a site that has compiled lists of the numbers 1-10 in a long list of Austronesian languages. You’ll see many resemblances to the old Chamorro and Javanese numbers. Most have not replaced all their numbers with borrowings, as Chamorro has, but many in the New Guinea area have replaced their numbers 6-10 with compounds: 5+1, 5+2, etc., or (near the Admiralty Islands) 10-1 for 9, 10-2 for 8, etc.
Zompist’s 1-10 in 5000 languages.
Even though numbers (especially 1-10) may be cognate in most if not all of the Indo-European languages, and therefore seem to be part of basic vocabulary unlikely to be borrowed, there are many exceptions in the world, especially in small-scale societies. Modern Western societies are obsessed with exact numbers (age, weight, dates, population, temperatures, and other numerical measurements) but this was not the case in ancient societies. Where numbers are used especially for purposes of storage and exchange of goods (as for instance in Egypt or Mesopotamia), the words for them can travel long distances through a variety of societies along with the goods, even if typically the human bearers of the goods only travel relatively short distances between specific stopping points where exchanges take place (eg along the Silk Road or other traditional path). It is not difficult or rare for the average person to learn 5 or 10 words for numbers without learning the language these words originated in, any more than to learn the names of the “exotic” goods traded and transported (see for instance the fortunes of words for “coffee” and “tobacco” once these substances were circulated far from their countries of origin).
Indeed. In fact I find it odd that numerals are so conservative throughout IE languages, which for much of their history were spoken by small societies of subsistence farmers.
This suggests that indeed PIE did have those numerals. But some of them do resemble numerals in other languages unrelated to PIE, suggesting that PIE may have borrowed the numerals before splitting. I seem to remember that the PIE word for “7” may be such a borrowing. Some of you Hatters will know better than I do.
I sometimes enjoy the idea that the Indo-European expansion established a Trans-Eurasian high-speed trade network. Numerals beyond three or four would have been an inherent part of the technology.
The Uralic words for 7 (Finnish seitsemän, e.g.) are very similar to the Indo-European ones, but it’s usually assumed that the borrowings go the other way. Indeed, no number greater than 6 is reconstructable to Proto-Uralic.
JC: Uralic borrowing from (P)IE is not incompatible with PIE (earlier) borrowing form some other language(s).
The PIE numerals ‘three’, ‘six’ and ‘seven’ resemble the Semitic ones quite a bit, and I believe people have been looking into that since the 19th century. I have no idea where matters stand at present. A quick search finds, e.g., this on Paleoglot, of which I have no opinion one way or another. Note Kartvelian numerals are involved somehow as well.
Yes, it is much the safest to express no opinion of Paleoglot.
…No. Nowhere close.
The name of the MCZ refers to comparative anatomy, a discipline founded by Cuvier at the beginning of the 19th century when evolution was just Buffon’s idle speculation. It is not a method like the comparative method of historical linguistics.
Well into the 20th century, phylogenetics in biology (as opposed to linguistics) had basically no method at all. Rather than a science, it was an art. A reproducible method was first published in 1950 on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, became widespread only in the 1980s and 90s, and still hasn’t reached the study of all branches of the tree.
Language classification began as phylogenetics, as the tree model. In biology, classification came a full hundred years (Linnaeus) before Darwin and Wallace published their paper in 1858 and Darwin’s book finally came out in 1859; it shows, it still shows.
That particular post has a few interesting ideas. But those ideas rest on a number of assumptions. For example, it seems pretty obvious that the Proto-Semitic *š wasn’t [ʃ] at all, but an alveolar [s], and that the PIE *s was the exact same thing. (Proto-Semitic *s most likely was [t͡sʰ].)
The reconstruction of various pre-PIE stages (developed across several more posts) is intriguing, but the thing about internal reconstruction is that it’s almost unconstrained by anything other than the imagination. To reconstruct ancestral states, you need an outgroup – a close relative but not member of IE.
Finally, complaining about markedness while simultaneously reconstructing a phoneme */sʷ/ is an odd thing to do. Even Abkhaz and Ubykh don’t have such a phoneme; Archi and Lezgian among the East Caucasian languages do, and so does Lao, but that seems to be all.
@David Marjanović: The reconstruction of various pre-PIE stages … is intriguing, but the thing about internal reconstruction is that it’s almost unconstrained by anything other than the imagination.
That is very true — but I for one would find it wildly fascinating to know what (if anything) the real experts think about the possible shape of such stages. But most of them prudently don’t share.
Apple dumplings.
Ultimately, the origins of Indo-European may be much farther east, in southern Siberia and possibly North America. An article published in journal Genetics in 2012 titled “Ancient Admixture in Human History” revealed that Europe experienced an admixture with a population related to Native Americans about 5,000 years ago, leading one blogger to speculate: “All that being said, what went on k)
Arm (Cl) akn
Arm achk
Mod. Arm ačk’
Avestan čama, čašman-, chashman (m > k)
Old Persian čaša-, čašna
Sanskrit akshân, akshi; chakshush, chaksu
Vedic Skt ákṣi, cháksus
Hindi ax
Old Prussian ackis
Mohawk okà:ra
Oneida okáh(la)
Anc Grk ophthalmós
Grk *Her) oːy-ó-n {ᾠόν}
Old Church Slavonic oko око
Ukrainian oko, vusko
Old Norse auga
Swedish öga
Latin oculus
Siouan-like forms:
Luwian tāwīs
Lycian tawa
Lakota ištá
Osage ehtah
Tutelo tasu
Crow ishtá
Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are an interesting case because they appear to incorporate a higher proportion of forms of Siouan origin. For example, Hittite form for ‘ear’ is istāman, istam-an- ~ istam-in-. More typically in IE languages, this form is derived from the *PIE *H₂ous-. The Hittite form is a bit of a mystery: “The root was lost in IE (connections with Ancient Greek and Avestan forms with the invariant meaning ‘an organ of perception’ or ‘a hole in the head’ are semantically unsatisfactory). …” (http://starling.rinet.ru/new100/ana.pdf) The Hittite form is a close match for the modern Lakota form for ‘eye’, ištá, suggesting the ‘organ of perception’ etymology.
A model for Proto Indo-European is the Central American language Garifuna. The genetic heritage of the Garifuna people is only 15% Native American, but their core language is still essentially a composite of Arawan and Carib. Likewise, according to genetic studies, modern Europeans are only 5-18 % Native American but their North American heritage lives on in their languages, which pear to be a creole based largely on a lexicon of Paleo-Iroquoian and Paleo-Siouan languages which were probably brought to Siberia as a result of a back migration from North America.
Unfortunately, a lot of my previous posting was truncated. To summarize, some linguists have noted parallels in both lexicon and syntax between the Native American Iroquoian and Siouan languages and Indo-European. Two papers describing similarities between Siouan languages and Indo-European were published in 1881 and 1882 by Andrew Williamson. More recently, in “The New Sound of Indo-European: Essays in Phonological Reconstruction” edited by Theo Vennemann, Pierre Swiggers comments ion Beekes’ comparison of the phonology of Proto Indo-European and the Salishan language Shuswap in the chapter titled “On (the nature of) PIE Laryngeals” :
“Is there an implication of a generic relationship in the statement that “the sound system reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European could have arisen from the Shuswap system through losses”?”
Indo-European appears to combine a lexicon to a very great extent based on archaic Iroquoian and Siouan with a sound system (especially laryngeals) partly based on Salishan languages. IE languages also retain fossilized versions of Iroquoian 3rd person singular prefixes (especially in forms for body parts) as well as the Siouan ‘wi-‘ and ‘wa-‘ noun prefixes (examples: *Proto Siouan *wiˈroːka ‘man’ (male) / *PIE *wiHrós ‘man’ (male) / Old Prussian wirakan.)
“man (male)”: *PIE *wiHrós / *Proto Siouan *wiroka
“man, hero” *PIE *H₂ner- / *Proto Iroquoian *-hniɹ- ‘be durable, be hard, be solid, be strong’ (See Latin neriōsus “strong”)
#68 ‘horn’ onà:kara (Mohawk) { *-naɁkaɹ- } ‘antler, horn’ (*PNI) / *ḱr̥nom, *ḱerh₂(s),*ḱerh₂sr̥, *koru (*PIE)
#71 ‘hair’ { -kiɁɹh- } (*PI) / *keres- (“rough hair, bristle”) (PIE*)
#74 ‘eye’ okà:ra (Mohawk) / *h₃okʷ-, *h₃ekʷ- (*PIE)
#75 ‘nose’ o’niónhsa (Mohawk) / hnéh₂s , *nā́s (*PIE)
#76 ‘mouth’ ohsakà:ra (Mohawk) / aholi (Cherokee) / *h₁oh₁s- (*PIE) (Note: Basque: ‘aho’. Uhlenbeck used this form as a ‘probe’ for linking Basque to other languages.)
#77 ‘tooth’ onawí:ra/onò:tsa (Mohawk) / *h₃dónts, *ǵembʰ- (*PIE) [Note: The Mohawk form is “hiding out” in the *PIE form: *h₃d-on(o)ts(a)-]
#81 ‘leg’ (a)kohsinkoɁˈtaɁkeh (PNI *) / *kroksko (*PIE)
#82 ‘knee’ kanigeni (Cherokee) (literally, ‘his knee’) / *g(e)neu- (*PIE)
The possibility of a North American origin for IE appears to be supported by genetics research. From a recent article in Nature #522, 167–172 (11 June 2015) about the DNA of Bronze Age steppe populations:
“Intriguingly, individuals of the Bronze Age Okunevo culture from the Sayano-Altai region are related to present-day Native Americans, which confirms previous craniometric studies. This finding implies that Okunevo could represent a remnant population related to the Upper Palaeolithic Mal’ta hunter-gatherer population from Lake Baikal that contributed genetic material to Native Americans.”
Don’t read papers from 2012 without reading papers from 2015! 🙂 These “Ancient North Eurasians” (to whom the 24,000-year-old skeleton from Mal’ta in Siberia belongs), together with more southern people most similar to present-day Armenians, are the genetic components of the people of the Yamnaya culture. Most likely the ANE simply spanned all of Siberia and eastern Europe.
German Dziebel? 🙂
Simply try again after replacing every < and > by < and > so they won’t be interpreted as HTML code.
So, where are the regular sound correspondences? So far you’ve only presented resemblances that are indistinguishable from random.
And what do you think of the idea that PIE “tooth” wasn’t *h₃donts, but *h₁donts (so that the Greek o- is an epenthetic copy vowel), which would have been an active present participle of the verb *h₁ed- and would have originally meant “eating”, “biting”? Such nominalizations aren’t unknown in PIE; wind is “the one that makes [xw]”, *h₂w-e-nt-…
That the ANE came from North America is neither implied by that quote, nor is it the simplest interpretation of the facts in that quote.
Proto-Siouan is dated to 1000 B.C.
Proto-Indo-European was spoken around 4000 B.C.
Therefore, PIE origin of Proto-Siouan appears more likely than vice versa. (unless Proto-Siouans had time machine)
The blogger who suggested the relationship between the Native American admixture in Europe and the advent of Indo-European was Razib Khan writing in Discovery Blogs (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/09/across-the-sea-of-grass-how-northern-europeans-got-to-be-10-northeast-asian/#.VeKDZuntiS0). Khan writes:
“But the bigger shock is that Europeans, and especially Northern Europeans, seem to have a substantial Northeast Asian component. From the nature of the prose I feel that the authors were definitely taken aback. They basically say so in so many words. In the process of resolving their confusion they skinned the cat every which way. And it does look to me that Northern Europeans are truly descended in part from a population which has affinities to the “First Americans.” I say this specifically because the Siberian samples they tested actually gave a weaker result than the South American Amerindians on the 3-population test. …
All that being said, what went on <5,000 years before the present to reorder the European landscape? The answer may sound crazy, but I think the most probable explanation (even if it is unlikely) is something to do with the Indo-Europeans. …
Though it strikes me as a bizarre conjecture, but I can’t help but imagine the rapid expansion of Indo-European populations into Europe, pushing into the peninsulas of the south. These people may have been a newly formed cosmopolitan mix of West Asians, Northern European Mesolithics, and Northeast Asians. I am at a loss to hazard a guess as to who the First American-like Northeast Asians were, though perhaps they were a western offshoot of the Kets? These people were then absorbed into a melange of tribes who themselves emerged from a synthesis between immigrant West Asian farmers and Northern Europeans. In shorthand: perhaps the Indo-Europeans were mongrels! …"
It should be noted that distinctively Native American Y haplogroup Q-M3 has turned up in ancient DNA from western China as all as modern DNA from bulk testing of men in central and eastern Europe. Varieties of Y haplogroup Q () closely related the Native American varieties are also found in Scandinavia. Because YHG Q-M3 is widely believed to have originated in North America, its presence in Eurasia could be viewed as evidence of a back migration. Intriguingly, the concentration of YHG Q in Europe appears to correlate well with the areas of the Nordic Bronze Age and Hallstatt cultures.
I was not suggesting that Indo-European was directly descended from Proto-Siouan. Rather, certain forms in Indo-European languages appear to be derived from an archaic ancestor of Proto-Siouan.
As far as regular sound correspondences go, it appears that the proto language from which PIE was ultimately derived, like Proto Iroquoian, was lacking in bilabial consonants. For instance, the forms for ‘five’:
w- /wh- > p- ‘five’ *Proto Northern Iroquoian (PNI) *hwihsk / *PIE *pénkʷe / Armenian ‘hing’ / Cherokee ‘hisg(i)’ (Note: the ’n’>’s’ correspondence is also attested in IE forms for ‘five’: Tocharian A päñ / Tocharian B piś; Greek pénte / Albanian pesë.)
Similarly for ‘four’ :
k- > kw- > m- ‘four’ *PNI *kaˈjeːɹih (Julian Charles) *kayeri (Lounsbury) / *PIE *kʷetwóres / Hittite ‘meyawes’ (Note that the -t- is omitted in some IE forms for ‘four’, particularly in Indo-Iranian languages Ex: Pashto calor, tsalór, Saka (Khotanese) cahora / Saka (Tumshuqese) cahari. Compare with modern Mohawk kaié:ri.)
And ‘one’: *PIE *sem Cherokee saqui (or sawu) / Laurentian+ secada / Mohawk ens()ka / Oneida ós()kah / Seneca s()kat / Arikara as()co] / Pawnee us()k’-o, where () indicates a vowel deletion. (-m > -k-) (-e- > -a-) Note also how Caddoan forms also fall in line with Iroquoian. (Incidentally, there is an interesting parallel of ancient Greek form εἷς ‘heîs’ derived from this root, to the Wichita chí?ass.)
PIE *leubh- “to care, desire, love” / Cherokee (u)lvkw(di) ‘he likes it, him’ / Oneida (-no)luhkw- love’ ( -bh- > -kw-)
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for an Indo-European / North American connection is the apparent cognate form for ‘dog’ in IE and North American languages. Based on the lack of evidence for the presence of domesticated dogs in North America before 11,000 years ago and the shared forms for ‘dog, horse’ between the language families, it can be reasonably inferred that the precursor language of Proto Indo-European most likely split from North American languages no earlier than this approximate date. Below are a few more forms for ‘dog, horse’ to the list from Siouan-Iroquoian-Caddoan complex:
Crow: biška
Hidatsa: wašúka
Dakota: šų́nka
Ioway: šų́ñe
Osage: šǫ́ke
Biloxi: čhǫ́ki
Ofo: ačhų́ki
Tutelo: čhų́ki
Saponi: “chunkete”
Cherokee: soqueli (‘horse’)
Cayuga: só:wa:s
Skiri Pawnee: asaaki
Shuswap (Salishan) sewt –1. Slave (also: sesésu7t); 2. animal owned
(Note: Crow bi- and Hidatsa wa- are noun prefixes.)
Equivalents in Indo-European are:
Russian: сука (súka) (‘female dog’, ‘bitch’)
Polish: suka
Sanskrit: ś(u)vā́ (śúnaḥ)
Avestan spā (acc. spānǝm, pl. gen. sū̆nam)
Middle Persian sak
Kurdish sah
Wakhi šač “dog”
Old Church Slavic: suka “bitch (female dog)”
Old Prussian: sunnis “dog”
Lithuanian: šuo “dog”
Armenian: շուն • (šun)
Luwian ásùwa (‘horse’)
Luwian zuwanis ‘dog’
C. C. Uhlenbeck suggested a generic relationship between Eskimo-Aleut and Indo-European. In contrast, equivalent forms in Inuit-Yupik-Aleut are:
qimmiq (Most inuit dialects including Inupiaq, Inuvialuktun, Inuktitut)
qipmiq (Malimiutun inupiaq)
qinmiq (Inuinnaqtun)
qingmiq (Natsilingmiutut/Kivalliq)
kimmik (Labrador Inuttut)
qimmeq (Kalaallisut)
qikmiq (Siberian Yupik)
qimugta/piguta (Yup’ik)
However, the Aleut form for ‘dog’, sabaakax, suggests a bridge between the Eurasian and North American forms: sa(baa)ka(x)
Linguists are quick to discount claims of links between languages based on similarities in forms for ‘water’. However, the cross correlations for forms for ‘water’, ‘wet’, ‘lake/river’, ‘salt’, and ‘wind’ between IS and North American forms add a degree of confidence the the candidate cognate word for ‘water’ is not accidental.
Iroquoian/Salishan
*PrIro *awe ‘water’
*PrIro *-entar- / *-otar- ‘lake’ (literally – ‘to be a lake’)
Nottoway awa ‘water’
Nottoway kanatariya ‘lake’
Mohawk kaniá:tare ‘lake’
Cherokee vdali ‘lake’
Cherokee gadulida ‘wet’
Cherokee ama ‘water’
Cherokee vdali ‘lake’
Mohawk oniá:tare ‘river’
Mohawk ohné:ka /
ohné:kanos ‘drinking water’
Mohawk ionà:nawen ‘wet’
Mohawk ówera ‘wind (breeze)’
Cherokee u²no²le ‘wind, air’ (r > l)
Oneida owe·lá
Mingo kææha’
Suswap líq’wem ‘to spill/sprinkle water’
Suswap liq’wt ‘liquid spills over the edge’
Suswap séwllkwe ‘water’
*PIE *h₂ekʷeh₂ ‘water’
Persian tar ‘wet’
Kurdish terr ‘wet’
Persian wɔb ‘water’
Kurdish aw ‘water’
Persian daryåche ‘lake’
Persian daryå ‘sea’
Mazandarani derka ‘river’
Urdu samandar ‘sea’
*Pr Celtic awa ‘river’
*PIE ḱewero- ‘wind’
*PIE *wleik- “to flow, run.”
Indo-Iranian roots: tar, terr = ‘wet’ dar-/der- ‘body of water’
Hittite wa-a-tar ‘water’ is a compound form consisting of (a)wa + tar
*PIE *wod-or ‘water’ compound of (a)w + odar?
‘Salt’
Persian namak ‘salt’
Cherokee a:ma ‘salt’
Tajik namak ‘salt’
Cherokee ali ‘sweat’
*PIE *sal- (1) “salt”
Latin alumen “alum,” literally “bitter salt,” cognate with Greek aludoimos “bitter” and perhaps with English “ale”
Grk háls (halós)
*PC salano- ‘salt’
Considering similar Japanese, Ainu, and Dene forms suggests a possible Northeast Asian sprachbund.
Japanese kawa ‘river’
Japanese âme ‘rain’ (-m- > -w-)
Ainu wakka ‘water’
Ainu pet ‘river’ ( ‘w’ > ‘p’ ?)
Ainu to ‘lake’
Navajo tó ‘water’
Navajo tooh ‘river, lake’
Ainu réra ‘wind (breeze)’
—However, the Aleut form for ‘dog’, sabaakax, suggests a bridge between the Eurasian and North American forms: sa(baa)ka(x)
sabaakax is borrowed from Russian.
The language had extreme degree of Russian impact which almost killed it at the time (two hundred years ago, not 11 thousand years before present)
Last page of my Aleut dictionary lists words such as
zaavtrikax- breakfast
zaavtrikal – to have a breakfast
zanavisxix – curtain
zaymil – to borrow
Xliibaax zaymida – borrow me some bread
ziilitix – vest
ziirkalax – mirror
zuulutix – gold
So you mean that, for “salt” and “water”, Italian preserved the s- and -k-, lost in the American languages?
David: Brown-eyed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis#Genetics
Of course, the appearance of Slavic-speaking natives of Eastern Europe is still generally like that, fair and light-eyed, so the idea that the ancient steppe dwellers by and large looked the same is hardly unexpected. From what I’ve read, even though the steppe expansion left a much more significant genetic footprint than formerly believed, I understand it had surprisingly little impact on the general appearance of European natives, so Neolithic steppe dwellers had a typical modern Eastern European appearance, Pre-IE Northern Europeans generally looked “Nordic”, Pre-IE inhabitants of Northwestern Europe had what we think of as “Celtic” looks, and Pre-IE Southern Europeans in the late Neolithic looked by and large like typical modern Southern Europeans. Which is almost an anticlimactic conclusion (and not quite what “Aryan master race” ideologues seemed to have in mind, just in case you were wondering).
It’s not unexpected, though, if the expansion was brought about largely by young immigrant males taking local wives (and then propagating wave-like, Kulturkugel-fashion, so that the genetic influence became more and more diluted away from the steppe, especially after the end of the Bronze Age) and establishing themselves as part of the local upper class, as is a plausible mechanism for the language spread. Ancient Europe was certainly a melting pot, much like Hungary, Anatolia or Latin America, without the immigrants even crowding out the natives in most regions (the best example for Überfremdung and Umvolkung in the modern world is ironically North America, where the dirty furriners are whites of European origin).
Palaeolithic Europeans were a different matter, however, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon#Physical_attributes, even they were anything but uniformly brown-eyed. So I’m not sure what David is referring to here.
Ötzi was brown-eyed. But then, Ötzi was apparently unconnected to the Yamnaya culture and instead to the first agriculturalists in Europe, who appear to have immigrated from Anatolia via the Danubian corridor, and who may have well imported a language themselves, but certainly not Proto-Indo-European.
As for Gary Moore, I think he should keep out of the historical linguistic business and stick to what he is good at. Since the only Gary Moore I’m familiar with is unfortunately departed, I assume it’s not guitar wizardry – although I see now there’s a namesake wielding the axe for Mother’s Finest. I mean, I’ve been amused by the curiously Indo-European-ish appearance of the Lakota word for dog myself before, but it’s your garden-variety false cognate – neither under a direct inheritance nor borrowing scenario, the sound laws work out. And Aleut sabaakax is clearly a Russian borrowing.
it’s your garden-variety false cognate
Yup. Amazing how hard it is for people to accept the prevalence of coincidence.
Late Neolithic people of southern Europe were dark skinned. They lacked genes for light skin present in current Europeans.
SFReader: Huh, really? Must have missed that one. Interesting. Is the evidence from ADNA only or do we have evidence from artistic depictions (with the usual caveats about possible non-naturalistic features of depictions) pointing in that direction, too?
Of course, that would only confirm the general picture – if steppe admixture was really responsible for the lightening of the skin of the natives of Southern Europe. Some of them are still relatively dark-skinned, but not exactly brown, of course.
Steppe migrations can even have led beyond the historical domain of Indo-European languages – even in the Middle East, especially in the Levant, a lot of people look relatively European, with fair skin, light eyes and relatively light hair. In Israel, European admixture in the Ashkenazi-descended Jewish population is the obvious explanation, but I’m not sure if the same explanation works for the Lebanon, for example. Indo-European-speaking steppe immigrants could have been assimilated (back) to (local) Semitic languages in the Bronze or Iron Ages.
Certainly a pushback against Indo-Europeanisation happened in various parts at various times and the resulting picture is quite complicated and messy. In Finland – according to http://kielievoluutio.uta.fi/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=bedlan2011_heikkila.pdf – the situation was actually inverted, in that Indo-Europeans belonging to the Corded Ware horizon and still on a Neolithic level of technology were assimilated by Uralic-speaking immigrants who already possessed Bronze-Age technology.
This is a useful reminder that just because in the historical period the indigenous languages of a region are non-Indo-European does not mean that Indo-Europeanisation never happened there (for example in parts of the Caucasus region: it’s quite possible that the area of modern Georgia was once largely Indo-European-speaking). Indo-European migrations were not an irresistible wave steamrolling everything else; they were just one among countless similar movements in human history, despite their uniquely far-reaching consequences for the history of Europe and large parts of Asia. It’s also a useful antidote to Social Darwinist master-race and supremacist nonsense: Indo-European language and culture did not always win out everywhere (nor did their genes), and Indo-European culture was not even always and everywhere (technologically) superior in the first place.
even in the Middle East, especially in the Levant, a lot of people look relatively European, with fair skin, light eyes and relatively light hair.
At least a bit is due to the British and their bints.
^ I’ve usually heard this phenomenon ascribed to the Crusaders, though that sounds suspiciously neat to me.
Ah, thank you. Keep in mind, though, that science has moved on – and Khan’s views with it. In particular, start at the headline “European man, made and unveiled” a few screens down in this post by Khan from 2015.
That’s one example. I asked for regular sound correspondences.
…Where to even start!
*kʷetwóres ~ *kʷétwores isn’t some kind of indivisible blob with three syllables. It has an etymology within IE. And it cannot be reconstructed to PIE in the widest sense; the Anatolian root (Hittite miyu-, meyu-; Cuneiform Luwian mawa-) is a completely different, unrelated one.
As with several other sound changes you propose, [kʷ] changing into [m] is hard to imagine, especially in a language that retains [kʷ] “elsewhere” as Hittite and Luwian did.
These are indeed cognate with each other – and are derived from a PIE word that began with [kʲ], not with [s] or any other fricative. The reconstruction is *ḱwō (nominative), *ḱwon- (stem).
Didn’t you notice that you only cited “satəm” forms?
(And you mixed Luwian asuwa- in; it does not belong, it’s from *h₁eḱwos… zuwanis does belong.)
No. Linguists are quick to discount claims of links between languages based on similarities in any single word. You need systematic correspondences across all the data.
No: 1, 2, 3.
…but it hardly matters, because the forms you cite under that heading aren’t cognate with that anyway!
No. There’s no trace of “salt” in that word.
Wait. The same language does and does not shift *m to w? What’s the conditioning environment? If it’s the following -a vs. -e, why does the syllable we exist in the same language?
As Razib Khan put it in the link at the top of this comment:
75 isn’t 100, but it’s reasonably close. 🙂 “They” are Allentoft et al. (2015), “Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia”, one of the papers linked to from higher up in Khan’s post.
Not so much; but the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers all over Europe were – and they had blue eyes (again with the caveat that 75 isn’t 100).
even in the Middle East, especially in the Levant, a lot of people look relatively European, with fair skin, light eyes and relatively light hair.
Like the Solluba, aka Ṣleb. Their name has been folk-etymologized to mean they are descendants of the crusaders (cf. صَلِيب ṣalīb ‘cross’), but the word goes back to Akkadian times. Blench thinks they descend from a pre-Semitic Arabian population. Their language, if they have or had a distinct one, has not been recorded.
Consistent patterns of phonetic … Proto-Tocharian … table with examples …
Thank you Hat, marie-lucie, John Cowan and others. I was not wishing to discredit the comparative method in general. But all of your replies referred to the sounds of languages. With the Germanic family (that marie-lucie mentions) we have modern descendants we can listen to.
With Tocharian there are no descendants. How can we be so sure how it sounded? John says With the scripts known, the pronunciation was known, … [marie-lucie makes a similar point.] But look at the variety of sound-values given to Latin script across the languages of Europe. In particular look at the higgledy-piggledy spelling in English. We can attest that English is Germanic by listening to it (and preferably ignoring the script).
Is there strong archaeological evidence to corroborate the IE migration story of Tocharian? How did they get there? Where did they stop on the way? Did they bring the script with them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians seems full of speculation.
What is the linguistic evidence against (for example) a hypothesis that Tocharian was an isolate (like Basque), and one day somebody turned up with a Brahmi script (and a Brahmi ear) and wrote down what they thought they heard?
AntC: Even if the sound of English, or French, is unknown, a literal, Latinate or Italianate pronunciation would still firmly place the languages as Germanic and Romance.
Using the spelling and ignoring the sounds actually makes such comparisons easier, because the spelling is more conservative: it fits Middle English better than what has become of that.
This applies to changes elsewhere, too. Wind is spelled the same in German, but while English has kept the pronunciation unchanged, German has turned w into [ʋ] or [v] depending on the region.
The evidence is in the words and the grammar!
Language families don’t generally have distinctive sound systems, as you seem to believe. Basque is a case in point: it uses the exact same sounds Don Quixote used, with practically the same allophony even – it just arranges them into completely different words and sentences.
(BTW, most or all surviving Tocharian writings must have been written by native speakers. The texts are sometimes long, and the spelling system is too consistent to be a pile of ad-hoc workarounds; this includes a consistent way to represent a vowel the Brahmi script couldn’t originally deal with.)
Indeed, Tocharian had undergone some pretty drastic sound shifts from PIE. The last table in that section explains what a ś /ɕ/ is doing in the Tocharian B word for 5: it’s regularly derived from *-kʷe, so it cannot be directly cognate to the /s/ found in Iroquoian.
primary archaeological suspect is the Afanasevo culture in south Siberia dated circa 3300 BC. It was carried by population of European extraction (previous inhabitants in the area were Mongoloid).
the closest analogies were found in contemporary Yamna culture of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (same guys who brought Indo-European to Europe)
it should be added that the Afanasevo were only the first of many steppe cultures of European origin in the east. The Indo-European languages (Iranian, Tocharian and possibly Indo-Aryan as well) were displaced from eastern steppes only in the 1st millenium AD – by expansion of Turkic speaking tribes.
Bravo, David, what words well put-together!
SFReader write
“sabaakax is borrowed from Russian.”
Thanks for the input. This time was not central to my thesis, but it is nice to know. This still leaves the central issue of why so many of the North American and Indo-European forms for ‘dog’/’horse’ are so close. These forms are not likely to be derived from a wanderwort because they seem to only appear in IE and North American languages.
Minus273 wrote:
“So you mean that, for “salt” and “water”, Italian preserved the s- and -k-, lost in the American languages?”
Deletion of the initial s- occurs fairly often in IE languages.
The Proto-Celtic form for ‘river’, ‘awa’ is essential the same form as in some Iroquoian languages, and means ‘water’ in Nottoway, an Iroquoian language, while the *PC word for ‘water’ is ‘*akwā-‘. One Cherokee form for river, ‘equoni’ is close to *PIE *h₂ekw-eh₂- ‘river’ plus the locative particle ‘-ni’ . Lyle Campbell (1997), citing (Haas 1965) lists “Proto-Siouan *qʷaʔ / *qoʔ ‘water'” In Cherokee, the form for ‘water’, ‘ama’, is the product of a fairly recent sound shift from Proto-Iroquoian ‘awe’. (In fact, it is one of the few forms in Cherokee that contains ‘m’.) Forms for ‘water’ in IE show a wide variety of sound shifts in IE: for instance, Dacian/Thracian ‘apa’/’aba’. The shift to ‘m’ is attested in Greek potamos, ‘river (flowing water)’.
To reiterate a key point, note that the forms for ‘lake/river’ and ‘wet’ also appear to be correlated.
David Marjanović wrote:
“No. There’s no trace of “salt” in that word.”
Or is there? It’s plausible that *PIE ‘sal-‘ ‘salt’ shares a deep etymology with PIE root for ‘bitter’ ‘al-‘/. The two can be linked by addition/deletion of initial ‘s’.
Also –
“Wait. The same language does and does not shift *m to w? What’s the conditioning environment? If it’s the following -a vs. -e, why does the syllable we exist in the same language?”
This is not a core of my hypothesis, but only a suggestion that IE shares an areal pattern with languages of Northeastern Asia/North America. For what it’s worth, though, the Japanese forms are probably based on borrow words from Ainu, so a specialist in these languages would have to sort that out.
David Marjanović wrote –
“Indeed, Tocharian had undergone some pretty drastic sound shifts from PIE. The last table in that section explains what a ś /ɕ/ is doing in the Tocharian B word for 5: it’s regularly derived from *-kʷe, so it cannot be directly cognate to the /s/ found in Iroquoian.”
That wasn’t my point. I was indicating that the Armenian form could plausibly be mapped to Cherokee. In any case, the Armenian form demonstrates a correlation between ‘p-‘ to ‘h-‘ (and ‘hw-‘).
Speaking of Tocharian, the forms for ‘old’ in the Toch A and Toch B differ considerably from the more typical forms based on *PIE *sen- ‘old’ which bears an obvious resemblance to equivalent forms in Dene-Yeniseian languages: ex. Ket sīn, Tlingit shaan (of people) and Navajo sání. However, the form for ‘old’ in Tocharian B closely resembles its equivalent in Iroquoian languages both phonetically and morphologically:
Toch B ktsaitstse ‘old’ ( = -ktsai- + -tstse )
Compare with Iroquoian equivalents:
Mingo kekëhtsi (-KËHTSI- Verb Root.) katkëhtsistha’ ‘to become old’ -at- (Middle prefix, -këhtsi- /someone is old/, -st- Base suffix. -atkëhtsist- )
Oneida: -kstʌ- ‘old, aged’; -kstʌhaˀ- ‘to become old’
*PNI * { -kẽhtsi- } ‘be old’
Indo-Iranian also appears to share yet a third form for ‘old’ with Mohawk, another Iroquoian language:
Persian kohne ‘old’
Kurdish kone ‘old’
Gujarati kıhan ‘old’
Mohawk aká:ion/iokaiòn:’on ‘old’
Gary Moore: [various correspondences]
You can find stunning lookalike words in any two languages. What people try to tell you is that it takes regular correspondences across a large enough part of the lexicon to rule out chance. Even better are regular correspondences of morphology, and the more complex the morphology, the better. Multiplicating probabilities brings the nominal threshold down.
Trond Engen wrote:
“You can find stunning lookalike words in any two languages. What people try to tell you is that it takes regular correspondences across a large enough part of the lexicon to rule out chance. Even better are regular correspondences of morphology, and the more complex the morphology, the better. Multiplicating probabilities brings the nominal threshold down.”
Some of what got cut off in my earlier post dealt with parallels in syntax between IE and North American families:
“In the 20th century, linguist C.C. Uhlenbeck used Siouan as a reference when analyzing syntax of early Indo-European languages, and more recently Brigette Bauer in her book “Archaic Syntax in Indo-European: The Spread of Transitivity in Latin and French” has noted parallels between syntax in early IE languages and the active-patient system of many North American languages.”
As for regular correspondences, as I noted the key is shifts towards bilabialization of consonants. More recently, I have been focusing on correspondences between laryngeals because maintaining the existing scheme of laryngeals in PIE seems to be a major concern of Indo-Europeanists. There are a lot of forms that contain consonant clusters in *Proto-Iroquoian, *Proto-Northern Iroquoian and *PIE that seem to show related patterns’
*PrIro *-Ɂnjõːhs- } “nose” / *PIE *nas-, hnéh₂s “nose” Ɂn > hn; hs- > h₂s
*PrIro *-hniɹ- ‘be strong’ / *PIE *h₂ner ‘man’ -hn > h₂n-
*PrIro *- õːnh- ‘be alive, life, live’ / *PIE *h₂enH₁- “to breathe” – õː > h₂e-; -nh- > nH₁
*PrIro -hnhõtho- ‘feed, put in the mouth’ / *PIE *h₁oh₁s ‘mouth’ hõ > h₁o (Oneida -shuw- ‘hole’)
*PNI -iɁtaɹ- / *PIE *h₁eh₂ter- ‘fire’ -Ɂt -> h₂t-
*PrIro *-hnùːkòːl- / *PIE h₃nogʰ- ‘claw’ -hn- > h₃n-
*PNI * -(a)hõht- ‘ear’ / *PIE *h₂ous- “ear” -(a)hõ- > h₂o-
Split of Proto-Iroquoian is dated to 3800 years before present.
Split of Proto-Indo-European occured 6000 years ago.
You can’t compare them directly. There is a distance of 2200 years between them.
Remote ancestor of Proto-Iroquoian circa 6000 BP likely looked and sounded very different from what you cite.
But they’re not, as I just demonstrated. They’re random lookalikes due to a sound shift that happened within IE.
Branches where this shift didn’t happen also have descendants of this *ḱwon-, for example Greek kyōn and English hound. (Except I don’t know where the -d comes from.)
But this* doesn’t happen at random. It happens across the board or not at all.
* Actually a shift from [s] to [h], sometimes followed by general loss of [h].
This reconstruction seems to be contradicted by one of the links I posted. Have you read them yet?
Oh, had my long comment not yet made it out of moderation when you posted this?
That would be the only word in the whole Greek language where anything had shifted to /m/.
This is now how sound shifts work. And pot- is neither a prefix, nor does it mean “flowing”.
Why and how would the same language both lose and not lose a sound in the same word?
For what? You’re trying to relate PIE to Proto-Iroquoian, not Armenian to Cherokee.
[p] > [pʰ] > [ɸ~f] > [h] is a common sequence of sound shifts the world over. You don’t need to establish that it’s possible.
Yeah, it resembles it. I can’t work out regular correspondences, however; the sounds are in different orders and stuff…
What are you trying to suggest? That Tocharian borrowed the word from farther east? Even for that the correspondences aren’t regular enough.
Well, yes. Most languages in the world are either nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, or active-stative. With so few possibilities, it’s inevitable that different languages pick the same ones independently.
That list gives one example for each of the correspondences you’re trying to establish as regular.
Strangely, they all concern whole clusters instead of individual sounds. If I take them apart and look into them, I find a lot of questions:
– So PIr *hs- corresponds to PIE *h₂s, *-hn to *h₂n- and *-(a)hõ- to *h₂o-. This looks like *h corresponds to *h₂. But then you claim that *-hn- corresponds to *h₃n-, not to *h₂n- as you said a few lines above, and you further say that *hõ corresponds to *h₁o, not to *h₂o- as you state a few lines below; also, *-nh- is to correspond with *nH₁. What is it, then?
– This could of course very easily be explained if PIr *h simply represents a merger of the ancestors of PIE *h₁, *h₂ and *h₃… except that this totally fails to take into account your claims that *-Ɂt corresponds to *h₂t- and *Ɂn corresponds to “*hn” (where “h” means “I cannot tell whether this was *h₁, *h₂ or *h₃”).
In short, you have two PIr phonemes corresponding to three PIE phonemes seemingly at random, everything-to-everything.
Sequences of perfectly regular mergers, or mergers and splits, can indeed produce such patterns. But you haven’t even tried to propose any. You have a lot of work to do.
(Your use of “>” is misleading. As used by historical linguists, it’s an arrow that indicates that the form on the left is ancestral to the one on the right. With PIr being much younger than PIE, that isn’t possible.)
Bravo, David.
A waste of time and effort in this particular case, I fear, but others will learn from it. You and marie-lucie have a clear expository style and endless reserves of patience that I can only envy.
SFReader wrote –
“Split of Proto-Iroquoian is dated to 3800 years before present.
Split of Proto-Indo-European occured 6000 years ago.
You can’t compare them directly. There is a distance of 2200 years between them.”
Remote ancestor of Proto-Iroquoian circa 6000 BP likely looked and sounded very different from what you cite.”
I work with what I’ve got to work with. Not much progress has been made in reconstruction of Native American languages beyond this time frame. This model may be related to the Macro-Siouan Hypothesis, which remains unproven. Analysis of data suggests that even if the Siouan and Iroquoian languages are indeed generically related, the precursor of IE likely diverged from North America languages after the Siouan-Iroquoian split. (BTW – the Macro-Siouan Hypothesis was first formulated by Latham, who was mainly an Indo-European scholar.) Anyone who has read Wallace Chafe’s work, “The Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan languages” is aware of Williamson’s two papers linking Siouan (specifically Dakota) to Indo-European. Williamson’s papers were in response a paper linking Siouan to “Turanian” (“Ural-Altaic”):
“Professor Roehrig, in his able paper on the Dakota, points out some very interesting analogies to Turanian languages. Others might be added. These similarities are chiefly in features common to I. E. and Turanian. …”
I think that the actual split probably coincided with the 8.2 Kiloyear Event, when a sudden drop in temperatures combined with a rise in sea levels resulted in extensive population displacements. It appears that their may have been a crossing by a population or populations related to modern Caddoan, Iroquoian, and Siouan speakers out of the Americas which passed through Dene-Yeniseian speakers on the way in. In this model, Indo-European would have the same relationship to the languages of the hypothetical Macro-Siouan family that Yeniseian has to Dene languages of North America. (By way of background, two eminent 18th century ethnologists placed the urheimat of the Iroquoian people in the Pacific Northwest: Lewis H. Morgan claimed that the Iroquois were from the Puget Sound region and Horatio Hale cited the Columbia River Valley. Either location could have placed them in contact with Salishan speakers.)
Some of the differences between Anatolian and the other branches of IE might be related to a different mix of forms of “Paleo-Siouan” and “Paleo-Iroquoian”. Specifically, the kinship terms of Anatolian look more like Siouan, and also the Hittite form for ‘wheel’ – ḫurki- may be related to *Proto-MVS Mississippi Valley Siouan *-ˈwrĩ’ ’twist, turn’ as well as *PIE *h2wrgí-lo- *‘of turning/twisting’←*h2w(o)rgi- ‘turning’. This could go a long way to explaining why the split between Anatolian languages and the remainder of IE appears to be more ancient than it really is. (The form for ‘wheel’ in the other IE languages is derived from *PIE *kwel- ‘‘spin, rotate’, which can be plausibly linked to Cherokee root ‘-gwal-‘ by relatively simple and straightforward sound shifts. Ex. Proto-Tocharian *kwə́kwlë (‘chariot, wagon’) / Cherokee ‘dagwalela’ (‘car, wagon’).
languagehat wrote:
“It’s your garden-variety false cognate
Yup. Amazing how hard it is for people to accept the prevalence of coincidence.”
Except that both the North American and IE forms probably share a related etymology. The North American forms are probably related to the Proto-Northern Iroquoian root *{ (-na)hs(vowel deleted)kw- } ‘(to be) domestic animal, prisoner, slave’, where the prefix (-na) indicates state of being. On the IE side, both the form for ‘horse’ and ‘dog’ is likely related to *PIE *sokw-yo- ‘follower, companion’ or *PIE *sekw- ‘follow’. The analogy is with Latin ‘sequeli’ – ‘band of followers’ (i.e., retainers or servants). Note that the Cherokee form for ‘horse’, ‘sogweli’, follows this pattern closely, with the addition of the noun ending ‘-li’. (The name of the famous Cherokee scholar ‘Sequoyah’ is a variant of this form.)
In North American languages, when horses were adopted, typically the form for ‘dog’ was transferred to the new animal, and IE appears to have followed this pattern. Probably both the IE forms for ‘horse’ and ‘dog’ were formed from and earlier form that simply meant ‘dog’ by deletion of the initial ‘s-‘ or ‘sV-‘.
BTW – If you looked at the candidate cognates I posted, you will notice that they constitute a fair portion of Pokorny’s Semantic Field 4, “Body Parts and Functions” – and I only listed possible matches for forms included on the Swadesh list. This is only a small part of the likely matches that I’ve identified. In all, I’ve identified about 50 to 60 candidate cognates out of the 207 item Swadesh List. There are an unusually large number of these “coincidences’ between IE and North American languages – well above the 10% figure typically cited for false cognates.
One elegant feature of the hypothesis is that is provides “missing” etymologies in IE daughter languages:
PI * { -hsnuːɹiɁ } ‘be fast, be quick’
German ‘schnell’ ‘fast’
Cherokee ‘gatsanula’ ‘fast’
Oneida ( -snole- ) ‘fast’ (e.g. yosno·lé ‘it’s fast’)
Ancient Greek: ” takho-, comb. form of takhos “speed, swiftness, fleetness, velocity,” related to takhys “swift,” of unknown origin.” Proto-Iroquoian ‘to run’, *-takh-.
Is there anything, any conceivable piece of information, that would lead you to suppose that your theory might be mistaken?
Gary Moore: The 10% figure quoted for false cognates was actually first proposed by Joseph Greenberg, with the two caveats that 1-This is the *lower bound* of the percentage of false cognates that will appear between two unrelated languages, which 2- Have *a similar number of phonemes*.
Proto-Iroquoian is reconstructed by your own source, Julian Charles, as having had a total of eleven consonant phonemes only. As a result finding a Proto-Iroquoian root which bears some similarity with an Indo-European root whose meaning is broadly comparable in meaning, and with no attempt at finding regular sound correspondences (as David Marjanović has shown above) is thus very easy, indeed too easy, and, unfortunately, as a result, proves nothing.
If you disbelieve this allow me to suggest to you the following exercise: start looking for Proto-Iroquoian roots which look like Modern English words/roots. You may be in for a surprise.
It’s not like I could do otherwise.
Like so:
…Excuse me. Do you read my comments?
How could *ḱwon- or *h₁e*ḱwo- be related to *sekʷ-/*sokʷ- (same root, different ablaut grade)?
1) Languages in North America had a very good reason for deriving “horse” from “dog”: there weren’t any horses in the Americas for a long time. When they were introduced, it made obvious sense to name them after the dogs whose functions they partly took over.
2) Wait. Are you saying that *ḱwon- and *h₁e*ḱwo- are related to *sekʷ- by random deletion of *s, random inconsistent deletion of *e, and random transformation between the unitary labialized velar plosive *kʷ and the consonant cluster *ḱw (that’s the palatalized velar plosive [kʲ] followed by the labiovelar approximant [w])? Because if so, you can relate anything to anything with minimal effort. Reminder: if you can explain everything, you have explained nothing.
Regular sound correspondences. You need them.
But the verb schnellen refers to jumping, jerking movements. That’s why the click beetles are called Schnellkäfer.
But Ancient Greek /kʰ/ came from PIE *gʰ and *ǵʰ, not from any consonant clusters – no, not clusters with “laryngeals” either (unlike in Indo-Iranian).
PIE: /p t kʲ k kʷ/ is 5; adding /d gʲ g gʷ/ gives 9 ([b] may only have existed as an allophone of /p/); adding /bʱ dʱ gʲʱ gʱ gʷʱ/ makes 14 already. /w j l r m n/ makes 20, /s/ and *h₁, *h₂, *h₃ makes 24. That’s more than twice as many consonant phonemes as Proto-Iroquoian had.
(It has been suggested that *h₁ was actually two separate phonemes, /ʔ/ and /h/. I’m not qualified to evaluate this; I don’t even know on what evidence this was suggested. Anyway, even without a /b/, we could have 25. – On the other hand, it has repeatedly been suggested that the distinction between the palatalized /kʲ gʲ gʲʱ/ and the plain /k g gʱ/ didn’t exist, putting us back down to 21 or 22; that, however, would make it really hard to explain certain distinctions in Albanian and Luwian, and certainly puts up a challenge to explaining why /gʲ/ was regularly borrowed into Proto-Uralic as /j/.)
start looking for Proto-Iroquoian roots which look like Modern English words/roots
It’s indeed what he did. He looked not for lookalikes in *PIE, or any single Indo-European language, but across all the daughter languages, thus greatly multiplying the resulting “cognates”.
It has been suggested that *h₁ was actually two separate phonemes, /ʔ/ and /h/. I’m not qualified to evaluate this; I don’t even know on what evidence this was suggested.
I’m not sure there is any evidence; I think it’s just that some people feel PIE should have had both of those phonemes. (For what it’s worth, I tend to think so, not that I can give any terribly cogent reasons.) That leaves your choices as basically either “h1 = /ʔ/ and /h/” or the “h1 = /ʔ/, h2 = /h/” (unpopular but I think possible; in Hebrew, /h/ patterns with the pharyngeals in causing epenthesis of [a] etc., so it’s not too big of a problem to assume PIE */h/ could color [e] to [a]).
Actually, English dog and Latin can-is are perfect cognates, if we posit that in Latin *d>k, *o>a and *g>n. If the sound changes seem too odd, consider that Armenian also has some weird sound changes. Or invoke metathesis, together with the more reasonable *d>n and *g>k.
Origin of English dog according to Piotr Gąsiorowski
http://www.academia.edu/1499785/The_Etymology_of_Old_English_docga
I was just toying with absurdity. If you presume unconfirmed sound changes you can relate anything to anything.
(Of Tocharian as an IE language) …it was recognized as such almost immediately, unlike Albanian, which hid its IE origins under a heap of borrowings.
Don’t you mean Armenian? In Albanian, most borrowings are Latin and Slavic. But even in Armenian the proportion of evidently non-IE loans in its old vocabulary isn’t high. Before 1875 (the annus mirabilis of IE studies) Armenian was generally regarded as an Iranian language (that is, an IE one, though from the wrong branch). What makes both of them a bit special is their long separate histories, during which sound changes not shared with any other group have accumulated, producing highly exotic regular correspondences. For example, Albanian sy ‘eye’ and Armenian erku ‘two’ are perfectly good IE words; they just don’t look it.
(French øj ~ zjø ‘eye’ and o ‘water’ are rather nice IE words; they just don’t look it.)
Not sure about o though: *akwā is restricted to a small cluster of western branches. But you are right. French is every bit as odd as Albanian, only more familiar to most people.
I’ve found that in many positions where *h₁ is reconstructed, either [ʔ] or [h] is really hard to pronounce while the other is no problem… of course they could have been allophones even so…
[h] indeed colors vowels in some languages. But assuming that *h₂ was [χ] explains a lot more things, for instance its written representations in Anatolian languages.
Obligatory joke about how God made dog in his mirror image.
Obligatory joke about how God made dog in his mirror image.
And then god unproblematically became cat in Germanic (via the *a/*o merger and Grimm’s law).
For what it’s worth, though, the Japanese forms are probably based on borrow words from Ainu, so a specialist in these languages would have to sort that out.
Just for the record, there’s absolutely no reason to suppose that Japanese /kawa/ or /ame/ are borrowed from Ainu (even if you very generously expand the definition of “Ainu” to “any language (i) in the same family as the direct ancestor of Ainu, and (ii) spoken on the Japanese archipelago after the arrival of an ancestor of Japanese”).
It’s not impossible that /kawa/ and /ame/ ultimately derive from a language that was ancestral to Ainu, through borrowing or common descent, but I can’t recall ever seeing a plausible argument (with regular correspondences, etc.) to that effect.
But assuming that *h₂ was [χ] explains a lot more things, for instance its written representations in Anatolian languages.
Yes, that’s certainly true — there are Ugaritic spellings of Hittite proper names which write the Hittite fricative as a velar, though Ugaritic had /h/.
Cats certainly are autotheists…
Oh, good to know!
Seconding what Matt said about the Japanese case, and adding that this is a good example of why knowledge of a language’s internal phonetic and orthographic history is necessary for comparative work.
For all of Japanese history until the last fifty-odd years, kawa “river” was written not かわ, but かは, reflecting the origin of the present /w/ in something like a bilabially fricative /h/ between two /a/ vowels (in other intravocalic environments it was regularly dropped). The /h/ in turn is thought to derive from the lenition of an original /p/. So, /kapa/ to /kaha/ to /kawa/. There are of course ways to get from “m” to “p”, but the mechanism has to be explained, and systematically demonstrated, and the link to ame justified by more than the semantic appeal to both words being about forms of water.
(French øj ~ zjø ‘eye’ and o ‘water’ are rather nice IE words; they just don’t look it.)
Both øj and o: look Scandinavian, though.
Anyone have an idea of how atypical PIE is in its rigorous contrast of /kʷ/ with /kw/? I don’t recall seeing that elsewhere (such as in any of the daughter languages).
Has *kw /kw/ actually been reconstructed? I – for what that’s worth – am only aware of *ḱw /kʲw/.
Boy howdy, you’re right, that’s a Joker-grade boner on my part. On the other hand, ḱ might be phonetically /k/ if we could imagine some other explanation for the Uralic data, so perhaps there was /kw/. I suppose, if /kw/ contrasting with /kʷ/ is really atypical, that by itself could be a (weak) argument against identifying ḱ as /k/.
Assuming that ḱ is in fact /kʲ/, well, can we think of other examples of languages contrasting /kʷ/ with /kʲw/?
Given the much greater frequency ḱ of relative to k (and yet we know for sure that in some IE languages, ḱ does not behave like a plain velar), I suppose mostly everyone finds it hard to believe that there wasn’t something interesting going on. I’m not attached any particular theory of when and how the interestingness happened. I wonder if early PIE might have had a voiceless velar only and voiced palato-velars only, like in Arabic … with later complexities caused by different dialects’ attempts to level that out.
David: Has *kw /kw/ actually been reconstructed?
Yes, for example initially in *kwah₂t- ‘ferment, bubble, turn sour’. The exact shape of the root is somewhat uncertain; the reconstruction above is the one I favour. The Lexicon der indogermanischen Verben has *kwath₂-, but such a form makes little sense to me, since it doesn’t account for the attested reflexes. I tentatively accept Birgit Olsen’s “laryngeal preaspiration” hypothesis, which predicts alternations like *kwatʰ-V-/*kuh₂t-C-/*kwah₂t-C- from underlying //kweh₂t-//, which is exactly what we see here: cf. OCS kvasъ, vъ-kyse (hence of course English kvass), Ved. kváth- ‘boil’, Goth. ƕaþiþ ‘foams’.
There may also be examples of medial *-kw- at morpheme junctures, e.g. (possibly) Greek lákkos ‘pond, cistern’, if from *lakw-o- (the lake, loch root).
…Fascinating.
“Everything is the way it is because it got that way.”
– D’Arcy W. Thompson (1917): On Growth and Form [a book about development biology]
PIE, as usually reconstructed, had an odd consonant system and an odd vowel system. How could it have gotten that way?
Start from a language with only one row of velars, rather than three, and a boring five-vowel system. Then blame the features of the vowels on the nearest consonants:
*/ki/ > */kʲə/
*/ke/ > */kʲə/
*/ka/ > */kə/
*/ko/ > */kʷə/
*/ku/ > */kʷə/
…and suddenly the palatalized and the labialized vowels are each twice as common as the plain ones.
It can’t have been quite that simple. But sound systems with such frequency distributions do exist. In Ubykh, the plain velars were so rare that they ended up merging into the palatalized ones, rather than the other way around! (Attested Ubykh had plain velars again – in loanwords.)
In short, it’s expected that *ḱ was more common than *k.
Aw heck, I still think that counts as something interesting going on.
DM: Start from a language with only one row of velars, rather than three, and a boring five-vowel system. Then blame the features of the vowels on the nearest consonants:
*/ki/ > */kʲə/
*/ke/ > */kʲə/
*/ka/ > */kə/
*/ko/ > */kʷə/
*/ku/ > */kʷə/
…and suddenly the palatalized and the labialized vowels are each twice as common as the plain ones.
Surely you mean this as an example of what not to do.
David, I never saw your reply to my objections when you brought up this theory a couple of years ago. If I understand correctly, the idea is this:
1. Some stage of pre-PIE had 5(+) vowels and a single dorsal series. It had ablaut patterns, but (I’m not clear about this part) only some roots participated in them.
2. Frontness and roundness of vowels were reinterpreted as due to adjacent consonants, so that next to a front vowel you got a palatalized consonant and next to a round vowel you got a labialized consonant; these features were phonemicized into the consonants and away from the vowels, with some vowel mergers occurring as a concomitant. (I’m not sure what the specific mergers are supposed to have been.)
3. All(?) consonants now came in plain, palatalized, and labialized sets, but the distinctions were subsequently done away with except in the case of the dorsals.
4. /a/ still survived from the pre-reorganization stage, but it later unrelatedly changed into (or merged into?) /o/.
This all seems like a really high price to pay in terms of hard-to-verify conjectures just to explain something that isn’t actually all that weird to begin with (the three dorsal series). I mean, nothing here is impossible, but it doesn’t seem preferable to a hundred other stories that could be concocted about pre-PIE sound systems with a bit of imagination. It posits a lot more weirdness than it accounts for, and comes with its own difficulties (e.g. **/k/ splits into */kʲ/ and */kʷ/ which then presumably alternate in ablaut paradigms, but don’t get leveled?).
Maybe I’m misunderstanding parts of the theory, and presumably Nostraticists claim to have comparative evidence supporting it, whose value will depend on how much you buy into Nostratic, but it looks like a flight of fancy to me.
David Marjanović can, of course, speak for himself, but I took his hypothesis as neither an example of what to do nor what not to do, but simply as another brief outline of a hypothesis that cannot be decisively proven or disproven because it butts up against the limits of our data. I suppose that’s a flight of fancy in some sense. If someone came up with a hypothesis that explained all the data in a straightforward way and didn’t create any of its own difficulties, then we could say that there’s a good chance it’s true. But, failing that, a hypothesis that is simple in some respects but requires some amount of epicycles to work might be true, but it’s hard to be very certain about it. I still think my /g/-fronted-first-like-in-Arabic idea is cute, but that’s definitely a flight of fancy with not a whole of lot falsifiability going for it.
“Yeah, it resembles it. I can’t work out regular correspondences, however; the sounds are in different orders and stuff…
What are you trying to suggest? That Tocharian borrowed the word from farther east? Even for that the correspondences aren’t regular enough. …”
Look again: the Tocharian B form and the Mingo/Seneca form also share morphological features as well as a similar sound pattern: the base suffix ‘-tstse- vs ‘-st-‘.
I don’t think this was a borrow word: rather, I think that Tocharian retained the original form and more common *PIE form, ‘*sen-‘, ‘old’ was most likely borrowed at some point from Dene-Yeniseian languages.
No, I have not worked out regular correspondences yet to the degree that neogrammarians would like. I am still in the “collecting forms lists” phase, but based on what I am seeing, there is a strong case for the deep affinity of IE with North American languages. I am hoping that someone with more time, resources, and specialized skills (and who can get paid for it) will take a crack at working out regular correspondences.
And BTW, the Tocharian A form for ‘man, person’ is ‘enkwe’. In *Proto Northern Iroquoian, it’s ‘-õkweh’ (‘be a person’) Tuscarora ‘-ək̃ wɛh’, Cayuga ‘-õkweh’, Seneca ‘-ɔk̃ weh’. and Mohawk ‘ón:kwe’. I’m not just posting random associations: there are patterns to these correspondences.
According to a recent Chinese paper describing the results of aDNA studies of remains in Xinjiang: “… Y chromosome haplogroups of Hunnu remains included Q-M242, N-Tat, C-M130, and R1a1. Recently, we analyzed three samples of Hunnu from Barköl, Xinjiang, China, and determined Q-M3 haplogroup. Therefore, most Y chromosomes of the Hunnu samples examined by multiple studies are belonging to the Q haplogroup. Q-M3 is mostly found in Yeniseian and American Indian peoples, suggesting that Hunnu should be in the Yeniseian family. …”
Because Q-M3 is widely believed to have originated in North America, it’s presence could be interpreted as evidence of a back-migration from the Americas. While this finding in no way directly proves that IE languages are derived from North American languages, there can be no doubt that early IE speaking populations were in contact with populations descended from North Americans.
David Marjanović commented:
“PIE: /p t kʲ k kʷ/ is 5; adding /d gʲ g gʷ/ gives 9 ([b] may only have existed as an allophone of /p/); adding /bʱ dʱ gʲʱ gʱ gʷʱ/ makes 14 already. /w j l r m n/ makes 20, /s/ and *h₁, *h₂, *h₃ makes 24. That’s more than twice as many consonant phonemes as Proto-Iroquoian had.”
The model does not suggest that *PIE is a direct lineal descendant of the ancestral form of Proto Iroquoian (which, for the sake of convenience, I refer to as “Paleo-Iroquoian”). Rather, *PIE may have been derived from a creole language that arose out of an ancient sprachbund of the Pacific Northwest Coast region that preceded the current Northwest Coast Sprachbund. This ancient sprachbund apparently involved ancestral versions of Iroquoian, Siouan, and Salishan languages, and this creole predecessor of *PIE borrowed features from all three families. There appear to have been at least two principal lexifers, Paleo-Iroquoian and Paleo-Siouan, with Paleo-Iroquoian being the primary. The sound system, as Beekes has suggested, could have been derived from a reduced subset of “Paleo-Salishan”.
Basque is widely acknowledged to have incorporated fossilized pronominal prefixes, and IE languages appear to have them too. One indicator that *PIE is a creole is the apparent presence of fossilized pronominal prefixes such as Iroquoian “Mohawk-like” ‘o-‘ and “Cherokee-like” ‘a-‘ preserved in forms for body parts as well as some other forms. (In fact, it provides another way of classifying IE languages, like the “Satem vs. Centum” division, with Anatolian with its Siouan-derived forms for some body parts as the exception.) Roots of many of the IE forms in daughter languages appear to based on the third-person singular version of Iroquoian forms, as though the ancestral “pre-Proto Indo-Europeans” had difficulty in learning the complex Iroquoian system of pronoun prefixes and stuck with the third-person form, adapting an alternative grammar from what may have been a substrate language.
An analogy to the proposed model is the Garifuna language of Central America. While core language is still essentially a composite of Arawkan and Carib, through a series of historical accidents, the speakers of Garifuna are genetically mostly African.
BTW – Here is a sign in the language that Beekes suggested could have provided the sound inventory for Proto Indo-European. Does the form remind anyone of an alternative word for “to be motionless” in Indo-European languages?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bonaparte_-_Secwepemctsin_stop_sign.jpg
Rather, *PIE may have been derived from a creole language that arose out of an ancient sprachbund of the Pacific Northwest Coast region that preceded the current Northwest Coast Sprachbund.
Reconstructed PIE looks like anything but a creole language.
Gary Moore: based on what I am seeing, there is a strong case for the deep affinity of IE with North American languages.
You are not the first person to mention a resemblance of SOME North American languages to IE. The great linguist Edward Sapir proposed a classification of the 60-odd North American language families recognized in the 19th century into 6 superstocks or “phyla”. One of these was the “Penutian phylum”, comprising approximately 15 families of the West Coast, from California to British Columbia. Sapir did not base his classifications on any items of common vocabulary or even on common or at least widespread pronouns, but on general morphological structures which reminded him of IE rather than of any other North American languages. For example, several of the “Penutian” families have complex verb formations including vocalic ablaut (as in English sing, sang, sung).
I don’t have the relevant texts at hand but the descriptions of the “phyla” should be easily findable on the internet, including the one(s) comprising Iroquoian, Siouan and others that you have been quoting.
I should add that Sapir’s “phyla” were not generally accepted by other linguists and that “Penutian” in particular is considered doubtful. The main reason for the non-acceptance is that most linguists researching the families and phyla in question have been looking at vocabulary items, forgetting that the “comparative method” uses phonological correspondences between the words of languages already considered to be related, and that relatedness is most easily detectable through common morphology (both structure and individual morphemes). Actually there are a fair number of morphological resemblances within the “Penutian phylum”, although much more work is needed to determine its structure and even its membership, before considering what it could itself be related to.
But the fact that some Penutian languages have some structural resemblances with some IE languages does NOT mean that the two groups should be considered related. Morphological structures, although more varied than syntactic ones, can resemble each other without the languages they appear in being related. The opposite is also true: once related languages can lose some of their features in such a way that the relatedness is no longer discernable.
@David Marjanović
“Together, the recent papers on the genetics of the Corded Ware/Battle Ax people make it highly likely that the non-Anatolian branch of IE expanded with the brown-eyed, lactose-tolerant hordes of the Yamnaya culture.”
Just to clarify about the genetics of the Yamnaya. It looks like they were actually NOT lactose-tolerant. Surprise, surprise!
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/full/nature14507.html
Piotr Gąsiorowski commented:
“Reconstructed PIE looks like anything but a creole language.”
Note that I stated that “*PIE may have been derived from a creole language”.
With all due respect to Professor Anthony, there are some features that IE inherited from its predecessor that point to its ultimate origin from a creole:
1) IE forms appear to be derived from two different language stocks: Iroquoian and Siouan. Consider the fact that there are a number of cases of multiple *PIE forms for the same item such as the first person pronoun, the numeral ‘1’, ‘water’, ‘fire’, ‘man, person’, etc. I have found that in many of these cases, one *PIE form appears to correspond to an Iroquoian form and the other to a Siouan form.
2) The precursor of *PIE shows drastic reduction in elements from its hypothetical parent lexifer. Pronoun prefixes in IE forms derived from Iroquoian, when present, are reduced to the third person singular only. There are a few examples other than body parts already listed in earlier postings. Here is another example:
*PIE ḱewero- ‘wind’
This form looks very much “in family’ with Iroquoian equivalents, taking into account the ‘r’ > ‘l’ shift.
*PNI * { -wɹ- } ‘air, wind’
Mohawk ówera ‘wind (breeze)’
Cherokee u²no²le ‘wind, air’
Oneida owe·lá ‘wind, air’
Mingo kææha’ ‘wind to blow’
The ‘ka- ‘ prefix is the 3rd person inanimate pronoun prefix for C-Stem Class Verb Bases in Mingo, and the *PIE form appears to have retained this element from the “Paleo-Iroquoian” parent language.
To cite some examples in daughter languages for an alternative form for ‘head’
Mohawk ohsò:kwa ‘head’
Cherokee asgoli ‘head, peak’ (also uska – ‘detached head, skull’)
Toch B āśce ‘head’ (Dropped noun ending)
Hittite sag ‘head’ (Dropped pronoun prefix and noun ending)
Old Norse skalli “a bald head, skull’ (retained noun ending but dropped pronoun prefix)
Swedish skulle
As can be seen, the IE forms are simplified from the Iroquoian forms.
3) Anthony also remarks that repeated forms are typically used in creole languages as an intensifier. An instance in *PIE is the non-Anatolian word for ‘wheel’ *kwékwlo-s, which is formed by reduplication of the base *kwel- ‘turn’. In this case, reduplication is used to indicate repetitive action. In turn, *PIE *kwel- can be plausibly mapped to its Cherokee equivalent, ‘-gwal-‘, by relatively simple and straightforward sound shifts. Compare Proto-Tocharian form *kwə́kwlë ‘chariot, wagon’ to Cherokee dagwalela, ‘wagon, car’ (Feeling). Comparable forms in Proto Northern Iroquoian given by Charles Julian are * { -kaɹhateni- }, * { -kaɹhatenj- } ‘roll, turn around’ ( limited to Iroquoia ) and PNI * { -kaɹhatho- }, * { -kaɹhathw- } ‘invert, roll over, turn over’. (Of course, the resemblance to common IE forms such as ‘car’ and ‘cart’ are remarkable.)
Although some may object to these proposed correspondences above, claiming that Native Americans ‘did not have the wheel’, it should be pointed out that hoop and stick games involving rolling disks or hoops on edge were widely popular in North America, so Native Americans were indeed familiar with the concept of the wheel.
Note that I stated that “*PIE may have been derived from a creole language”.
OK. PIE looks like anything but a language “derived from a creole”. If there’s anything creoles typically lack (or almost lack), it’s an elaborate system of inflections and complex, semantically and formally opaque derivational rules. PIE abounds in both. Creoles also tend to have small and typologically unremarkable phoneme inventories: can you show me a creole language with more than a dozen stop phonemes?
Lookalikes don’t count as cognates until you can show that they display robust, systematically recurring phonological correspondences and morphological homologies. Random “root” resemblances are easy to find between any pair of languages.
PIE accentual mobility, too, is too difficult for second-language speakers to handle.
I repeat my earlier question to Gary: Is there anything, any conceivable piece of information, that would lead you to suppose that your theory might be mistaken?
It would be a waste of time and space to point out all the errors in Gary’s data. I’ll just give one example: there are several Hittite words that could be translated approximately as ‘head’ — first and foremost, haršar (oblique stem haršn-) — but there’s no Hittite “sag” ‘head’. SAG is a sumerogram employed instead of the corresponding Hittite word. Gary, will you start arguing now that Sumerian is also an Iroquoian-based creole?
Gary, will you start arguing now that Sumerian is also an Iroquoian-based creole?
Now that you mention the possibility…
I think there is some miscommunication here (Sigh. Doctors make the worst patients, and linguists can’t communicate…): Gary seems to be using “creole” with the meaning “lexically mixed language”. Now, while some creoles do indeed have mixed vocabularies, this is the exception rather than the rule: most creoles derive the bulk of their lexicon from a single language: most Jamaican Creole lexemes come from English, most Haitian Creole lexemes come from French, and so on. Conversely, of course, most languages with mixed vocabularies are not creoles.
Piotr: While I do not believe that Gary has a case, I must point out that creole phoneme inventories can be quite rich: Chinook Jargon (A pidgin which nativized at least once) had a substantially richer consonant system than Proto-Indo-European, with fifteen stop phonemes (Which is quite banal in North American Pacific Northwest languages, of course…).
Gary: while I do not believe you have a case, I at least am trying to be fair. I had pointed out upthread that since Proto-Iroquoian had a mere eleven consonant phonemes, the odds of finding a coincidental look-alike between Iroquoian and Indo-European were disturbingly high (Incidentally, another language with a very poor consonant inventory is Basque, which, as Luis Michelena (AKA Mitxelena) pointed out, did make finding alleged “cognates” of Basque words in other languages very, very easy).
More broadly, unless you show that the similarities you have listed between Indo-European on the one hand and various Native American language families (including Iroquoian) *cannot have arisen by chance*, then I’m afraid you are wasting everybody’s time. including your own. And our cyberhost’s question (which I believe deserves an answer) as to what it would take for you to accept that your theory is wrong goes to the heart of the matter: as Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “unbeatable systems are Dogma, not Science”.
Chinook Jargon (A pidgin which nativized at least once) had a substantially richer consonant system than Proto-Indo-European, with fifteen stop phonemes (Which is quite banal in North American Pacific Northwest languages, of course…).
I stand corrected, thanks. 🙂
marie-lucie commented:
“You are not the first person to mention a resemblance of SOME North American languages to IE. The great linguist Edward Sapir proposed a classification of the 60-odd North American language families recognized in the 19th century into 6 superstocks or “phyla”. One of these was the “Penutian phylum”, comprising approximately 15 families of the West Coast, from California to British Columbia. Sapir did not base his classifications on any items of common vocabulary or even on common or at least widespread pronouns, but on general morphological structures which reminded him of IE rather than of any other North American languages. For example, several of the “Penutian” families have complex verb formations including vocalic ablaut (as in English sing, sang, sung). ”
BTW, Siouan languages also exhibit a form of ablaut, but of the final vowel. See this paper by Robert Rankin:
http://udel.edu/~pcole/fieldmethods2010/CatchingLanguageFelixKAmekaAlanCharlesDenchNicholasEvans2006book/The%20interplay%20of%20synchronic%20and%20diachronic%20discovery%20in%20Siouan%20grammar-writing%20Robert%20L.%20Rankin.pdf
In my earlier posts, I had also noted two papers describing possible links between Siouan (Dakota) and IE by Andrew Williamson, published in 1881 and 1882, respectively. This papers unfortunately were published in local American journals and received no visibility to European scholars.
The idea of an explicit link between the Iroquoian languages and Indo-European is not new: the Jesuit missionaries – the same people who pointed out the parallels between Sanskrit and Indian languages to the classical languages of Europe – remarked on the resemblance of Iroquoian languages and Ancient Greek early on. Father Joseph-François Lafitau, who noted strong similarities between words in languages of ancient Anatolia and equivalents in Iroquoian languages, remarked: “For besides those which I have mentioned, I can cite more of them which, without alteration, are purely Huron and Iroquoian; and others which having all the construction and flavor of these languages, can be found in them with slight changes.” Lafitau may have been exaggerating, but the resemblances are often striking, as in the case of Hittite (unknown to Lafitau) takku ‘if’ and Mohawk tóka’. ‘if’. Speaking of his near contemporary, Fr. Jean-Andre Cuoq, Horatio Hale wrote: “The resemblances of these Indian languages to the Greek struck him, as it had struck his illustrious predecessor, the martyred Brebeuf, two hundred years before.” The idea that Iroquoian languages were in some way derived from ‘a form of ancient Greek’ was taken seriously in the 19th century, and the pioneering linguist Albert Gallatin wrote a paper comparing the middle voice in Ancient Greek and Iroquoian, and one scholar, Giles Yates, even presented a paper proposing correspondences between Ancient Greek and Iroquoian sounds, according to H. R, Schoolcraft, who was himself skeptical of the proposal. Unfortunately, speculation centered around the fanciful vision of some Bronze Age transatlantic migration and not the broader issue of the possibility of a very ancient relationship of Iroquoian languages to the general IE family. However, Thomas Jefferson, who was a serious student of Native American languages, suggested that North America may have been a source of Eurasian languages, and as previously noted, some major IE scholars have remarked on possible connections between North American languages and Indo-European. With advances in population genetics that appear to show evidence for a back flow of Native American populations into Eurasia, possibly reaching even as fall as eastern and central Europe, such links can no longer be peremptorily ruled out. By the era of proposed for the split of the predecessor of IE from North American languages – that is, about 8,000 years ago – North America had been settled for at least 5,000 years and possibly longer, so there is no valid scientific reason for preferring a west-to-east migration from Siberia to North America over an east-to-west migration from Alaska back into Eurasia by that time.
Etienne commented:
“Gary: while I do not believe you have a case, I at least am trying to be fair. I had pointed out upthread that since Proto-Iroquoian had a mere eleven consonant phonemes, the odds of finding a coincidental look-alike between Iroquoian and Indo-European were disturbingly high (Incidentally, another language with a very poor consonant inventory is Basque, which, as Luis Michelena (AKA Mitxelena) pointed out, did make finding alleged “cognates” of Basque words in other languages very, very easy).”
One thing that give me a high degree of confidence in many of my proposed correspondences is that the forms not only merely monomorpheme ‘sound-alikes’, but have similar structure. For example, the *PIE form for ‘leg’, ‘’krosko’ with *Proto Northern Iroquoian (*PNI) ‘kohsinko?t’ ‘leg’/’knee’/’ankle’:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
*PIE k ro k s – ko –
*PNI k o h (k>h) s in ko Ɂt
As you can see, the *PIE form closely resembles its *PNI counterpart, with possibly some limited loss (?) of morphological elements. To emphasize, this is not merely an isolated example: there are plenty in the core IE lexicon. Correspondences between Native American and *PIE and other IE languages are not, as Schoolcraft remarked, a few “disjointed examples in the lexography” – there are high densities of candidate correspondences in many semantic fields – especially body parts, numbers, and personal pronouns. Moreover, many correspondences display distinctive patterns which suggest that *PIE retained vestiges of an earlier polysynthetic morphology involving incorporated pronouns.
Another example is *PIE *H₁dónt- and *PNI * oˈnoɁtsaɁ ‘tooth’
0 1 2 3 4
H₁d ó n t-
oˈ noɁ ts- a
As can be seen, while the *PIE form appears to have a prefix of unknown origin, it is otherwise is quite similar to the *PNI form structurally.
Etienne also commented:
“Piotr: While I do not believe that Gary has a case, I must point out that creole phoneme inventories can be quite rich: Chinook Jargon (A pidgin which nativized at least once) had a substantially richer consonant system than Proto-Indo-European, with fifteen stop phonemes (Which is quite banal in North American Pacific Northwest languages, of course…).”
This brings up an interesting point: the Pacific Northwest region of North America has been particularly productive of trade languages and pidgins, and not just the Chinook Jargon. As Beekes has pointed out, the *PIE sound system could have been derived from a reduced set of the sound system of the Salishan language Shuswap.
During the early stages of European settlement, many Europeans in the Pacific Northwest adopted Chinook Jargon and even spoke it as the primary home language. This could provide a peaceful model for how europeanoid steppe dwellers came to speak a language borrowed from populations derived from Native Americans on the eastern fringe of the steppes.
The Pacific Northwest is of course linguistically diverse. Whether or not Siouan or Iroquoian populations were once part of this mix is impossible to definitively prove, but for what its worth, two of the most eminent Iroquoian scholars of the 19th century, Horatio Hale and Lewis Hunt Morgan, placed the urheimat of the Iroquoian languages in the Pacific Northwest.
languagehat commented:
“I repeat my earlier question to Gary: Is there anything, any conceivable piece of information, that would lead you to suppose that your theory might be mistaken?”
The theory that PIE is somehow autochthonous and arose from a west Eurasian linguistic isolate is questionable, and I think that’s the real issue here. The model suggesting links between North American languages and PIE falsifies the theory that IE is a monogenic language. The distinctive features of IE probably arose as independent language innovations or borrowings after the split from North American languages which most likely took place around 8,000 BP, and 6,000 or 5,000 years BP when the IE “baseline” was established.
As I have pointed out, I am not the only person to suggest the likelihood of links between IE and North American languages. Accomplished linguists have separately suggested links between IE (specifically, Greek) and Iroquoian, and IE and Siouan, and all I have done is to synthesize these hypotheses and place them in the context of recent genetic findings.
The smug attitude of IE scholars towards IE-American connections is illustrated by Carl Buck’s snide remarks in “Hittite an Indo-European Language?”:
” It would not be difficult to pick out items here and there which would seem to discredit the author’s understanding of Indo-European relations or his sense of perspective. But to my mind that would only becloud the issue, which must rest in the main on those resemblances which I have summarized above.
Not, of course, on any one of them. Not, for example, on kuis ‘who,’ and the adverbs kuwabi, etc., for one might as well prove the Indo-European affinity of a North American Indian language which shows an interrogative stem qa- (satem-language!, cf. Skt. ka-) in the adverbs qama ‘how,’ qaxba ‘where,’ etc. (Handbook of American Indian Languages, pp. 674, 676). …”
Note how Buck never questions whether or not the Native American language referenced could be potentially related to IE: he automatically assumes the correlation was absurd simply because it was an “Indian language” without doing any further analysis. If he had dug further, he might have found:
Avestan: a- ‘he, this’ / Cherokee a- ‘he/she/it’ (3PS pronominal prefix)
Avestan: dah- ‘gift’; dā- ‘give, put’; dāna- ‘offering’
Cherokee: adanedi ‘give’; adanehi ‘giver’; adanelv ‘given’; adahnehdi, adanedi ‘gift’
Avestan: gam ‘go’ / Cherokee -ega ‘go’
Avestan: kō, ka, ko ‘who’ / Cherokee gago ‘who’
Avestan: kat ‘what’ / Cherokee gado ‘what’
Avestan: aθaham; verb; 1st person singular imperfect indicative active ‘speak, say, declare’ /
Cherokee: adiha ‘he’s saying it’
While this list of potential correspondences by itself does not “prove” a generic relationship between IE Avestan and Iroquoian Cherokee, one has to wonder why linguists like Buck never bothered to delve into a possibility that they were, in fact, somehow related. Sure, the forms in the list possibly could all be false cognates, but at this point, that proposition is beginning to strain credulity.
The hypothesis at least answers some of the key questions that has bedeviled historical linguistics: what are the antecedents of Indo-European? Where are the living linguistic cousins of Indo-European? These questions could be answered now; they were mysteries because linguists were looking on the wrong continent.
I have to say, Gary, you didn’t really answer the question in this most recent comment. Rather it’s more just a restatement of your general thesis.
Exactly. You seem unable to comprehend what the question even means. A theory that is not falsifiable is not a theory but a dream.
Another example is *PIE *H₁dónt- and *PNI * oˈnoɁtsaɁ ‘tooth’
0 1 2 3 4
H₁d ó n t-
oˈ noɁ ts- a
As can be seen, while the *PIE form appears to have a prefix of unknown origin, it is otherwise is quite similar to the *PNI form structurally.
The PIE word does not contain a prefix. The root here is *h₁ed- ‘eat, take a bite’, and *-(o)nt- is a suffix (forming present pasticiples and agent nouns). Since the accent in this word was shifted to the suffix, the root occurs in the zero grade. The etymology of ‘tooth’ is thus transparent, and it’s clear that the word was formed in PIE by derivational processes productive in that language. Of course it doesn’t mean that before the PIE period people had no teeth, but any predecessors of *h₁d-(o)nt- must have gone extinct or changed their meaning. The alternative IE word for ‘tooth’, *ǵombʰo- (cognate to English comb) is also deverbal. I’m surprised you don’t seem to be aware of all that.
But never mind. Now show how the constituents of *h₁d-(o)nt- map onto North Iroquoian morphemes. What is the North Iroquoian root? What does it mean, and how is that meaning modified by affixes?
During the early stages of European settlement, many Europeans in the Pacific Northwest adopted Chinook Jargon and even spoke it as the primary home language..
Do you have a source for this? Pacific Northwest history used to be one of my hobbies, and I do not recall ever coming across any claims that a significant number of early European settlers switched to Chinook Jargon as their primary language.
A large number of Europeans on the West Coast learned CJ and it was the primary medium of communication between them and the aboriginal people. But it is unlikely that it became the “primary language” among Europeans although non-English settlers might also have used it with other local Europeans. It may also have been the home language of some mixed race families.
CJ is known to have been learned as a first language by some children in the two very large reservations in Oregon where people of four or five native groups speaking as many distinct languages were resettled together by the American government, so that CJ became the lingua franca. Under these conditions, intermarriage was common and spouses often only had CJ as their common language, and that’s what their children learned first.
Gary:
1-I must third Brett and Marie-Lucie’s point/question: I too have never heard of Chinook Jargon becoming the home language of any significant number of European settlers, a reference would be very much appreciated.
2-Your latest round of data does not improve your case, I’m afraid! By comparing any daughter of Proto-Iroquoian (such as Cherokee, which by the way only had twelve consonant phonemes) with any daughter of Indo-European (such as Avestan) you are making the task of finding similarities a lot easier. I can’t help but note that if you replace Avestan with Proto-Indo-European forms the match with Cherokee forms becomes much poorer…
3-I must also echo David D.: you are basically avoiding answering the questions Piotr, our cyberhost and I had brought up. If you wish to know what kind of evidence I would find convincing in demonstrating a genetic relationship, I refer you to my comments on Proto-Romance on this Language Hat thread from two years ago:
http://languagehat.com/an-anatolian-script-mystery/
Reminder:
As long as you can answer the question “if I were wrong, how would I know?” all the way down, you’re doing science; as soon as you can’t do that, you’re not doing science anymore.
====================================
Lactose tolerance: I need to read the papers again.
Scenario for why PIE had nine velar plosive phonemes and the plain ones were rarest: Deliberately oversimplified in that I wanted to show only the principle behind this. West Caucasian languages don’t have a single vowel phoneme either, they have a minimum of two, and there’s no reason to think that ablaut is a PIE innovation out of nowhere… I recommend the second part (pages 306–320) of this paper and pages 6–8, 11 and 19 of this presentation which will be familiar to some
====================================
Bedtime.
How can you have a strong case if you don’t have any regular correspondences?
But you’re not trying to relate Tocharian A to Northern Iroquoian. You’re trying to relate IE as a whole to Iroquoian as a whole.
Unless you can reconstruct the PIE ancestor of this Tocharian A form, and the Proto-Ir ancestor of this PNIr form, you’ve got nothing. 😐
Maybe you can. But I see one difficulty right away: PIE appears not to have had any words that began with a vowel.
Do the necessary work, and then come back.
I’m completely baffled that you quote a paper without citing it.
And what does “a Chinese paper” even mean? There’s no such thing as national genetics.
Mind you, I’m not upset by the conclusion in your quote. 🙂 It has long been suggested, and quite convincingly, that one of the who knows how many languages spoken in the Xiongnu confederation was Yeniseian.
In hindsight, all that can be said of their idea is “nice try”. They lived long before historical linguistics had become a science.
Creationists love to point out that just about every biologist and “philosopher of nature” was a creationist right up until the year 1858.
Beekes’s point wasn’t that PIE came from the Pacific Northwest, it was that it came from a language that had a sound system rich in ejective consonants. Such sound systems are found today in languages from the Pacific Northwest, from the general Caucasus area, and from southern Africa.
Shuswap is simply an example of a language with a very large consonant system.
You can’t falsify a hypothesis with another hypothesis. You can only falsify it with facts that it doesn’t fit.
The question becomes: is your idea that the lexicon of PIE has two origins more parsimonious than the idea that it has a single origin?
So far, the answer seems to be “no”.
And you haven’t even noticed that they all contradict each other. You can’t, for example, suggest a link between specifically Greek and Iroquoian without either proposing that Greek isn’t an IE language or that Iroquoian is an IE subbranch.
Also, there were accomplished biologists before 1858. They were still wrong.
Oops! You did it again.
This time you’re suggesting a relationship between specifically Avestan and specifically Cherokee even though you actually want to suggest a relationship between IE as a whole and Iroquoian as a whole.
You need to compare PIE and PIr.
If you go back to the PIE ancestors of the Avestan forms you cite, many of the similarities just evaporate. For example, Avestan is an Indo-Iranian language, which means that Avestan a represents a merger of PIE *e, *o (in closed syllables) and the rare *a. I’ll try for a few of yours…
Avestan: dah- ‘gift’; dā- ‘give, put’; dāna- ‘offering’
PIE: *doh₃- “give, put”; *doh₃-no-m “offering”
Avestan: kō, ka, ko ‘who’
PIE: *kʷi-s “who” (animate)
Avestan: kat ‘what’
PIE: *kʷi-d “what” (inanimate)
Avestan: aθaham; verb; 1st person singular imperfect indicative active ‘speak, say, declare’
– I don’t know by heart where that comes from. However, Iranian (including Avestan) θ between vowels comes from PIE *th₂; Iranian h comes from *s; Iranian a almost always comes from *e or *o; and seeing as PIE words may not have been able to begin with a vowel, you’re probably missing *h₁ or *h₂ at the beginning of the word, less likely *h₃.
Now show me the Proto-Iroquoian ancestors of the Cherokee forms you quoted…
I’m sorry, that’s nothing but funny.
…No, for the most part they weren’t and aren’t looking at all.
Those who have been looking for relatives of IE have been looking in the geographical vicinity: Uralic and Etruscan* are the candidates I personally find most promising, West Caucasian and a large grouping of language families including lots of north-central Eurasian families other than West Caucasian have also been suggested.
The problems lie elsewhere. IE has been researched with a great effort for the last 200 years, with the help of ancient documents going back four thousand years; that is very much the exception. The Uralists have to make do without any writings older than one thousand years; they’re still not sure where to put the root of the Uralic tree (between Samoyedic and everything else, or between an eastern branch – Samoyedic and Ugric – and everything else?), and they’re still discovering heaps of new cognates every decade. So, if you want to compare PIE to Proto-Uralic, you’ll find that Proto-Uralic is much more nebulous than you’d like. The Etruscan language is poorly known and poorly understood. If Uralic plus something else is the closest relative of IE, the possibilities multiply, and the state of the research worsens, as generally does the state of the data known to science; I’ll just mention the Altaic controversy.
* Or rather the “Tyrsenian languages” as a whole, of which Etruscan is the best known one by far.
The form aθaham ‘I said’ is actually Old Persian, not Avestan. The Avestan root is saŋh- (http://avesta.org/avdict/avdict.htm), corresponding to śaṃs- in Sanskrit (http://spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=zaMs&trans=Translate&direction=AU), and the Indo-European root must be *kens- which AHD has as the source of Latin cēnseō ‘I assess, estimate, judge’. So at this point not looking close to Cherokee adiha.
And of course the a- of aθaham is a tense marker (the augment), while the a of adiha is, if I’m not mistaken, a person marker. One more example of the many things that can go wrong when you treat inflected forms as your comparanda without regard to their morphological structure.
So, aθaham is from PIE *h₁e-ḱens-mi? I’m becoming more and more curious about the Proto-Iroquoian ancestor of adiha.
Presumably rather *(h₁)e-ḱens-e-m, thematic imperfect.
Presumably rather *(h₁)e-ḱens-e-m, thematic imperfect.
Presumably rather *(h₁)e-ḱens-o-m?
Avestan: kō, ka, ko ‘who’
PIE: *kʷi-s “who” (animate)
Avestan: kat ‘what’
PIE: *kʷi-d “what” (inanimate)
But the Avestan forms clearly go back to the o-stem variants, *kʷo-s and *kʷo-d.
Presumably rather *(h₁)e-ḱens-o-m?
Yes, of course. Is there a historical linguistics equivalent of the Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation?
Actually, instead of *(h₁)e-ḱens-o-m, shouldn’t we reconstruct *ḱens-o-m? As I recall, the augment, being found in Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iranian only, is assumed to be a late post-Proto-Indo-European innovation which left geographically peripheral languages (Celtic, Latin, Tocharian, Anatolian languages…) unscathed.
Well, since we’re talking specifically about the preform of aθaham, I think the augment has to be there.
Yes, except I wasn’t sure those existed, beyond knowing Latin quod. I have never systematically studied this whole subject. :-]
Well, even English who and what (as well as German wer and was) reflect *kʷo-s and *kʷo-d.
*kʷo-d erat demonstrandum.
What’s the definition of IE languages anyway? It seems a bit circular to me. IE languages are descendants of PIE. PIE is the common ancestor of all IE languages.
So if a newly discovered language, extinct or not, is shown to definitely be related to IE, but branced off before any of the current branches, does that change what PIE is?
IE-ness is a matter of classification, and that makes it circular by definition.
The situation you describe happened when Hittite was discovered to be IE. In some ways it confirmed the reconstruction. They famously provided written evidence for the existence of the laryngeals. In others it didn’t and led to a refined model. The PIE gender system is one example.
What’s the definition of IE languages anyway? It seems a bit circular to me. IE languages are descendants of PIE. PIE is the common ancestor of all IE languages.
The definition is genetic. You can define PIE formally as the most recent common ancestor of, say, Hittite and Vedic, and the IE family as PIE plus all languages descended from it. This definition is not circular. If, for example, one day someone gathers enough evidence that IE and Uralic are related via a common ancestor, the definition will not hyave to be revised.
To 19th century scholars PIE was the most recent common ancestor of all languages known at the time to be related to Sanskrit, and IE was that language plus all its descendants (or, equivalently, the “crown group” of the family: all its extant representatives and their ancestors back to the most recent common one, plus all its descendants). However, it didn’t occur to anybody to formalise this definition and codify the terminology. (presumably it was regarded as too obvious to require clarification). Today we know that the Tocharian and Anatolian languages are more distantly related to the IE languages in the 19th-c. sense than the latter are to each other. That’s why we continue to use the old term for a more encompassing taxonomic unit (also because the position of Anatolian and Tocharian wasn’t quite clear from the start). “Indo-Hittite” somehow didn’t catch on. It would be nice to have established terms for the “Neogrammarian IE” node and for a larger group that includes all languages more closely related to Sanskrit than to Hittite (it includes Tocharian). My personal preference if for “Neo-Indo-European” (the crown group) and “Core Indo-European” (Neo-IE + Tocharian), but there are other terms in circulation as well.
My personal preference if for “Neo-Indo-European” (the crown group) and “Core Indo-European” (Neo-IE + Tocharian)
That sounds terrible to me (sorry!). “Neo-Indo-European” sounds like it should mean some newer form/version of PIE, and “Core Indo-European” sounds like it should be just the central group of languages, not “plus” anything.
Hah! There’s no pleasing everyone.
Hat is right. How can the core be bigger than what it’s the core of?
But what did you intend the “core” to mean?
Or what Keith said while I was typing.
The “core” of the family after you peel off Anatolian.
Piotr Gąsiorowski can answer for himself, but his classification seems to be like this
PIE
/ | \
Languages closely related to Sanskrit Tocharian Anatolian
=
Neo-IE
\_______________________________________/
= Core IE
\_____________________________________________________/
=IE
I agree that Neo- may sound confusing if it refers to the old notion of IE, but in biological phylogenetic nomenclature “Neo-” often refers to a crown taxon (the part of a larger taxon which contains all its living representatives).
“Core IE” is not my private term. Some authors use it like me for the non-Anatolian branch, while for others their “Core” = my “Neo-“. Don Ringe (From Proto-Indo-european to proto-Germanic) calls IE without Anatolian “North IE”, and North IE without Tocharian — “West IE” (now, this is confusing, because his West IE includes Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Balto-Slavic, among others). He further divides West IE into Italo-Celtic and “Central IE” (Greek + Armenian + Albanian + Balto-Slavic + Indo-Iranian + Germanic). I’m not happy either with this family tree or the accompanying terminology.
Wow, all that terminology is awful! I hope they can figure out some more satisfying terms.
To make matters worse, I’ve also heard “nuclear IE” used for Piotr’s “Neo-IE”. It’s confusing because the same people who use it also use “core IE” for “nuclear IE” + Tocharian, and I find it impossible to remember which is the core and which is the nucleus.
Truth to tell, “Indo-European” is awful too. The hyphen suggests that we have two subfamilies, Indic and European. To make matters worse, Anatolian, Armenian and most of Iranian are neither Indian nor European, and there are many non-IE langauges in both Europe and (especially) India. If we drop the hyphen, the Indoeuropeans could be interpreted as Europeans of Indian descent (the Roma?). “Indogermanic” was still worse. Time to rethink it all? 😉
I thought the rationale for indogermanisch was supposed to be about the geographical distribution of the subfamilies (before 1492 etc): Indic-speaking regions to Germanic-speaking regions and all points in between (German wikipedia glosses it as „von Indien bis Germanien“), not implying that Indic and Germanic were the only two pieces?
I know how it was motivated, but what about the Celtic and Romance (Neo-Italic?) languages?
1) Where does the claim that the steppe people did not have blue eyes at all (isn’t that a quite strong claim to make?) come from? I mean, who proposed it and on what evidence? The Wikipedia entry I linked to says (with ref) that many steppe people had blue or green eyes, which makes the opposite claim surprising.
2) Regarding Chinook Jargon being spoken among European-descended white North Americans, see the wonderful anecdote about the two ladies mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chinook_Jargon#Note_on_comment_re_usage_by_.22American_leaders.22_and_.22residents_of_Vancouver.22
3) Old Irish loch (Proto-Celtic *loku-) and Latin lacus are indeed cognate and related to Greek lákkos, but English lake is unrelated; it is neither borrowed from Latin or Romance, nor is it cognate (don’t forget the Germanic sound shift!), but has an independent origin. (The Wikipedia article on false cognates lists various pretty cute and instructive examples, several of which I have added myself, including a Proto-Indo-European/Proto-Algonquian comparison.)
4) For a plausible venture into Pre-Proto-Indo-European vocalism, see https://web.archive.org/web/20130124063132/http://www.indogermanistik.uni-freiburg.de/seminar/pers/kuemmel/umat/idgphon.pdf
I’m still disturbed by the vocalism of PIE, regardless of whether Kümmel’s hypothesis is correct. If most instances of high vowels (/i/ and /u/) can or even must be explained away as allophonic with the semi-vowels /j/ and /w/, most vowels by far are the ablaut vowel //e ~ o ~ Ø ~ a?//, which does seem to mean that PIE had only a single common vowel, and other vowels turn up only marginally or in vocabulary which is suspicious of being borrowed, onomatopoeic or elementary (such as *atta “father”, which looks un-PIE and is apparently derived from baby-talk – it might not even be of PIE age, and can be recreated repeatedly in descendants, much like German Pappe vs. English pap, which does not show the effects of the High German sound-shift but does not seem to be a Low German borrowing either). Even the reduplication /i/, which cannot be related to a zero grade of a diphthong with /j/, seems to alternate with the reduplication /e/ on a more abstract level. Kümmel’s Pre-PIE system with two vowels /a/ and /a:/ distinguished by quantity rather than quality is even weirder typologically. But you don’t even need it to acknowledge that the PIE vowel system is odd. So the idea that an originally significantly larger vowel system was collapsed to a basically one-vowel or two-vowel system (perhaps under the influence of West Caucasian?) is attractive and makes sense intuitively. If Uralic is really the closest kin of IE – or related at all, of course – this would help us understand why it is so different typologically.
5) Considering the vagaries of subgrouping in both Indo-European and Uralic, I’m prepared (like the LIV) to be generous in what I accept as “reconstructible to PIE/PU” – with varying probabilities attached. The requirement that an etymon absolutely must be attested in an outlying group (Anatolian and Tocharian for PIE, Samoyedic for PU) to even be considered for inclusion in a list of proto-language reconstructions seems excessive to me (and, as argued in the preface of the LIV, we need to anticipate future progress – it’s always possible that a cognate turns up eventually after all). If, for example, a verbal root is attested in both Baltic and Greek, or Celtic and Indo-Aryan, or Saami and Hungarian, and there is no reason to suspect that it is secondary somehow, it is highly probable that it was part of the proto-language and justified to treat it as a proto-vocable. If it is only attested in a single branch, but there is no particular reason to suspect secondary formation, borrowing or what have you, the possibility of it being inherited from the proto-language is of course much more uncertain, but for practical purposes it could still be justified or useful in some contexts to treat it as a proto-vocable – with appropriate reservations, caution and disclaimers. Any individual case is to be judged on its own terms.
As for Anatolian and Tocharian, I would also like to point out that the matter is still not settled and I don’t find it acceptable to treat “Indo-Hittite” as fact. In the realm of phonology, for example, there are no clear non-Anatolian common innovations, and in the field of verbal roots, Anatolian isn’t really distinctive, either. So the honest approach, IMHO, is to admit that we just don’t know for certain what the relationship between Anatolian, Tocharian and PIE really is like. A possibility I don’t see given as much thought as it deserves (IMHO, of course) is a kind of compromise between the traditional comb-like and the “Indo-Hittite” model: Anatolian and Tocharian did split off early and lost contact with the remainder of IE, but only after internal differentiation within PIE had already started, turning it into a dialect continuum, like the relationship between Icelandic/Faroese and the remainder of North Germanic, which wasn’t homogeneous either anymore when Icelandic/Faroese split off. So common innovations within the “core” IE dialect continuum that did not reach Anatolian (and in some cases not even Tocharian) were still possible. (This means that strictly speaking, Anatolian and Tocharian are on the same level as Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, ?Graeco-Phrygian, ?Italo-Celtic and Germanic.)
6) For the PIE word for “tooth”, see now http://www.martinkuemmel.de/liv2add.html#_Toc392257927
7) I’m surprised to hear that the steppe people of the Yamnaya culture weren’t lactose tolerant yet, but then, “milk” doesn’t even have a solid PIE reconstruction (“to milk”, however, has).
The relative northwesternmostness (or whatever you want to call distance from Bengal) of Germanic v. Celtic probably depends on your century of reference. If you’re willing to treat Iceland as part of the “natural” range of Germanic rather than a colonial expansion that’s too recent to count, Germanic clearly wins. Supposedly both “Indo-Celtic” and “Tocharo-Celtic” have been proposed as alternatives, although I’m not sure how non-facetiously.
OK, the dark horse could also win if you’re willing to take the dubious-but-arguable position that if Germanic gets credit for Iceland, Romance gets credit for the Azores. More recently, of course, IE has become so globally dispersed as to not have coherent “end points.” The antipodes of the conjectural Urheimat on the Ukrainian steppes from which it may have begun its expansion is someplace in the part of the South Pacific that is almost entirely devoid of islands, very roughly equidistant between Germanic (New Zealand) and Romance (Chile).
Why don’t we just rename PIE Pre-Proto-Ukrainian? I can’t imagine any objections to that.
Piotr, I’d be curious to hear why you dislike Ringe’s division of West-Neo-Nucleo-Kernular IE into Italo-Celtic vs. all the rest.
…in the field of verbal roots, Anatolian isn’t really distinctive, either.
As regards verb stems, however Anatolian is rather special in completely lacking the “simple thematic presents” like *bʰér-e/o-. Tocharian shows a few of them as a category “in the making”. In the rest of IE, they are the dominant type of present stems.
Just a few other telling innovations, off the top of my head:
Anatolian has no -eh₂-feminines (not even anything vestigial corresponding to them), and arguably no feminine gender as a grammatical category. This sets it apart from Tocharian and the rest.
The *TK metathesis is shared by all IE branches except Anatolian and Tocharian.
The absence of the aorist/present distinction in Anatolian seems to be due to a branch-specific loss, but there are cases where pairs of verb roots with the same meaning but different lexical aspect are segregated between Anatolian and non-Anatolian. Consider, for example, the words for “drink”: the original present root survives in Anatolian but the aorist root is lost (leaving at best some doubtful traces). In non-Anatolian, the present root is still present in Tocharian but disappears elsewhere (except for a few fossilised derivatives), while the aorist root survives and gives rise to a new (reduplicated thematic) present in the “crown group”.
All these facts are, in my opinion, more consistent with successive splits (and a nested hierarchy of the family tree) than with areal diffusion.
Piotr, I’d be curious to hear why you dislike Ringe’s division of West-Neo-Nucleo-Kernular IE into Italo-Celtic vs. all the rest.
I’d like to see some real support for it (other than, say, lexical innovations). My gut feeling is that Germanic belongs with Italo-Celtic, and whatever it has in common with Balto-Slavic can be plausibly explained by contact. If, on the other hand, the satem shift and RUKI rule in Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic are due to areal convergence rather than common origin, why wasn’t Germanic affected by either of these changes despite being so close to Balto-Slavic? The position of Greek, Armenian and Albanian is more problematic. The treatment of the dorsal series in Armenian and Albanian is quite unique and different from “satemisation” proper. So the family tree as I imagine it would feature two large taxa, (Italic + Celtic + Germanic) and (Indo-Iranian + Balto-Slavic) plus three or more (Thracian? Dacian? Phrygian?) small branches closer to the root. But all these deeper branchings are hard to resolve. Of course family trees have limited validity if there’s a lot of secondary convergence going on.
Why don’t we just rename PIE Pre-Proto-Ukrainian? I can’t imagine any objections to that.
Sergey V. Lavrov is already preparing an angry note of protest.
Is that all? I was hoping for little green men at my door.
Florian: English lake is unrelated
Which English lake? OE lacu ‘stream, watercourse, gully’ is probably native and related to leccan ‘moisten’, but the Middle English word for ‘lake’ was at least influenced semantically by Latin lacus and French lac. Why shouldn’t it simply be a Latinate loan falling together with a native word meaning something rather different (running, not stagnant water)?
According to Florin Curta, Proto-Slavic never existed.
Common Slavic was just a mixed language which arose in 7th century as lingua franca of Avar Khaganate.
Florian Blaschke: Chinook Jargon spoken by two ladies in New York
Thank you for linking to the Wikipedia Talk section on CJ.
Judging from this very informative section, it seems to me that while many European settlers, traders and priests on the Northwest Coast (in both Canada and US) indeed learned and spoke CJ quite fluently, the anecdotes about them speaking it among themselves refer to this use in the presence of strangers in order NOT to be understood (I imagine that this would explain its use by the “two ladies” in a New York hotel). Other uses were as a source of euphemisms, or just for fun.
According to Florin Curta, Proto-Slavic never existed.
It’s like saying that Old English never existed — and maybe even English in general has never existed, because:
(1) The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes were distinct ethnic communities with little or no sense of common identity (at least before the unification of “England” under the rule of Wessex, which however did not extend over all West-Germanic-speaking inhabitants of Great Britain. Scandinavian presence in the north only complicated the picture.
(2) At no point in its history has English been a uniform language; Old English started out as a cluster of related but different Ingvaeonic dialects not much different from pre-Old Frisian and (continental) Saxon; then it became partly bastardised via contact with Old Norse.
(3) Middle English (also extremely non-uniform) was a kind of lingua franca under Norman rule, in a linguistically mixed society.
(4) Modern English is such a mess.
What would it take for a language to be a “100% real” entity? We know that languages are useful abstractions whose “realness” varies depending on the circumstances, and we know how to live with it.
It’s not a strong claim to make. The famous mutation rs12913832 in the gene OCA2-HERC2, which explains 3/4 of the distribution of blue vs. brown eyes, is quite recent; it hasn’t been that many millennia since nobody in the world had this mutation, and therefore most likely blue eyes, at all.
I quote from the famous recent paper on the subject:
66 authors with delightful names (first: Morten E. Allentoft, last: Eske Willerslev): Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia. Nature 522: 167–171.
Page 171:
Fig. 4a shows the frequency of rs12913832 in purple: it’s at 0 in the Paleolithic sample, at 1.00 in the Mesolithic European sample, maybe 0.55 in the Neolithic European sample, maybe 0.4 in the Bronze Age European sample, at 0 again in the Bronze Age Steppe sample, again at about 0.4 in the Bronze Age Asian sample, and at 0.25 or just above in the Iron Age Asian sample. Among modern populations, it’s at 0 in Africa, about 0.3 in southern Europe, maybe 0.85 in northern Europe, maybe 0.15 in South Asia, 0 in East Asia and about 0.3 in America.
On goes the quote:
(Obviously, “lactase tolerance” at the end of the quote is a confusion of “lactose tolerance” and “lactase persistence”.)
I don’t understand why both 5% and 10% are given for Bronze Age Europeans, and thus the difference between figures 4a and 4b. Apparently the latter represents a larger sample of individuals, where just the region around the LCT gene was investigated rather than the entire genome?
Fig. 4a apparently puts the frequency of rs4988235 at 0 in Paleolithic Europeans. Astoundingly, it implies 0.15 in Mesolithic Europeans; this is not mentioned in the text at all. The data point is shared with that for another allele, so maybe there’s a mistake. Anyway, it’s at 0 again in Neolithic Europe. Bronze Age Europe has the mentioned 0.10, and the Bronze Age Steppe, Bronze Age Asia and Iron Age Asia samples are all at 0. Today, it’s at 0 in Africa* and East Asia, 0.25 in southern Europe, 0.7 or so in northern Europe, about 0.15 in South Asia and 0.2 in America. Brown-eyed, lactose-intolerant hordes, then?
* Many Africans are lactose-tolerant, but that’s due to two other mutations (one eastern, one western).
Fig. 4b shows apparently the same frequencies for the modern populations as Fig. 4a. But for the ancient ones, the numbers differ: 0 for Paleo-, Meso- and Neolithic Europeans, the mentioned 0.05 for Bronze Age Europeans, about 0.20 for the Bronze Age Steppe sample, a bit above 0.1 for Bronze Age Asians and 0.25 for Iron Age Asians. A fifth of the brown-eyed hordes was lactose-tolerant?
It looks to me like the allele rs4988235 comes from Yamnaya and spread both east and west while the selection for it continued everywhere.
Extended Data Fig. 7 splits up the samples from Fig. 4 and shows the frequencies of rs4988235 according to the method used for Fig. 4b. Both Western and Eastern Hunter-Gatherers are at 0, and so are the two Neolithic samples; among Bronze Age Europeans, “Rem”, “Bb”, “Une” and “Sca” are at 0, but “Hu” is at maybe 0.05 and “Cw” above 0.15; in the steppe, “Oku”, “Sin” and “Androv” are still at 0, but “Arm” is at maybe 10, “Afan” slightly higher, and “Yam” towers at 0.30; of the further Bronze Age samples, “Mezh” is at a whopping 0.50, “Karasuk” at about 0.1, and “AfGo” is at 0, as is the Iron Age sample from the Altai. The modern American samples, it turns out, are Mexican, Puerto Rican, Colombian and Peruvian.
From the last paragraph of the paper proper:
It goes on to repeat the suggestion that the Afanasievo culture is ancestral to the much later, much more southern Tocharians.
From the AI Koans:
This is known as the ice-cream koan.
Ow!
In particular, Austroasiatic is not spoken all over Southern Asia, nor is Afroasiatic spoken all over Africa and Asia.
@Piotr Gąsiorowski: How much evidence is there about the Jutes as a distinct ethnic and linguistic group, actually? The last I heard, the information about them was pretty thin.
@David Marjanović: Eye color is weird, because the degree of pigmentation is human eyes is governed by three separate but very similar genes. They are three copies of the same original gene, duplicated through unequal crossing over. So there are seven discrete hues of human eyes, depending on how many positive alleles (from 0 to 6) an individual has. (The colors are light blue, dark blue, green/gray/hazel, light brown, dark brown, light black, and dark black. The two shades of blue and two shades of brown are easy to distinguish if you look carefully. The blacks are more difficult, both being quite dark). No single mutation (unless it occurred prior to the genes being duplicated) can therefore dominate the variance in eye color. A new mutation in one of the genes can move the population at most two steps along the spectrum (and often only one—a population with only brown or darker eyes cannot get blue eyes through a single mutation).
I am the result of a blue × green mating, and have blue eyes with green flecks in them.
How much evidence is there about the Jutes as a distinct ethnic and linguistic group, actually? The last I heard, the information about them was pretty thin.
The well-documented Kentish dialect of Old English was very distinct, different in many respects from both the Anglian varieties (Mercian and Northumbrian) and West Saxon. Anglo-Saxon tradition attributes its origin to Jutish colonisation. The Jutes who had settled in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight were subjected to ethnic cleansing as Cædwalla of Wessex annexed those areas in 686 (according to Bede). There is no particular reason to question those traditions, though the Jutes are a little more enigmatic than the Angles and the Saxons. This is partly due to the accidental similarity of their tribal name to the OE pronunciation of the Scandinavian Gauts (Ġēatas), with whom they tended to be confused already in the Middle Ages.
Yah, it’s de Yats an’ de Yutes again…
Don’t forget the Eotenas and the ettens!
@John Cowan: It’s obvious just from looking at most people’s eyes that there is a lot of spatial variation in the pigment levels between different portions of the iris. This precise expression of the color is also shaded a bit (in two senses!) by other genetic and environmental factors. This level of variability is not unexpected when you realize that the actual number of melanin molecules present in the iris is (relatively speaking) quite small, and so the fractional variation is pretty large.
However, the fact that your eyes seem to be mixture probably has nothing to do with your parents being separately blue and green.
Yeah, I’m such a product too, and all four of us have either blue or green eyes.
That would be at least two. The difference between *e and *o was phonemic in that it was used to distinguish words all on its own, like the nominative *nokʷts (“night”) from the genitive *nekʷts (Hittite na-ku-zi, ne-ku-zi, IIRC).
Anyway, I’m trying to come up with a theory, which is mine, on how the PIE vowel system came to be, taking both Kümmel’s idea and this, which at first sight contradicts it.
The most impressive examples are picken and pecken, the verbs for what birds do with their beaks.
Picken has an additional, unrelated, and just as onomatopoeic meaning in Austrian dialects: “glue/stick”.
Oh. Fascinating!
Blessed are the cheesemakers.
Ringe’s argument, and apparently only argument, is that the passive in *-r (Anatolian, Tocharian, Italo-Celtic) could only have been replaced by the one in *-i a single time. I don’t know where he takes that certainty from; right here chez Hat, Hans linked to two works on Google Books a few months ago that tried to derive the Italo-Celtic *-r from something other than the ending seen in Anatolian and Tocharian, but the interesting parts weren’t included in the preview. 🙁
Phonological evidence:
1) Dybo’s law: long vowels (both original and from compensation for lost laryngeals) were shortened if they came before the originally stressed syllable.
2) *TT clusters changed into the entirely new phoneme */sː/, even though PIE didn’t have phonemic consonant length at all.
I also wonder if Douglas Kilday is right and Kluge’s law (plosive + *n under Verner conditions > */pː/, */tː/, */kː/), rather than being limited to Germanic, is shared with Italo-Celtic; but that idea needs a lot more work.
I knew that about Albanian, and so does Wikipedia; but Armenian?
It has been suggested that “Saxon”, rather than an ethnonym, was a job description (“pirate in the North Sea”) much like “Viking” a few hundred years later. I’ll dig up the paper(s) at some point, it’s really late at night. There’s no such doubt about the Angles and the Jutes, however.
*TT clusters changed into the entirely new phoneme */sː/, even though PIE didn’t have phonemic consonant length at all.
Is this supposed to have been a direct change, or to have gone through an intermediate stage *TS, thus *TT — *TS — *SS (later S:) which seems more likely? (Sorry, I forgot how to make arrows properly – I had written it down but lost the note).
@Marie-Lucie
An [s] was inserted already in PIE between any two dental stops followed by a vowel (actually the rule was a little more general, and a sibilant was inserted also in the so-called “thorny” clusters like /tk/, with further branch-specific complications. Anyway, the realisation of /t+t/ was *tst, and there are phonotactic reasons to analyse the epenthetic *s as a separate segment rather than part of an affiricate, at least in PIE. The development of this *tst in Germanic, Italic and Celtic is quite odd (whatever the intermediate stage) and unlikely to have affected them independently. Some propose a similar outcome for Albanian, but the Modern Albanian reflex (s) must have developed from an earlier affricate that merged with the result of the palatalisation of *kʷ before front vowels, and with the reflex of *ḱw — presumably some kind of labialised alveopalatal affricate, but at any rate nothing to do with *ss.
So. I have about an hour; let’s see what I can write down and where it takes me.
One idea I have is to start with Kümmel’s idea that *e – *o used to be a length contrast, but to interpret that as */ə əː/ rather than */a aː/ in order to accommodate the evidence (presented by Piotr) that *a and *ā also existed in PIE. If I simply ignore *ē for the time being – Kümmel seems to think that this could be possible in the nominative singular; I have no idea about verb roots, however –, then this gives us a pre-PIE system with four vowels, */ə əː a aː/, of which the first two were much more common than the last two, and ablaut was a matter of length alone.
Ignoring length for the moment, this and the multiplicity of velar plosives might have come from a six-vowel system */a e i o u ə/: all except */a/ (PIE *a) merged as */ə/ (PIE *e), while */e i/ palatalized the preceding (and perhaps the following?) consonant in the process, */o u/ labialized it, and the original */ə/ did neither. This latter phoneme would explain why both *e and *a seem to occur next to plain velars.
What about length then? Perhaps it, and thus ablaut, is an IE innovation derived from stress. This would mean it’s unrelated, except perhaps as a vaguely areal feature, to the ablaut seen in Afroasiatic and, from what very little I’ve read, Kartvelian and West Caucasian. (Otherwise, it could have been retained from Proto-Nostratic, as Bomhard has in fact proposed; the other Nostratic branches, which may form a larger branch of their own, would then have lost it). West Caucasian isn’t supposed to be Nostratic, but has a fair number of similarities with IE that point to noteworthy amounts of contact.)
Or length could be inherited. Vowel length is not (anymore) reconstructed for Proto-Uralic, but it is for Proto-Altaic (by people who hypothesize a Proto-Altaic language in the first place, it goes without saying).
The other idea I have is to not ignore PIE *ē; after all, Piotr’s presentation doesn’t. 🙂 That gives us a system with three “full” and two “reduced” vowels: *ā, *ē, *o, *a, *e, from earlier */aː eː oː a ə/. This immediately reminds me of the northwestern African vowel system (shared by the local Arabic “varieties” and the local Berber languages), which has three “full” and a single “reduced” vowel, ends up as a, i, u, e/è/é in French transcription and a, i, u, ə in more scientific transcriptions, and has default phonetic values somewhere around [æˑ iˑ uˑ ɪ] (with plenty of allophony). Both in Arabic and in Berber, the reduced vowel results from a merger of three historically separate short vowels, while the full vowels are the historically long ones. Next door*, in the Tuareg languages which belong to the Berber family, only two of the original three short vowels have merged, leaving two reduced vowels that are transcribed ə and ă. Just like how *h₂ turned adjacent *e into a in PIE, several consonants turn adjacent ə into ă in Tuareg.
In PIE, *ē and *o certainly were not [iː uː], but more like [ɛː ɔ(ː)]. Perhaps they were pushed away by the syllabic allophones of /j w/? Really surprisingly far away?
I have to go now; I’ll think about whether the two ideas can be merged, because the first doesn’t predict *ē and the second predicts neither that *a and *ā were so rare nor why there were palatalized and labialized velars nor why *a was more common but still far from universal next to the plain velars.
* Relatively speaking. Old joke about asking for directions in the desert: “go straight ahead, and turn left in two weeks.”
Marie-Lucie: > is no problem, you can just use it. To write < write & l t ; without spaces. The mnemonic is “Less Than”.
Piotr: Thank you for the clarification. So there was indeed an intermediate stage, though tst rather than <ts.
JC: Thank you! “And Less Than” makes perfect sense.
David Marjanović quoted in regards to lactase persistence:
“To further investigate its distribution, we imputed all SNPs in a 2 megabase (Mb) region around rs4988235 in all ancient individuals”
And concluded:
“It looks to me like the allele rs4988235 comes from Yamnaya and spread both east and west while the selection for it continued everywhere.”
For everyone who is not familiar with what it means to impute genetic data, this means that the missing nucleotides in the ancient DNA sequences were “filled in” based on statistics from modern data.
I’m not sure how this got past the reviewers, but the actual mutations present within ancient haplotypes can not be statistically implied from modern samples, in the absence of any actual direct ancient association.
This means that at maximum, the lactase persistence alleles we’re present at about 5% in Yamnaya, but could actually be 0% from a different reading of the same data.
Also, the exact same mutation is present in individuals with R1a and R1b Y chromosome haplogroups in India and even ‘older’ ones among the unusually R1b cattle pastoralists of Northern Africa.
This says to me that the mutation is much older than the Yamnaya. It seems to have spread at a very low level with some pastoralists ancestors.
Some of their steppe relatives also founded the Bell Beaker culture in western Europe, and this seems to have been even more important in its expansion within Europe.
Oh.
Have you found anything redeeming in the supplementary information?
I wrote:
The only idea I can come up with is to start from the second idea and postulate that the full vowels *ā, *ē, *o were somehow descended from earlier */a ə ɨ/, a West-Caucasian-like system which could have been produced by a collapse where frontness and roundedness were transferred from the vowels to the consonants. But why *[ə ɨ] would rotate to become *[ɛ ɔ] – and even in which direction: *[ə ɨ] > *[ə ʉ] > *[ɛ ʊ] > *[ɛ ɔ] or *[ə ɨ] > *[ə ɪ] > *[ɵ e] > *[ɔ ɛ] – is beyond me.
Now we need external cognates to test any of this.
Earlier, I wrote:
One thing I have appears to be:
Elmar Seebold (2013): Die Aufgliederung der germanischen Sprachen. NOWELE: North-Western European Language Evolution 66: 55–77.
Google Scholar can’t find more than the citation, though, and the pdf I have – which Google can’t find either – has the right page numbers but no other indication of belonging to a journal; it’s even written in the tone of an introductory lecture. Anyway, the interesting part here starts with the oldest sources about the invasion of Britain, both from the mid-6th century; Gildas consistently called the invaders Saxones, which apparently meant “Germanic pirates” in contemporary sources, while Procopius said that “Brittia” was inhabited by Britons, Angles and Frisians, complicated by the fact that he called Britain Brettanía elsewhere. Next is Bede, who in 731 first called the invaders Anglorum sive Saxonum gens – one people with two names – before inserting a mention of the Jutes.
If the sources are taken at face value as they are preserved, Saxones go way back into antiquity. Apparently, however, that name was so prominent in later times that it was inserted when illegible names were copied or when unspecified “barbarians” or “pirates” were mentioned as occurring in the later Saxon area; very similar things seem to hold for the Franci. The oldest mention of Saxones that is “clearly reliable” is in a work of Julian the Apostate and refers to the years 353–356, and apparently means “pirates”. And that, Seebold goes on, fits in with the Saxon origination story written down much later by the noble Saxon Widukind of Corvey. It says that the Saxons arrived in later Saxony by ship and took over by trickery and betrayal; they had large knives, “as the Angles still carry them today according to the way of the ancient people”, and these knives are nostra lingua called sahs. Even earlier, Rudolf of Fulda had expressly stated that the Saxons were descended from the Angles (whom he located, however, in Britain).
When the later Anglo-Saxons referred to themselves as a whole, they called themselves Angles all the way to King Alfred of Wessex. Outsiders, however, consistently spoke of Saxons (and still do in Welsh and Gaelic).
Beda’s mention of the Jutes is the only one in any early source (excepting of course those who copied the whole story from him), apart from the saxonibus euciis in a letter from the Frankish king Theudebert I to Emperor Justinian. Then, there are two Old English sources: a poem called Widsith, which says that an otherwise unknown Gefwulf ruled the Jutes while Fin(n) ruled the Frisians, and Beowulf, where Finn’s people are called Jutes four times – Frisians are mentioned three times in the same passage, but it’s not clear if they’re also ruled by Finn.
Taking all this together, Seebold proposes that the Frisians were at one point conquered by sea warriors from northern Jutland. That would explain why their names are both synonymous and not synonymous, why Frisian and English are “so closely connected”, and why the presumably Frankish source Procopius had mentioned Frisians invading Britain. It could also explain what’s going on with the runes: shortly after the invasion, special English runes appear in Britain that have no precursors among “the normal Norse runes”; the Frisian runes, which first appear a bit later, are closely related to the English ones; and the next most similar rune shapes are “special developments” found on bracteates from northern Jutland and southern Scandinavia.
Then Seebold spends half a page on what I would call a fun fact: the Franks, first mentioned in 291 and coming out of nowhere; “the hints in Latin sources point, if anywhere, to the Frisians and their neighbors (especially the Chamavi). On the other hand, there is some evidence (far from proof) that the Franks were earlier called Hugones or similar, and in that designation many have sought a reflex of the name of the Chauci who disappear from the picture of history in about the 2nd century. […Wow, that would require that Verner’s law hadn’t acted yet.] Where they were, the Saxons are found later.” Now the scenario: in the 2nd/3rd century the Saxons push out or conquer the Chauci, and the Frisians are pressured by the Jutes. At the same time, the Franks show up, connected to Frisians and Chamavi as well as to the Chauci. Perhaps the Franks, the Free Ones, were those Frisians and Chauci who were not conquered by the Saxons and Jutes.
Another half-page treats another fun fact: the Danes who took over Jutland and are first mentioned in the mid-6th century (Jordanes and Procopius, the former stating that they are descended from the Swedes and kicked out the Heruli). Given the lack of a tribe called Danes in Scandinavia, perhaps Dane was a nom de guerre like Saxon before it and Viking after it. “Thus, when Hygelac/Chochilaicus is sometimes called a Geat, sometimes a Dane, this need not be a contradiction: he is king of the Geats; but when he assaults Frisia, he’s a Dane.”
Old Saxon was part of the continental Germanic dialect continuum, Old Frisian was not. Seebold explains this by postulating that when the sea warriors partly left for England, the superstrate influence ended in Saxony, and adstrate influence from the south and east came in; Frisian, on the other hand, was isolated in the extreme west, and only the name “Frisians” came back after not being mentioned for several centuries.
Interesting stuff, thanks for passing it along. I remember respecting Seebold back when I read him for my IE studies.
Names are only names, but there are unquestionable linguistic differences between the southern (“Saxon”) and northern and Midland (“Anglian”) varieties of Old English, and a few of them are fundamental enough to go back to the “continental” period. To quote Bede:
From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain desert to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber, and the other nations of the English.
Bede’s credibility should not be overestimated, but he was a pretty careful historian for his time. He relied more on written sources (monastic annals, foreign historians) than folk memories (which did not extend into the fifth century anyway). His account makes a lot of sense linguistically.
Fun thing is, Seebold quotes from that very passage, but just the part about the Angles leaving an empty country behind – “de illa patria, quae Angulus dicitur, et ab eo tempore usque hodie manere desertus” – and only in the chapter on the Danes. The linguistic diversity of Old English is only mentioned at all when it comes to the name of the Jutes: their land is eota lond in at least one unspecified manuscript of the OE translation of Bede, and Seebold calls that form “probably Mercian”, while Manuscript B has ytena lond, which is “probably Late West Saxon”.
…How, actually, did lond turn back into land? It can’t be some kind of Dutch loan…???
Which ones? Arguments from the assumed speed of evolution make more sense in linguistics than in biology, but I still feel uneasy about this.
Which ones? Arguments from the assumed speed of evolution make more sense in linguistics than in biology, but I still feel uneasy about this.
(1) Different operation of “Anglo-Frisian brightening” (the fronting of *a), which was blocked in Anglian (Mercian/Northumbrian) in some environments in which West Saxon and Kentish had it, e.g. before dark /l/. This must be an old difference, not a secondary retraction of the vowel in Anglian, since velar palatalisation did not take place in Anglian before this vowel. That’s why today’s English has cold, calf etc. (from Anglian cald, calf with OE /ɑ/), rather than *cheald, *chalf, which would have regularly developed out of West Saxon ċeald, ċealf (with [æɑ] < *æ). Note that palatalisation itself is old — older than i-umlaut.
(2) The Anglian raising of West Germanic *ā, which merged with *ē in prehistoric times, hence A ē corresponding to WS ǣ. (A similar change in Kentish, however, is independent and later: the vowel was still low in early Kentish texts). This must be older than the monophthongisation of *ai and i-umlaut, since the umlauted reflex of *ai is A ǣ, not ē.
One striking consequence of the latter difference is the outcome of the ‘cheese’ word in Mercian (ċēse, the ancestor of the modern form) and Late WS (ċӯse, ċīse. Here, Proto-WGmc. *ā became Proto-Anglian *ē and remained stable, while Proto-WS *ǣ underwent a whole series of changes restricted to that dialect: after the palatalisation of the initial *k the resulting alveopalatal consonants caused it to diphthongise, yielding something like *ēæ, which merged with the i-umlauted reflex of Germanic *au into Early WS īe (phonetically [iːy]) > Late WS ӯ, ī.
There’s also some morphological stuff to consider, but the phonological differences are more evidently old.
Impressive.
Do you think it’s inherited from Proto-Anglo-Frisian or a later areal feature?
Palatalisation works differently in English and Frisian. For example, the diphthong *au became primitive OE æu, later ēa [æːɑ], causing a preceding velar to palatalise, whereas in Old Frisian *au was monophthongised to ā with no palatalising effect (cf. OFris. cāp [kɑːp] vs. OE ċēap [ʧæːɑp]). Still, whether brought from the continent or developed areally in Britain, palatalisation must have been one of the oldest specifically English changes. Even umlaut predates the oldest written attestation of OE, leaving very little time for still older changes, including palatalisation, its grammaticalisation through the loss of final vowels that triggered it (as in gōs/gœs) and its spread all across Old English dialects.
The rising of WGmc. *ā and the non-brightening of *a before word-final or preconsonantal *l connect Anglian with Frisian. It seems as if some “polymorphisms” existing in the Proto-AF dialect continuum had been inherited by Old English.
It’s notable that umlaut exists in both the languages of Britain.
consistently spoke of Saxons (and still do in Welsh and Gaelic)
Also Breton Saoz and Finnish/Estonian Saksa(maa), now meaning ‘Germany’.
It is notable that Angles dwelling “north side of the river Humber” also occupied entire south-eastern part of modern Scotland, including its largest city of Edinburgh.
Scots language is a direct descendant of early medieval Anglian dialect and lowland Scots are actually Angles by origin.
Therefore, Scots language should be properly called English and Scotland should be renamed England.
Finnish/Estonian Saksa(maa), now meaning ‘Germany’.
these knives are nostra lingua called sahs
Finnish for “walnut” is saksanpähkinä, and the word for “scissors” is sakset, a borrowing from Swedish (sax).
David Marjanović said:
Have you found anything redeeming in the supplementary information?
Overall, it is a very interesting paper, including the supplement. Of course there are clearly multiple gaps in our knowledge.
The sampled Yamnaya have almost completely R1b Y-haplogroups, while Corded-Ware are largely R1a. This means that although the genomic resemblance is strong, there may not be a “father and son” relationship between these cultures. Or there was a strong founder effect from an unsampled Yamnaya group.
In the next few years we should hopefully get a flood of new ancient genomic data on various ancient cultures throughout Eurasia and the Middle East. Hopefully it will align much more strongly with linguistics.
There will have to be higher quality data as well, which seems to be possible. And a few parent and child pairs would yield fantastic information, but nearby burials almost always seem to be unrelated individuals so far.
Could this be a sequence along a tree? Perhaps palatalisation happened first while *au was still intact, then the Frisians wandered off (perhaps from Denmark to the land of the ancient Fresones) and eventually monophthongised *au, then Pre-English decided to raise *au after all, creating new occurrences of a front vowel behind unpalatalised consonants, and palatalised again?
The Slavic palatalisations come to mind: two ran their course, then *ai became a new front vowel, which triggered the third round except in Novgorod.
Good to know, thanks.
then Pre-English decided to raise *au after all, creating new occurrences of a front vowel behind unpalatalised consonants, and palatalised again?
To front the starting point of the diphthong rather than raise it. But note that i-umlaut actually produced a new generation of phonetically front vowels (fully phonemicised before the 7th century) which no longer triggered velar palatalisation. Cyning < *kuningaz, gœs ~ gēs < *gōsiz etc. had initial velars, not palatals.
Oh, of course.
…So my whole scenario would have needed to happen well before that time. I’ll need to think about it when I’m less tired.
David, Piotr: here’s another scenario: what if there had been a Pan-Ingveonic shift of short /a/ to /æ/, even when this /a/ was the first element of the diphthong /au/ (thus, the diphthong would have become /æu/), and Frisian had then turned the initial element of the diphthong back to /a/ because of the influence of the following /u/?
The main advantage I see with this scenario is that you could assume that the same shift from /æ/ to /a/ took place in Anglian and Frisian before final/pre-consonantal /l/: /l/ and /u/ are quite close in terms of point of articulation, after all.
So if we assume a universal fronting of short /a/ to /æ/, what we later see is that:
1-West Saxon and Kentish keep the original state of affairs.
2-Anglian, in common with Frisian, centralizes /æ/ to /a/ before final/pre-consonantal /I/, and
3-Frisian, unlike any variety of Old English, centralizes /æu/ to /au/.
One could thus offer a unified explanation for Frisian: it centralizes all instances of Ingveonic /æ/ when pre-consonantal/final /l/ or /u/ follows, and within the Ingveonic dialect continuum the innovation is found in Anglian, but only under the first conditioning factor, not the second.
Thus making Anglian intermediate between Frisian and West Saxon/Kentish. Which, oddly, fits with another scholar who sees the dialect diversity of Old English as being due to multiple migrations, with West Saxon/Kentish going back to an older and Anglian to a more recent migration from the continent:
https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/1889/344_058.pdf?sequence=…
Ooh, back-and-forth sound changes! I like those. 🙂 I also like the paper, except I need to read up on what Ringe thinks of the reflexes of PIE *ē; I remember he defends a back-and-forth sound change for this one, as does Piotr above.
Well. Ringe (2006) has a sentence on this:
In keeping with the purpose of his book, but unfortunately for my purposes, he didn’t say what that intermediate stage was and didn’t cite any source.
David: About: *TT clusters changed into the entirely new phoneme */sː/ : I thought there must have been an intermediate state *tts, which Piotr corrected to *tst (see above).
Ringe: Italic and Celtic show the same outcomes of these PIE clusters, but it seems clear that the changes were parallel developments rather than historically shared changes, if only because an intermediate stage is clearly attested in Gaulish (at a time when Latin had long completed the process).
I guess Ringe must mean “parallel developments” in Germanic as well as Italic and Celtic, but I don’t see why the intermediate stage attested in Gaulish precludes a shared development in Italic and Germanic. In this I seem to agree with Piotr’s statement above, that The development of this *tst in Germanic, Italic and Celtic is …. unlikely to have affected them independently.
Because Italic and Celtic are more closely related to each other than to Germanic. Any development shared by Italic and Germanic but not Celtic could perhaps be a borrowing that was made in darkest prehistory, but cannot be a common inheritance from a common ancestor.
I thought of that explanation, but borrowing of a feature of pronunciation implies actual contact, so is there evidence of geographical closeness of Italic and Germanic at some point?
No.
Not so fast. There are a few words in the Ringe/Tarnow data set (though I am not up to picking them out of the thicket today) that indicate contact between Proto-Italic and proto-Germanic. It is also quite probable that proto-Italic was originally spoken in Central Europe rather (or as well as) in Italy.
Thanks JC. The plot thickens! It makes sense, since Italic seems to have largely displaced non-IE languages in Italy (I don’t mean just Etruscan which seems to have been intrusive at a later date).
Where can I access the Ringe/Tarnow dataset?
Meanwhile, I recently acquired the new Beekes volume on comparative IE, but I can’t find anything there on the things discussed here! The book has an index of forms in the various languages, but not an index of topics.
Well… on the northern side of the Alps, there was the Celtic La Tène culture; before that, there was the Hallstatt culture, which is also considered Celtic, though I don’t actually know why; before that, what people spoke is anyone’s guess, but Hallstatt starts pretty early. As soon as we can say something about Germanic, its southern limit was pretty far north. From the height of the Celtic expansion there’s the Celtic kettle of Gundestrup in Denmark…
@David: But the usual story is that it was the Cimbri who went to Serbia and nicked the kettle from the Scordisci before the Romans sent them packing back to Himmerland. Gold and silver travels widely.
Of course the Cimbri may have brought some Celts back as thralls, but 1) it’s hard to prove and 2) it doesn’t really count anyway.
…You know what? I really, really should have checked Wikipedia first.
Still, maps like this still put a lot of distance between Germanic and Italic long before the Celtic expansion.
m-l: Somewhere in this thicket of papers is the raw data, but it’s not reasonably indexed. There are “updated” versions of this that aren’t based on Ringe’s professional cognacy judgments, so accept no substititutes
@ David: The Germanic- Italic parallels have been known for a long time. E.g., Krahe & Meid’s “Germanische Sprachwissenschaft” (Vol. 1, Sammlung Göschen 1969, pp 15-17) lists over 30 lexical and morphological isoglosses that are shared only by Germanic and Italic. I’m not going to list them all, but I’ll quote this (my translation):
Especially characteristic is that not only nouns, but also a number of verbs (frequently up to details of the conjugation class) is only Germanic and Italic, e.g. Latin du:cere “draw, lead” – Goth. tiuhan, OHG ziohan “draw”; Lat. cla:ma:re “shout, cry” – OHG hlamo:n “roar”; Lat. tace:re “be silent” – Goth. thahan, OHG dage:n “be silent”; Lat. sile:re “be taciturn” – Got. ana-silan “become silent”.
The similarities are of a kind that can have arisen in a still relatively undifferenciated IE; so both languages may even have shared a neighbourhood before the Proto-Germans moved to Southern Scandinavia.
JC, thanks for the diagram, but I am fearful of embarking on a search of the thicket! I guess that Ringe is the historical linguistic “anchor” in the enterprise led by mathematicians etc. From what I can gather of that type of work, it relies far too much on (a smallish amount of) vocabulary, ignoring the importance of morphology.
The lexical ones could easily, I suppose, be cases where Celtic once had the words in question and then lost them. After all, except for the rather innovative Island Celtic branch, Celtic is very poorly attested. I wonder if the morphological ones could be similarly overwritten by later Celtic changes.
There are several amazing lexical isoglosses connecting Italic with Slavic. They are only explicable through early contact:
Lat. pastor : PSl. *pastyrь ‘shepherd’ (note that Slavic uses *-tel-, not *-tor- in occupational terms).
Lat. anser : PSl. *gǫserъ ‘gander’ (note that the initial /g/ rules out borrowing from Latin, no matter how early).
Lat. secūris: PSl. *sekyra ‘axe’ (the root *sek- ‘cut’ is widespread, but the suffix *-ūr- is unusual and the chances of its appearing independently twice to form words with the same meaning in different branches are extremely low).
I’ve read somewhere that the so called “Italic” glosses in Slavic are actually Venetic.
The Veneti were Indo-European people found all over Europe – from Italy to Poland and their language may have been a separate branch of IE family, but obviously closely related to Italic.
m-l: My rule of thumb is that if Don Ringe, whose historical linguistic credentials[*] are impeccable, is not involved in the mathematical work, it may as well go into the oubliette at once. Accept, as I say, no substitutes, no matter how many mathematicians or biologists (with a bow to David M) or astrologers are involved. He can easily be wrong, but his theories are never “not even wrong”.
Part of the list. The sound-changes (all of them highly conditioned or parts of chains) are on p. 113-14 (physical pp. 55-56 of the PDF). The morphological replacements (things like “How is the medio-passive marked: suffix A, suffix B, non-morphological?”) are on pp. 117-18 (physical pp. 59-60 of the PDF). Just a few of the 370+ lexical items are on pp. 121-23 (physical pp. 63-65 of the PDF). Intervening pages map arbitrary “character numbers” like “1=absent”, “2=present” to particular languages.
[*] His Stammbaum: August Schleicher > August Leskien > Ernst Fraenkel > Werner Winter > Warren Cowgill > Donald Ringe.
The Veneti were Indo-European people found all over Europe – from Italy to Poland
Russian Wiki identifies them as Slavic (at least the Northern ones), and of course that’s how Finns or Estonians call Russians – Vene / Venelainen
Venice, I suppose, is also Russian?
If only we knew anything about all those Veneti/Venedae beyond their names…
Ooh, thanks!
I would venture a guess that Veneti means “immigrants”
One of these ancient indo-european genetics papers was just updated with new genomes a couple of days ago. It is looking very interesting for the Indo-Iranian branch.
Of the 6 samples extracted from Srubna culture sites for whom a Y-DNA hapogroup could be tested, all belonged to haplogroup R1a, and four of them to subclade R1a-Z93, which is most common among modern-day Indo-Iranians.
@David Marjanovic
ANE is an Amerindian marker in the Old World by definition. Read Raghavan et al. 2013 to see that MA-1 is closer to modern Amerindian populations than it is to any modern Eurasian population. Nothing has changed since Patterson et al. 2012. It’s an anti-Amerindian bias that keeps people from consistently referring to it according to what it really is, namely “Ancient Amerindian.”
Re: Gary Moore’s ideas, yes, they look like chance resemblances, but all long-range linguistic proposals (save may be Yeniseian-Na-Dene, although lexical support for it is weak, too) look like they are based on look-alikes or borrowings. We know what a proven first-order language family looks like, but we don’t know what a proven macrophylum looks like. Nostraticists claim that they are establishing sound laws for Nostratic but nobody’s buying it, so “regular sound correspondences” are not enough to make people convinced. They are as subjective as the look alikes. This is because comparativism does not have a strong methodology – first order language families benefit from the objective recency of divergence and the availability of ancient written attestations but the methodology of recovering linguistic kinship in the absence of those objective perks is not well-developed. Historical linguists just got spoiled by 19th century successes, which they attributed to their “methodology,” and in the 20th century they got completely diachronically lazy and switched to synchronic linguistics for the most part. However, considering that there’re now Amerindian-Eurasian whole-genome markers, search for linguistic connections between the Old World and the New World along the lines suggested by the distribution of “ANE” in the Old World should be able to intensify. And Gary Moore is doing what he can here – pulling data together for everyone to look at.
Reference, please?
Please don’t feel singled out by the following:
This whole whining about “but it’s not proven” is just ridiculous. Only creationists and historical linguists ever use that word anymore when talking about science. Science deals in varying amounts of evidence, not in proof.
That has a bunch of reasons, but it mostly boils down to “nobody else is even looking at the evidence”…
Noise is not data. Seriously, you’re talking about someone who didn’t even notice he was comparing the kentum and the satem forms of the same word to different language families.
@David Marjanovic
“Reference, please?”
I gave you one. If you don’t know yet the original paper on ancient Mal’ta DNA, just google it: “Raghavan”,
“Mal’ta” 2013. Ok, fiine, here it is: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7481/full/nature12736.html.
“This whole whining about “but it’s not proven” is just ridiculous. Only creationists and historical linguists ever use that word anymore when talking about science. Science deals in varying amounts of evidence, not in proof.”
So, you decided to lower the scientific bar as a way to differentiate science from creationism?? Sorry, you are on your own here.
“That has a bunch of reasons, but it mostly boils down to “nobody else is even looking at the evidence”
It’s an excuse. I personally looked at the evidence within one lexico-semantic class and its pretty poor (more here: http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org/2015/10/the-current-state-of-nostratic-theory-or-a-psychoanalytic-reading-of-a-russian-utopian-idea/ with a further reference). Nostraticsts can’t even reproduce the dictionary meaning of a word correctly. Everything gets edited to make it easier for them to arrive at some sound laws of their choosing. My point is a methodological one, though, namely that sound correspondences don’t guarantee that the evidence of linguistic kinship is robust. They are a world of its own and there’s a lot of subjectivity there.
“Seriously, you’re talking about someone who didn’t even notice he was comparing the kentum and the satem forms of the same word to different language families.”
Yes, amateurs make mistakes that trained linguists don’t. It’s like speaking with a foreign accent. But I’d rather have an amateur do lexical comparisons between first-order language families, than have professional linguists waste their time on that. Greenberg compromised his reputation precisely because he was chasing after long-distance ghosts for the last 20 years of his life. Professional linguists should work on methodology, theory, etc. In astronomy, amateurs have been very useful to the academic community precisely because you can’t monitor so much data out of just a few observatories.
@Gary Moore
I got interested in your attempt to link Hitt meyu ‘four’ to Narrow IE (NIE) *kwetwo:r. Currently there’re no sound laws that can justify the connection. However, we do have a few cases in IE when m- (and other sonorants) unexpectedly appear in the initial position. Arm merk ‘naked’ is sometimes considered a reflex of IE *negwno-/*negwro-: merk < megwro- (typical Armenian metathesis) < *negwro- (distant dissimilation). Same for Avest magna 'naked' (< *nagna-). In Greek, gymnos 'naked' (< *nogwno-) shows that segment-level rearrangement can affect a labiovelar as well (*kw- in NIE *kwetwo:r). This is in addition to the dissimilation m ~ n.
I don't have any similar m-examples for Hittite but Hitt does show unexpected l- in a number of words: laman 'name', lissi 'liver' (if related to NIE *yekwr-, but see Arm leard, OHG lebara).
So hypothetically Hitt meyu-, CLuw mauwa- could have arisen by dissimilation from *weiwo-. *kwetwo:r is a complex form, so it's possible that it started with PIE *kwe- to which a suffix was later added after Anatolian had split off. Lat quattuor shows an unexpected reflex of *h2, which is not attested in other NIE forms for 'four', so it's possible that PIE had *kweH- 'four'. NIE *kweH- and Anat *weiwo- is as much as we can get in terms of bringing the two disparate daughter forms together. Now, we do have the example of Arm vec' and OPruss ushts 'six' in which the expected *sw- (PIE *swek's-) is replaced by w-. There's no good explanation for this development but apparently it happened. So, again, as a single case example you could postulate the loss of k- from PIE *kweH- to arrive at *weH- in Anatolian.
But considering that the above analysis operates with models based on attested exceptions to rules rather than rules themselves and it still leaves some phonetic developments unexplained, I would just leave Hitt meyu- alone as presently unrelated to PIE *kwetwo:r.
So, you decided to lower the scientific bar as a way to differentiate science from creationism?? Sorry, you are on your own here.
Not at all. He’s saying that in science, we proportion the strength of our beliefs to the strength of the evidence for them. We don’t arbitrarily divide hypotheses into “proven” and “not proven” like a Scots jury (which, to be sure, has different objectives).
@John Cowan
“He’s saying that in science, we proportion the strength of our beliefs to the strength of the evidence for them. We don’t arbitrarily divide hypotheses into “proven” and “not proven” like a Scots jury (which, to be sure, has different objectives).”
Indo-European, Austronesian, Siouan are proven, Nostratic or Amerind or Indo-Paciifc are not proven. It’s not arbitrary at all. There’s something interesting going here, though. There’s a semantic difference between “laws” in historical linguistics and “laws” in jurisprudence. “Laws” in historical linguistics were originally modeled on “natural and physical laws” in contradistinction to man-made legal “laws”. You are trying to divorce linguistic laws from natural laws, thus lowering the bar, but then you justify this epistemological move by referring to the “laws” of jurisprudence as a poor ideal model for linguists to follow. It’s either a bad metaphor on your part, a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method, or a belief that linguistic “laws” are different from both “natural” and “legal” laws (so that they are not human-made but neither they are given in nature, but then what ARE they?). Which one is it?
I would agree, though, that there’s a moment in time when evidence is being accumulated. During this time, people assess whether there’s enough evidence to exclude alternatives, or alternatives should still be in the running for truth, and they hold their beliefs commensurate with the quality of the evidence mounted in favor of one model vs. the other. But it’s a “race” of sorts meaning that there must be a movement forward toward the goal of establishing “laws” as in “natural laws” that make a theory “proven.”
I am very far from wanting the things you think I want. We are basically on the same side, but you put things more rigidly than I can wholeheartedly agree with. Sometimes in the historical sciences (including both biology and historical linguistics), we never do accumulate enough evidence: look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messapian_language"Messapian, for instance.
But that doesn’t mean that any hypothesis is ever confirmed beyond the reach of any future refutation (which is the meaning of proven), nor does it mean that hypotheses are worthless because they are not yet accepted by all. The problem with Nostratic is bad data; the problem with Amerind is bad data compounded by bad methodology; and Indo-Pacific isn’t even a hypothesis, just a wastebasket taxon.
@John Cowan
I’m with you on that. I do sometimes come across as more rigid than others. Agree on everything you just wrote. Thanks for the Messapian link.
It’s always good when problems dissolve into sweet, sweet harmony!
Oh, Raghavan et al. (2013) is just the original paper on the genome from Mal’ta? Why didn’t you say so? I happen to have the pdf. 🙂
So, how do you interpret its figure 2, what do you make of it in the light of the recent papers on Neolithic European and Bronze Age Eurasian genetics, and what do you mean by “closer”?
What… no. Nothing can be proved. I can’t even prove I’m not the solipsist, and I’m pretty sure you can’t either. Certainty, as John Cowan explained, comes in degrees; only the Sith deal in absolutes… and the creationists… and far too many historical linguists.
Greenberg compromised his reputation because he used “mass comparison”, which is fine for proposing hypotheses, but incapable of testing them. If he had used the comparative method instead, he’d have proposed fewer hypotheses, but his reputation would be a lot better now.
How does it help to bring in people who not merely aren’t professionals, but haven’t learned the comparative method to begin with (whether in university courses or on their own)?
What – not on actual phylogenetic hypotheses?
I already linked to a much more parsimonious explanation of *kʷetwóres ~ *kʷétwores.
Oh no, that does not follow. There are tons of cases of “s mobile”, but this never extends to *k to the best of my knowledge; worse, you’re quietly implying that PIE didn’t have a phoneme /kʷ/, only a consonant cluster /kw/ – when in fact there’s pretty good evidence that it had both, and that it had /kʷ/ in the “4” word.
It’s clinal. Is Afro-Asiatic “proven” or “not proven”? Is Siouan-Catawban? Is Siouan-Catawban-Yuchi? Is Sino-Tibetan? Is Dené-Caucasian (pdf on comparative morphology here)? Is Totozoquean? Is Toto-Zoque-Chitimacha? Is Indo-Iranian? Is Balto-Slavic? Is Italo-Celtic? Drawing a line through this continuum is arbitrary; it can’t help being arbitrary.
Neither nor. We’re divorcing natural laws from the rather useless concept of proof.
(But then, I wouldn’t speak of natural laws outside of relativity and quantum physics anyway; those elsewhere all just follow from them.)
…That’s not Science Theory As We Know It. *headshake*
Finally:
That post is about something quite different: the aftereffects of the Iron Curtain in historical linguistics (very, very similar to those I see in paleobiology). The Russians – I overgeneralize only slightly – have no money for international journals or to go to international conferences (never mind hosting international conferences!), so they publish in their inbred in-house journals that apparently aren’t even properly peer-reviewed (peer review being a quite recent development in the West, after all). On top of that, many of them (more so in Moscow, less so in St. Petersburg, it seems – another leftover cultural divide…) don’t know English well enough that reading international literature or going to conferences would do them any good. Conversely, almost nobody in the West can so much as read Russian, so the institutions don’t carry Russian in-house journals in the first place. And never the twain shall meet, even before politicians with a persecution complex descend upon the situation. It’s quite horrible.
Rant over, I’m off to bed.
@David Marjanovic
“what do you mean by “closer”?
Shared drift as measured by f3 stats. See Fig. 1c in Raghavan.
“what do you make of it in the light of the recent papers on Neolithic European and Bronze Age Eurasian genetics.”
The ANE gradient decreases from east to west from north to south and from “refugia areas” (such as the Caucasus) to “spread zones.” It’s present all over West Eurasia, including Basques, and I think it’s Paleolithic heritage in Basques. I think ANE back migrated to South Siberia from the steppe or the Caucasus area (along with mtDNA X2 lineage) during the Bronze Age.
” Nothing can be proved. I can’t even prove I’m not the solipsist, and I’m pretty sure you can’t either. Certainty, as John Cowan explained, comes in degrees;”
No, it doesn’t come in degrees. There’s a time factor involved in making hypotheses proven or falsified (as I explained above), but there’s no way around the notion of “proof,” be it the social or the natural sciences.
“Greenberg compromised his reputation because he used “mass comparison”, which is fine for proposing hypotheses, but incapable of testing them. If he had used the comparative method instead, he’d have proposed fewer hypotheses, but his reputation would be a lot better now.
How does it help to bring in people who not merely aren’t professionals, but haven’t learned the comparative method to begin with…”
An answer to your question is in your own statement: amateurs can do ‘mass comparison’ and professionals should R&D the comparative method. And they should exchange results with each other.
“I already linked to a much more parsimonious explanation of *kʷetwóres ~ *kʷétwores.”
I don’t buy etymologies that “explain” one etymon from a whole lexico-semantic class (numerals in this case) by pointing to some kind of notion that lies outside of that class (as in an arbitrary verbal root, as in *mei- ‘measure’ for Hitt meyu- or *kwet- ‘group in pairs’). Numerals, kinship terms, etc. form systems and etymologizing individual items can only come from an understanding how these classes of words evolved as systems.
“There are tons of cases of “s mobile”, but this never extends to *k to the best of my knowledge.”
I’m not sure it’s an s-mobile case here, and the whole phenomenon is still a bit enigmatic… Some authors (G & I) reconstruct a single, compact phoneme *sw- in the form for ‘six’. But in any case, I was just thinking through Moore’s hypothesis. It’s apriori attractive because it’s the most parsimonious of all: if meyu and *kwetwo:r are related, then the problem is solved. I just couldn’t find enough evidence to support it.
I also happen to think that PIE may have had a palatolabiovelar phoneme that can account for such forms as Skrt asva vs. lat equus/Gk hippos ‘horse’; Gk the:ros vs. Slav *zve:ri ‘beast’.
“It’s clinal. Is Afro-Asiatic “proven” or “not proven”? ”
Proven. In some of your other example it’s again a time factor that needs to be factored in. But all of them need to be tested in terms of “proof” and be open to be falsified and alternative hypotheses advanced in their stead if needed. The Italo-Celtic node is a special case because it’s a problem internal to a proven language family. It is interesting (in the light of recent ancient DNA data, to your earlier point) that the only two proven nodes downstream from the proven IE node are the easternmost Balto-Slavic and the Indo-Iranian nodes.
“That’s not Science Theory As We Know It.”
This is nonsense to me. Sorry.
“That post is about something quite different…”
yes, a more relevant reference is in the bottom of the post (http://www.kunstkamera.ru/index/science/books/books/algebra_rodstva_11/).
David: The Russians – I overgeneralize only slightly – have no money for international journals or to go to international conferences
I have been more or less regularly attending a major international conference (ICHL) for a number of years and the presenters include more and more linguists from Russia and other countries previously behind the Iron Curtain. A good sign!
German Dziebel: But I’d rather have an amateur do lexical comparisons between first-order language families, than have professional linguists waste their time on that. … In astronomy, amateurs have been very useful to the academic community precisely because you can’t monitor so much data out of just a few observatories.
I would not compare those “amateur linguists” to “amateur astronomers”. Some of the latter, armed with limited equipment (and some relevant knowledge of astronomy), have indeed contributed data to the professionals because they have been able to devote time and energy to long term, consistent observations while the professionals were busy with different agendas, many of them requiring extremely sophisticated equipment. In this respect the amateurs are acting like unpaid assistants to the professionals, who appreciate their contributions. An amateur astronomer eager to contribute to Flat Earth or Hollow Earth studies would not re similarly appreciated by professionals.
By amateur linguists I don’t mean people like some of the Hatters who are extremely knowledgeable about linguistics. Professionals are those who are expected to do research, present at conferences, etc where their findings and opinions will be tested by “peers”. Unfortunately it does not always mean that they are more knowledgeable about some aspects of the discipline. But most “amateur historical linguists” start basically from scratch, with no training and sometimes an axe to grind. As an example, a few years ago I stumbled across a website run by a Spanish retired officer who was engaged in proving to his own satisfaction that Spanish was derived from Basque rather than from Latin. The proof? words such as “comandante”. So gathering data in the absence of some relevant qualifications (however acquired, but not a priori contradicting those of the professionals) is often a waste of everybody’s time and energy if the data turned out to be unreliable or even unusable for various reasons.
Professional linguists should work on methodology, theory, etc.
The accepted methods in historical linguistics were established and refined over 150 years or so, through the study of actual documents in the various languages and extrapolation from the actual data towards reconstruction of the common ancestor (and intermediate stages). Concentrating on methodology and theory with less and less attention to actual (not made up) data has not worked very well in “synchronic linguistics”, especially syntax.
Greenberg compromised his reputation precisely because he was chasing after long-distance ghosts for the last 20 years of his life.
Theoretically, the methods for “long-range comparison” should be the same as for “short range”, but working in first-order families (eg Romance, Celtic) where resemblances are obvious is not the best training for working in second-order (eg IE) and even potentially third-order (eg Nostratic) groups. First-order families show resemblances in both vocabulary and morphological features which are usually obvious even to untrained persons: a French speaker finds a lot that is familiar (though not identical) in Spanish or Italian, but hardly anything recognizable in German or Russian apart from a few identical loanwords. Greenberg attempted to go almost directly from first to nth order, collecting a lot of vocabulary and a few pronouns (and making a lot of mistakes while doing so). Resemblant vocabulary even in closely related languages can be misleading if the words are not analyzed and if their participation in paradigms (such as sets of verb forms) is ignored.
Greenberg should have used the comparative method
The comparative method is a method of reconstruction of the common ancestor and only secondarily a method of confirming (or infirming) a proposed genetic classification. It works best when used with closely related languages, since classification (at least in general terms) is not a problem (eg one might argue about the exact degree of relationship between some Italian or German dialects, but not about the fact that they are Italian or German). One can collect huge amounts of data in hundreds of not fully classified languages, but even if those data can be considered reliable, using the comparative method to reconstruct their potential common ancestor (impossible if the languages are not yet classified) in order to classify them better would be an insurmountable task, even if one’s intuitions about their relationships (or other linguists’ classifications) could be assumed to be correct.
Greenberg’s Amerind classification
By now everyone knows that except for Eskimo and Na-Dene (basically Athapaskan), ALL of the other languages of North and South America are “Amerind” according to Greenberg. Of course Amerind is not a giant melting pot, there are many families and subfamilies listed under that name. Greenberg recognized that he had basically accepted current classifications and just put them together, but he disagreed with a few. Here are a few comments about his North American classification (reprinted in Wikipedia), specifically for Western North America:
– in California the groups “Penutian” and “Hokan” are put together; I have been working with Penutian languages for years and I can assure you that these two groups are VERY different from each other. The only reason they are there together is that since they are both major families of California, for some years there was an annual meeting called the “Hokan-Penutian conference”, which accepted papers about the two families without any suggestion that the languages were at all related. One might as well have heard of a conference in Russia called “Slavic-Caucasian” and from there conclude the two groups had a common ancestor.
– Another large group is Uto-Aztecan (with languages in the US and Mexico); this group was originally classified with another, much smaller group in the SW US called Tanoan, and Sapir put them together as “Aztec-Tanoan”, a classification that is now disputed (rightly in my opinion). Later, Uto-Aztecan was considered by Swadesh (a well-known “lumper”) to belong to a larger “Macro-Penutian” group. I think this potential grouping has a lot of merit although much more work is needed to substantiate (or not) the relationship. But Greenberg considers “Hokan-Penutian” and “Aztec-Tanoan” as belonging to two distinct major subclassifications of “Amerind”.
– As for Zuni, a neighbour (though unrelated) of “Tanoan”, Greenberg places it together within “Penutian”, following an older article which was actually the result of a hoax.
Together with the numerous errors of various kinds in the published data, is it any wonder that specialists in Amerindian (NOT “Amerind”) languages do not take Greenberg’s classification seriously?
@Marie-Lucie
“I would not compare those “amateur linguists” to “amateur astronomers”.”
Some amateur astronomers, just like amateur linguists, are knowledgeable, others are not. There’s no difference here. Professional astronomers seem to be better than professional linguists in terms of their ability to utilize the amateur community to advance science. Professional linguists tend to stare at amateurs as if the latter were exotic animals and to gloat at their “mistakes.” Professional linguists tend to wade through thousands of languages and tens of thousands of forms on their own and its hard to marry quantity with quality. Consequently, currently none of the megaphyla have a proven status despite decades of research.
“The accepted methods in historical linguistics were established and refined over 150 years or so,”
I would emphatically disagree. Those methods need to evolve and one of the reasons for long-range failures is precisely because the methodology (which as you rightly point out should be the same as that used to prove first-order language families) is weak and antiquated. You can’t easily see methodological flaws in the study of first-order families because of the sheer amount of valid cognates that haven’t really changed much. But those very methodological flaws come out into the open in long-range comparisons. The major flaw (and I wrote several articles in Russian to justify this critique for Indo-European languages) is that cognate sets are poorly defined and the criteria for the inclusion/exclusion of items into a cognate set are subjective. (Similarity in sound and meaning is not an objective criterion to group items into a valid cognate set as they are historically variable.) Sound laws and reconstructions that derive from cognate set grouping procedures are hence incomplete and sometimes wrong. When there’s a need to provide an etymology for a reconstructed etymon, two look-alike etymons are typically grabbed and forced into a comparison. (As in Hitt meyu- vs. NIE *mei- ‘measure’). One of them is used a source for the other one. Some linguists accept those etymologies, others reject them. Then another etymology based on look-alikes is proposed and so on and so forth for decades and decades. As a result, there are a lot of forms without good etymologies, forms that are declared isolates, presumably “local” isoglosses, forms with phonological anomalies, etc. Whole lexico-semantic classes (such as Indo-European numerals or kinship terms) are basically left without good etymologies.
The implications of those methodological flaws are likely considerable. Just one example: PIE *krd- ‘heart’ shows up as *srudice in Slavic and sirdis in Lithuanian. So, the velar is presumably palatovelar (PIE *k’rd-) because the so-called satem languages (named so precisely because they turn up palatals where Greek, Latin, etc. have plain velars) show s- and not k-. But then there’s another cognate set represented, e.g., by Gk rhadix and Lat radix ‘root’. The Greek form presupposes *s (< *sradiks), which is presumably not the same /s/ as the satem /s/ < PIE *k' but PIE spirant *s. But now the full morphology of this root is unmistakably the same as the full morphology of Slav *srudice and the meanings are fully compatible ('heart', 'middle', 'core', 'root'). So, if we put the two conventional sets together and treat it as one single cognate (super)set, the reconstruction will be radically (pun intended) different.
Other examples can also be adduced to show that satem *s and PIE * is one and the same PIE phoneme. And not two, as the methodology devised 150 years ago wants us to believe! That's where we need professional linguists. At the same time, the searching for potential Eskimo-Khoisan parallels can be done by a host of amateurs.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on your critique of lumping efforts in the New World. And thanks for your "insider" perspective on that!
Went to German Dziebel’s links and found on his page this interesting exchange:
Alexei Kassian:
14.01.2015 в 1:07
> Вы правы, я не очень связан с российской наукой
Герман, извините, но вы тут развели такую активность по защите А.Клесова, что все-таки надо бы и вас представить публике. Я по долгу службы знаю, кто вы такой, а коллеги, наверное, нет.
Вы находитесь в пограничной зоне между лингво-фриком и любителем. Т.е. иногда вы делаете что-то, что пригождается в научной работе (я видел ссылки на вашу д/б терминов родства), хотя обычно это всё бесполезное и фрическое.
Несколько лет назад вы пытались овладеть сравнительно-историческим языкознанием. Оказалось, что быстро это ну никак не получается, увы.
Я сейчас заглянул на ваш сайт и увидел, что вы сдвинулись в область междисциплинарных исследований (геногеография, лингвистика, археология). Это понятное желание, т.к. для междисциплинарных исследований вроде как требуются менее глубокие знания.
Но это обманчивое впечатление, Герман. Для современных междисциплинарных исследований нужно соавторов классных специалистов из нескольких областей, а не надерганные цитаты из разрозненных публикаций.
> You’re right, I am not really connected with the Russian science
German, I’m sorry, but you became so active in defense of A.Klesov that one needs to introduce you to the public. By work, I know who you are, but the colleagues probably do not.
You are in the border zone between linguistic freak and an amateur. That is, sometimes you are doing something which comes in handy for scientific work (I’ve seen references to your database of kinship terms), but usually it’s all useless and freaky.
A few years ago, you tried to master comparative linguistics. It turned out that it’s not possible to do it quickly, alas.
Now I looked at your website and see that you have moved to interdisciplinary research (genogeography, linguistics, archeology). It is an understandable desire, because interdisciplinary studies probably require less profound knowledge.
But it is misleading, German. For modern multi-disciplinary research, it is necessary to have as co-authors experts from several areas, it is not sufficient to copy-paste quotes from disparate publications.
Reading further, I learned that German Dziebel is founder of a new science of idenetics (иденетика), later renamed to gignetics (гигнетика).
I haven’t been able to determine the exact subject of this new science, but apparently both idenetics and gignetics reach conclusion that humankind originates from North America.
Definition of idenetics from 2001 book by German Dziebel is quite baffling:
Иденетика – область системных эмпирических исследований поведения биологических особей как взаимных знаков (сообщающихся коммуникантов). Строящаяся на теоретическом и практическом материале этнолингвистики, когнитивной антропологии, семиотики и этносоциологии родства, она призвана исследовать процесс идентификации системой (человеком, социумом) коммуникативно-активных элементов окружающей ее социальной и природной среды. Под «коммуникативно-активными элементами» подразумеваются не только человеческие особи, но и потенциально любой действительный или воображаемый объект, если он сообщает субъекту свойство или сознание активности в отношении себе подобных.
Idenetics – the area of systematic empirical studies of the behavior of biological individuals as the mutual characters (communicating communicants). Built on a theoretical and practical material of ethno-linguistics, cognitive anthropology, semiotics and ethno-sociology of kinship, it studies the process of the identification by the system (human or society) of communicative and active elements of the surrounding social and natural environment. “Communicative-active elements” refer not only to the human individuals, but potentially to any real or imaginary objects, if they assign to the subject a property or consciousness of activity in relation to their own kind.
@SFReader
I’m probably the least freakish of all scholars. Alexei Kassian is an ignorant individual with homemade credentials splitting time between going through scientists’ dirty laundry and publishing something about the Hittite language. His racist social media activity in Russia has recently caused some of his colleagues to campaign for his dismissal from a teaching position at the RGGU in Moscow. He is an example of how freaks and amateurs, under the right circumstances, can become associated with academic institutions. BTW, further up there Kassian claimed that my father paid to have my Russian book published and also paid for my education at Stanford University. It’s just so funny it made me cry.
Thanks for bringing it up, though, because Alexei Kassian is a good example supporting my point that it’s not so easy to tease apart freaks, amateurs and professionals. But may I ask you: why did you decide to put on a pseudonym, dig through my website and then translate a bizarre quote without even including my response to it?
It gets even better!
Later in the thread, Kassian accuses A.Klesov (defended by German Dziebel) of discovering new hominid species – rusanthropus which lived on Russian plain circa 700 000 before presen.
Rusanthropus is claimed to be the direct ancestor of Russian nation!
@@SFReader
I would recommend that you translate my whole book into English and send it to me for corrections. Your English is somewhat misleading.
@SFReader
if you read carefully, you’ll notice that I never defended Klyosov, although he was right about molecular dating and other Russian scholars, who consider Klyosov a pseudoscientist, were wrong.
I was defending the ethics of academic debates.
But keep trolling the thread…
“Just because the world’s biggest fool says it’s raining, doesn’t mean the sun is shining.” (If this is not also a Russian proverb, it certainly should be). However, one would do well to check.
@John Cowan
It’s not an English “proverb” either, you fool! 🙂
Quite right, it’s not. But I use it anyway.
I knew of Anatole Klesov/Klyosov back in 1972 when he and I. V. Berezin published a paper entitled “Use of integrated rate equations for the determination of the kinetic constants of enzyme reactions” in Biokhimiya 37, 170-183 (cited 36 times, including by me in 1975). That and his other papers in biochemistry are perfectly respectable (albeit not very exciting) pieces of work, and he is certainly not a pseudoscientist, at least so far as biochemistry is concerned. Until today I didn’t know of his work in dating fossils, and maybe he has strayed away from his real expertise.
@Athel Cornish-Bowden
Yes, that’s the Klyosov we are talking about. Here’s the scoop. He finished his academic career, worked for biotech in Boston (where I met him) and then got interested in molecular genealogies and the dating of divergence of molecular lineages (not fossils but Y-DNA). This became his hobby, but a hobby related to his primary area of expertise. Over the years he developed a new science called “DNA Genealogy,” which attracted a motley crew of science hobbyists in Russia (but no one in the U.S.), branched into archaeology, linguistics and other social scientific disciplines, founded a journal called “Advances in Anthropology,” published books on the origins of everybody from Slavs to all of modern humans, launched a Y-DNA sequencing lab in St. Petersburg and became a media personality in Russia brandishing his Harvard credentials and upsetting some established paradigms of thinking developed by academic scholars working in the social sciences and humanities. (E.g., his DNA-Genealogy showed that there was no significant influx of immigrants from Scandinavia in the 9-10th centuries A.D. that could justify the theory of the Western (“normanist”) origin of the Russian state.
Last year, a team of academic scholars in Russia (population geneticists, archaeologists, craniologists and some linguists) published a letter in a web journal decrying Klyosov’s activity (outside of biochemistry) as “pseudoscience.” The letter was accompanied by a series of web posts by a Russian-born journalist Lebedev (based in Boston) entitled “Klyosov as a Science Porn Star” in which claims were made that Klyosov cooked up his Harvard credentials and earned too much money working for biotech. (The latter compromised him even more than the former in the eyes of financially insecure Russian academics.)
So, a scuffle began. Klyosov defended himself out of a web property called Pereformat.ru, and I, in tandem with a head of biology lab in one of Moscow institutes, criticized the academic team for bad ethics, biases against Klyosov and poorly built arguments.
The bad news for the Russian academic team is that Klyosov was indeed right about the mutation rate on Y-DNA lineages, and this had direct implications for the models of migrations of Slavic- and Indo-European-speaking populations. A Stanford team has recently revised the “molecular clock” first advanced by another Russian scholar, Lev Zhivotovsky (with whom I enjoyed a number of tasty lunches and thoughtful conversations when I was at Stanford), and the new “clock” is very close to what Klyosov proposed some 10 years ago.
The bad news for Klyosov is that nobody is giving him any credit and that his attempt to create a new science of everything in prehistory (“DNA-Genealogy”) faces rejection even from such balanced scholars as myself. 🙂
Thanks for digging that stuff up, SFReader, it makes things much clearer.
@languagehat
So, instead of deleting the spam from an anonymous troll, SFReader, you acquired a greater awareness of something?
SFReader is not an anonymous troll, and the very fact that you feel entitled to characterize someone that way just because they disagree with you is telling.
Please don’t generalize your distaste for pseudonymity to the Internet in general, German Valentinovich. A lot of people have a very long presence here, and it would be simply contrary to fact to call them anonymous trolls.
@minus273
It’s a fact that SFReader, at least in this thread, is an anonymous troll. Now you are telling me that s/he’s been a troll for a while. And this somehow gives him or her a lifelong right to not be referred to as such by a person with scientific credentials, a real name and meaningful contributions to the conversation.
You have a right to refer to anyone by whatever insulting terms you like, and we have a right to judge you on that basis. Even if you have scientific credentials.
@languagehat
Here’s a Wiki definition of a “troll”: In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion,[3]
SFReader is a perfect example of a troll. No insults on my part. S/he’s just illustrating a dictionary entry.
Can we now please return to the topic of this thread? Mrs. Tarpent (if I may), do you have any thoughts on my last post re: comparativist methodology?
A troll in the usual sense is someone who enters an online discussion forum with posts designed to infuriate the regular participants and create drama, especially by reiterating a absurd standpoint and refusing to accept arguments to the contrary.
SFReader does not do that. Everybody but you knows that because we are regular participants.
Oh, sorry, I forgot to refresh before I posted. Well, since you know what a troll is already, you should be able to judge who the troll is by the amount of disruption and emotional response generated by the various posts in this thread.
I haven’t even have time to properly read the latest comments. Just so much for the moment:
1) Semantic fields should be studied as integrated systems – yes, generally, I agree, but there are exceptions. “40” in Russian is not remotely like “20, 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90” (which are all perfectly regular, as they are – together with “40” – in other Slavic languages); it’s a completely different word that used to designate a unit.
2) Using a pseudonym is orthogonal to being a troll. To claim otherwise bespeaks a Mark-Zuckerberg-level failure to think things through.
@Lars
“A troll in the usual sense is someone who enters an online discussion forum with posts designed to infuriate the regular participants and create drama, especially by reiterating a absurd standpoint and refusing to accept arguments to the contrary.”
This is an example of an absurd standpoint. I gave you a definition of a “troll” from a principal web source. You countered with a definition of your own making. The Wiki definition says nothing about a “regular” participant. Trolls can get regular if they are not banned. Who cares if a participant is regular. It’s more important if s/he is credentialized, curious, ethical, good listener, etc. SFReader interrupted a discussion (fact) by attempting to compromise a participant (inflammatory, deliberate, intentional) and shift it from a discussion about languages to a discussion about a participant and still another person who is not even part of this conversation or this topic (biochemist Klyosov).
And languagehat should have thanked me, and not SFReader, for making a full account of the Klesov controversy openly and freely available in one place (my own website). Instead he chose to thank a troll.
@David Marjanovic
“Semantic fields should be studied as integrated systems – yes, generally, I agree, but there are exceptions. “40″ in Russian is not remotely like “20, 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90″ (which are all perfectly regular, as they are – together with “40″ – in other Slavic languages); it’s a completely different word that used to designate a unit.”
It a valid counterpoint and counterexample.
The notion that SFReader is a troll is absurd. And it’s ironic that anyone claiming such linguistic expertise would be unable to figure out the meaning of “troll.”
@Brett
“The notion that SFReader is a troll is absurd.”
Why is it absurd?
“unable to figure out the meaning of “troll.””
It’s been figured out. You are just posting gibberish.
a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people,posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion,[3]
Yet there was no discord until your arrival. No one is inflamed but you. The messages you don’t like are not extraneous nor off-topic, and you don’t have to believe me, our host has already told you so. Finally, no one else has provided an emotional response, nor has normal on-topic discussion been disrupted. Nor is it likely to be.
It’s not just that SFReader has been here for years and we know his strengths and weaknesses (he’s obviously not the perfect commenter, but who is?). It’s that all of us are singing the same tune here about him except you. Yet this tells you nothing. In short, the evidence is against you. Time to re-evaluate your theory.
@John Cowan
You are wrong and here’s why.
“Yet there was no discord until your arrival.”
Discord emerged only after SF Reader’s posts. Before it was a discussion. A discussion presupposes disagreements, otherwise what’s the point of debating.
“No one is inflamed but you.”
SFReader’s posts were inflammatory. This doesn’t mean that I got inflamed. I just had all the reasons to.
“The messages you don’t like are not extraneous nor off-topic.”
They were off-topic. Nothing in SFReader’s posts had anything to do with what David Marjanovic, Marie-Lucie and I were talking about. Or with what Gary Moore posted earlier (which attracted my attention).
“The messages you don’t like are not extraneous nor off-topic.”
People’s opinions are not evidence. You seem to be living on some kind of anti-science planet.
“Time to re-evaluate your theory.”
Why? It’s being proved (sic!) with every post. Since SFReader’s posts we are only talking about him and his posts. That’s a troll’s ultimate goal. And I’m willing to let it roll so you can see it with your own eyes.
Troll kalla mik
trungl sjǫtrungnis,
auðsug jǫtuns,
élsólar bǫl,
vilsinn vǫlu,
vǫrð nafjarðar,
hvélsveg himins –
hvat’s troll nema þat?
They call me a troll,
moon of the earth-Hrungnir
wealth sucker of the giant,
destroyer of the storm-sun
beloved follower of the seeress,
guardian of the “nafjord”
swallower of the wheel of heaven.
What’s a troll if not that?
GD: Mrs. Tarpent (if I may)
Please don’t..
GD: back to comparative linguistics:
PIE *krd- ‘heart’ shows up as *srudice in Slavic and sirdis in Lithuanian. So, the velar is presumably palatovelar (PIE *k’rd-) because the so-called satem languages (named so precisely because they turn up palatals where Greek, Latin, etc. have plain velars) show s- and not k-.
Indeed.
then there’s another cognate set represented, e.g., by Gk rhadix and Lat radix ‘root’. The Greek form presupposes *s (< *sradiks), which is presumably not the same /s/ as the satem /s/ < PIE *k' but PIE spirant *s.
I don’t have any expertise on Greek anything, but it seems to me that Greek only admits “rh” as word initial, not plain “r”, or am I wrong? And this is not a cluster, but an aspirate (should be written with superscript h if possible with the font). So even if all or most occurrences of Greek “h” derive from PIE *s, that does not mean that “rh” is actually *hr, itself from *sr. I think there are other languages pointing to reconstructable PIE *sr, eg the ancestor of English stream. But rhad-iks corresponds to English root, not “*stroot”.
Sorry I am not competent to go any further.
the searching for potential Eskimo-Khoisan parallels can be done by a host of amateurs
We need well-trained people familiar with many languages and with the kinds of strange things that can happen, not a host of amateurs who will look for lookalikes/meanalikes and find them in all the wrong places.
@German, thanks for your opinion, but you seem to be in a minority with it. A minority of one. If that doesn’t make a bell ring, I have a shorter version:
NO U!
@Lars, “but you seem to be in a minority with it.”
This is easy to explain: SFReader attacked only me. Had he tried to compromise everybody, he would have been a minority, not me. The problem is that the rest of you are supporting his unethical behavior only because he’s been around for a while. This is just forum politics. But it’d be great to see sort of objectivity and integrity here.
@Marie-Lucie
r is indeed aspirated in the beginning but also in the middle (rrh) of Greek words as in diarrhea.” This means that *s > hr in Greek and not *s > r as it happened in Latin (radix) where *s is always lost in the onset of a word before sonorants. But we do need to check the hypothesis against other phonetic environments. And we indeed find support for it in Gk hippos ‘horse’ (Lat equus), which I compare not just with Skrt asva but also with Skrt sapho- ‘hoof’ (Slav kopyto, with an ending just like in Gk hipotes). Not only do we have Gk h ~ Satem *s again, but also centum kw > p in Satem languages! Not only does the 19th century belief in satem languages disappears under a 21 century methodological scrutiny, but so does the 19th century belief in kentum languages! Instead, what we have is a positional conversion of velars into palatalovelars or into labiovelars on the PIE level (!) in response on some – admittedly still poorly understood – suprasegmental pressures that result in empirically attested doublets (comp. the mobility of aspiration in Gk thriks vs. trikhos ‘hair’). Now it becomes clear why even some Anatolian languages (Luwian) show satemization signs (HLuw azuwa ‘horse’), while even such heavily satemized languages as Slavic often show centum-like reflexes in forms where Sanskrit has a satem /s/ (kopyto ‘hoof’ above next to Skrt sapha-).
I obviously have other examples to support both developments, but for it suffices to say that the methodological flaw that I’m correcting is that a generative, etymological connection has to be “baked” into the cognate set composition and not added after a cognate set had already been defined on the basis of subjective and ahistorical “similarity in sound and meaning” assumptions. The “old” approach leaves forms without good etymologies and generates many phonological anomalies (-h- in Skrt sapha- or s in Skrt asva), which linguists armed with 19th century methods tend to dance around inventing ad hoc developments to explain them.
“We need well-trained people familiar with many languages and with the kinds of strange things that can happen, not a host of amateurs who will look for lookalikes/meanalikes and find them in all the wrong places.”
Yes, I agree that some level of linguistic sophistication is required from amateurs to make them useful to the academic linguistic community (just like some genome bloggers know enough about genes and stats to make professional geneticists visit their websites and read their posts and look at their PCAs). I guess my thoughts on this matter were inspired by an experience in Merritt Ruhlen’s class at Stanford where he showed Greenberg’s method of multilateral comparison. And I thought: geez, you don’t have to be a trained linguist to do it, but you do have to have a lot of passion for the linguistic material. 🙂
So why do you have both aśva- and śapha- in Skt?
I guess my thoughts on this matter were inspired by an experience in Merritt Ruhlen’s class at Stanford where he showed Greenberg’s method of multilateral comparison. And I thought: geez, you don’t have to be a trained linguist to do it, but you do have to have a lot of passion for the linguistic material.
That accounts for a great deal. Yes, multilateral comparison is easy enough. But it’s also useless as a method of choosing between hypotheses. At most it can generate hypotheses to work on, but it also generates a vast amount of junk hypotheses.
The part which caused a strong emotional reaction in myself, German, was your post about poor Kassian snagged by the ugly flamewars, losing grant support, and threatened with loss of his academic position – and about your enthusiastic support for all these despicable developments. My gut reaction is that whenever there is such a campaign of concerted denunciations to the real-world employers, then it may be too dangerous to stay involved, for anyone can become the next target. It is very emotionally distressing, and it was you, German, who brought it up, and who made me break with my long tradition of posting at LH openly, and to switch to an anon handle 🙁
@minus273
I honestly don’t fully know yet. That’s why I wrote “admittedly still poorly understood.”
Note that Avestan has aspa ‘horse’ which is an even more literal match for Skrt sapha- ‘hoof’. I would re-write Skrt sapha- as *sahpa- (perceptually likely identical) to align it with asva. The simplest explanation is that PIndAr *saskwo- dissimilated rightwards into asva and leftwards into sapha- in Indic. But I’m not sure if those were indeed /s/.
In the light of Skrt sapha-, the always-problematic geminated -pp- in Gk hippos can be understood as -pp- < *-hp- as in *hihpos < *hihkwos.
We need to pull in more material and look at a bigger picture. A small methodological change yields a butterfly effect across the whole corpus. But first thing first: build a cognate set correctly, build another one, then another one, etc., then derive a correct sound law from them. Just don't be scared by a doublet. Doublets happen, we just need to explain them phonetically.
@John Cowan
“Yes, multilateral comparison is easy enough. But it’s also useless as a method of choosing between hypotheses. At most it can generate hypotheses to work on, but it also generates a vast amount of junk hypotheses.”
You are right. That’s why I think amateurs could generate hypotheses, while professionals could test them but also work on methodologies, etc, to ultimately make amateurs more effective. It was just sad to see such competent and rigorous people as Joe and Merritt get mired in hypothesis generation using a massive amount of often opaque and intricate material, while trying to do hypothesis testing and proving at the same time.
It’s still quite hard to understand. For example, why is what you write as s pronounced as ś when it corresponds to Greek k‘s and as s when it corresponds to Greek aitches?
GD: I guess my thoughts on this matter were inspired by an experience in Merritt Ruhlen’s class at Stanford where he showed Greenberg’s method of multilateral comparison.
I second JC’s comment That accounts for a great deal.
And I thought: geez, you don’t have to be a trained linguist to do it
That’s exactly the attitude Ruhlen tries to foster (thereby downgrading the work of linguists) in his book on the origins of language (a misleading title). He takes the reader through some (carefully chosen) material, adding here and there “linguists know that (such and such a rule applies)”, something the reader could not possibly have thought up, and ends up saying “See? you don’t have to have studied all those languages, you can do better than those old fuddy-duddies!” (or words to that effect). His approach reminds me of what adults do when they are playing a game with small children and arrange to let them win.
amateurs could generate hypotheses, while professionals could test them but also work on methodologies, etc, to ultimately make amateurs more effective
This reminds me of Ives Goddard’s reply to someone asking him about why he was not debating Greenberg (about Language in the Americas): something like “Geographers don’t feel compelled to debate the Flat Earth Society”.
such competent and rigorous people as Joe and Merritt
Perhaps they appeared that way to students who did not know any better. “Rigorous” is not a term I would associate with either of them. (See for instance my comment on Greenberg’s Amerind subclassification in this thread a short while ago).
That said, I agree with some of Greenberg’s criticisms about the state of historical linguistic methods, but he seems to have confused the situation among some (not all, as he suggests) linguists dealing with Amerindian (NOT “Amerind”) languages (former students of Mary Haas in particular) with the state of historical linguistics in general. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with the traditional (IE-inspired) methods, except that they are often misunderstood and oversimplified (eg by the above-mentioned linguists). Reliance on “cognate sets” (dealing with lexical items only) while ignoring morphology is a major fault.
But then there’s another cognate set represented, e.g., by Gk rhadix and Lat radix ‘root’. The Greek form presupposes *s (< *sradiks)
It doesn’t, because all initial rs in Greek are written as aspirated (or voiceless — whatever exactly ῥ stood for). In this case there is plenty of evidence (including English wort) that it’s actually from PIE *wr-.
@Marie-Lucie
“I second JC’s comment That accounts for a great deal.”
I guess I didn’t understand what JC means and now what you mean by that. I learned linguistics not from Merritt. But I did talk to Greenberg quite a bit and took Merritt’s class to have a first-hand knowledge of the way they worked. And I agree with you that Greenberg made some good criticisms of the comparative method.
“This reminds me of Ives Goddard’s reply to someone asking him about why he was not debating Greenberg (about Language in the Americas): something like “Geographers don’t feel compelled to debate the Flat Earth Society”.”
This varies by linguist. LC debated them quite a bit.
“Rigorous” is not a term I would associate with either of them. (See for instance my comment on Greenberg’s Amerind subclassification in this thread a short while ago).”
My choice of a descriptor may not be right. But Greenberg made a significant contribution to the study of typology, so I presume he was rigorous or not depending on the kind of data and methodology he worked with. Ruhlen has pretty good logical thinking (and he may have had a math degree before switching to linguistics).
@TR
“In this case there is plenty of evidence (including English wort) that it’s actually from PIE *wr-.”
No, you are wrong methodologically. You artificially split cognate sets into partial ones and arrive at wrong reconstructions. That’s my whole point.
““This reminds me of Ives Goddard’s reply to someone asking him about why he was not debating Greenberg (about Language in the Americas): something like “Geographers don’t feel compelled to debate the Flat Earth Society”.”
This varies by linguist. LC debated them quite a bit.”
I would even say that Goddard debated a bit too little and LC debated a bit too much.
Then I don’t understand your point. What is gained by discarding a perfectly good cognate set like this one, based on close semantic relationship and regular sound changes for which there’s plenty of other evidence?
@TR
I’m not discarding them but the set you have in mind is a subset of a real, natural, historical set. The two sets (the HEART set and the ROOT set) were misanalyzed as two separate, unrelated sets. Systematic morphological, semantic and phonetic resemblances between the two have been overlooked. Phonetic problems (e.g., Skrt hrd ‘heart’ that can’t be derived from PIE *k’rd but it is undoubtedly part of the HEART set) have been ignored or underestimated. The loss of s- in some forms within that set needs to be explained. I hypothetically think that there was some kind of dissimilatory process that involved /s/ and “laryngeals.” A laryngeal is reconstructed in the ROOT set, which looks like *wreH2d-.
GD: Greenberg made a significant contribution to the study of typology, so I presume he was rigorous
Nobody questions Greenberg’s significant contribution to typology. Classification and reconstruction are another matter.
I agree with you that Greenberg made some good criticisms of the comparative method.
I was not criticizing the comparative method (as practiced and refined by traditionally trained historical linguists), but a flawed, simplified interpretation of the CM as practiced by some Amerindianists, which Greenberg appeared to confuse with the full traditional method. Incidentally, this confusion shows that he was not himself trained in the method (something abundantly confirmed by his and Ruhlen’s “Amerind cognate sets” and reconstructions).
@Marie-Lucie
“I was not criticizing the comparative method (as practiced and refined by traditionally trained historical linguists), but a flawed, simplified interpretation of the CM as practiced by some Amerindianists, which Greenberg appeared to confuse with the full traditional method.”
OK, thanks for the clarification. I personally think that Greenberg was close to truth when he argued that classification precedes reconstruction. He just misapplied this idea. Let me explain. I also believe that classification precedes reconstruction and my critique of the comparative method identifies an error precisely at the classification stage. But unlike Greenberg, and the difference here is crucial, I think that it’s cognate sets that are the minimal units of classification and not languages.
I’m not discarding them but the set you have in mind is a subset of a real, natural, historical set. The two sets (the HEART set and the ROOT set) were misanalyzed as two separate, unrelated sets.
So the same PIE root gave rise to one set of reflexes that look like they reflect *wr- and another set that look like they reflect *k’r-? And somehow *s- is involved too (I don’t understand this part)? Maybe you have more data or arguments that you haven’t adduced, but unless you have a good solution to the phonological difficulties, I don’t see how you can declare so confidently that these are the same cognate set rather than what they look like, i.e. two unrelated sets.
GD: I too agree that classification precedes reconstruction. You can’t even think of reconstructing a proto-language, the ancestor of a language group, unless you have good reason to believe that the group does consist of related languages. It is relatively easy to group languages which are indeed closely related (but unusual phonological correspondences or the presence of a substantial number of borrowings can obscure the relationship if “cognate sets” is all you look at). It is much more difficult to prove or even suspect more distant relationships. Earlier I cited some of the problems with some of Greenberg’s subclassifications within “Amerind”, which do not inspire confidence in the validity of the larger group.
TR: I agree with your comment. I too have trouble understanding how to deal wirh the s’s.
About HEART and ROOT, the alleged semantic relationship seems very dubious.
@Marie-Lucie
” You can’t even think of reconstructing a proto-language, the ancestor of a language group, unless you have good reason to believe that the group does consist of related languages.”
Precisely. The same, IMO, works for cognate sets: you can’t even think of reconstructing an etymon and formulating a phonetic law, unless you have a good reason to believe that the cognate set(s) that form a basis for them is/are fairly complete. But routine comparative method is not diligent with criteria for inclusion/exclusion of items in cognate sets, hence the reconstruction may get wrong. This in turn obscures long-distance relationships (of those cognate sets!).
@Marie-Lucie
“About HEART and ROOT, the alleged semantic relationship seems very dubious.”
Not at all. The HEART set also has meanings such as MIDDLE or CORE (including their arboreal applications) and the ROOT set has somatonymic meanings such as “wart”. Also comp. “The heart of the matter” and “the root of the problem.” An etymological meaning that cuts across the two sets could easily be “to grow.”
Forms with s- and without s- are typical in IE langages and sometimes described as the s-mobile problem. I’m not trying to hide behind it, though. On the contrary, a chronically unresolved phonetic problem can be resolved with a change in the approach.
“An etymological meaning that cuts across the two sets could easily be “to grow.””
Or even better ‘source’.
Which reflexes in either set even show s-mobile? In any case, the main problem with uniting these two sets isn’t s-mobile, or even the semantics, but the fact that *wreh2d- and *k’erd are phonologically irreconcilable.
By the way, the initial *w in the Greek “root” family is guaranteed by Aeolic βρίζα and Mycenaean wi-ri-za, on the assumption (not certain, however, because of the vocalism) that these and their Attic cognate ῥίζα — all meaning “root” — are related to ῥάδιξ.
TR: Which reflexes in either set even show s-mobile?
Indeed. I don’t see it in those examples.
<i.By the way, the initial *w in the Greek “root” family is guaranteed by Aeolic βρίζα and Mycenaean wi-ri-za, on the assumption (not certain, however, because of the vocalism) that these and their Attic cognate ῥίζα — all meaning “root” — are related to ῥάδιξ.
Thank you, I was wondering about that *w. Is there a regular internal alternation in Greek between ζ [dz] and δ (d)?
ῥίζα: Now I understand “glycorrhiza” ‘liquorice’.
Is there a regular internal alternation in Greek between ζ [dz] and δ (d)?
There is a regular sound change whereby Proto-Greek *dy (and *gy) > ζ. Presumably ῥίζα is derived with the so-called devi suffix, which in Proto-Greek is *-ya (PIE *-ih2).
Now I understand “glycorrhiza” ‘liquorice’
I never realized that!
Still no time to deal with everything…
Dude. You are the first person in the history of this blog to feel trolled by SFReader. His presence here dates back… at least a year, likely more. This thread doesn’t exist in a vacuum!
I laughed out loud.
Correct. The trick is that PIE didn’t allow plain */r/ as a word onset either. Laryngeal + */r/ was allowed, but would have yielded vowel + voiced /r/ in Greek (as it did in érythros < *h₁rudh- “red ~ crimson”). So, */sr/ is an obvious option.
But so is */wr/.
That’s the middle of a compound word: dia- “through” + rhe- “flow”. Does rh occur in the middle of any morphemes?
So why doesn’t aśva have this p?
The Luwian branch of Anatolian doesn’t merely show “satemization signs”, it shows the whole sound shift of palatalized velars to z in all environments that they have been found in so far (in the limited corpus). It’s a pretty obvious, “natural” thing for palatalized velars to do, don’t you think?
I’d be very interested in seeing them.
Well, there is no “h” in śapʰa-. Of course pʰ comes from PIE *pH, meaning *ph₂ and possibly *ph₁. If you really want to compare śapʰa- with *kopyto despite the latter’s *k… how would the laryngeal be reflected in Slavic? The y conveniently derives from a long vowel; which tone does it have?
The ś in aśva is not at all anomalous if you derive the word from PIE *(h₁)ékʲwos, as current textbook wisdom has it. Please explain what you mean.
*blink*
…Just to make sure: you are aware that s /s/ and ś /ɕ/ are two completely separate phonemes in Sanskrit, right? Russian (in not too conservative accents) happens to use both sounds as phonemes, too: с, щ.
I thought consonant lengthening is completely regular in Greek after a stressed short vowel? There are problems in this word, but they’re the /h/ (which comes out of nowhere, but is a late innovation, absent from the name Álkippos) and the /i/ (/e/ would be expected).
Again, what “h”? If you mean a laryngeal (any one), it would have disappeared with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel, and that didn’t happen.
But *-aHp- would have yielded -āp-, not -apʰ-, probably before *h₂ actually became [h]. I would certainly not call [χp] and [pχ] “perceptually likely identical”.
at least a year, likely more
Since 2012, thanks to the wonders of binary search through dates.
Thanks David.
GD: About “horse” and “hoof”, I don’t see why the Slavic, etc words have to be related to each other any more than the English ones. Or than “heart” and “root”. When two words are similar in one language but their potential cognates are quite different in one or more others, the obvious conclusion is that they must come from different ancestors. Especially if making them compatible with a common origin requires tweaking otherwise well-attested rules or introducing extraneous elements.
Does rh occur in the middle of any morphemes?
Only as part of a geminate, e.g. ἄρρην “male”. Breathings are a late and not wholly reliable notation, but the appearance of rough breathing over rho is completely predictable: word-initially and in the second half of a geminate (written ῤῥ). You never get a singleton non-initial ῥ.
I thought consonant lengthening is completely regular in Greek after a stressed short vowel?
That’s the first I’ve heard of a littera-type rule in Greek, but in any case the geminate in hippos isn’t a problem, as you say, given that it reflects two PIE segments rather than a single labiovelar.
Sorry, I had to update my OS, hence picking up the thread only now.
@TR
“the main problem with uniting these two sets isn’t s-mobile, or even the semantics, but the fact that *wreh2d- and *k’erd are phonologically irreconcilable.”
The truth is they are very much reconcilable – morphologically (Gk/Lat *sradiks and Slav *srudice are identical), semantically (see above) and phonetically. Slav *or- (*ord-ti ‘grow’) and Germanic *ur- (*wurtiz, with w- as a prothetic) are perfectly regular reflexes of syllabic R also found in *kRd ‘heart’. For Gk, I’d postulate the sequence k’ > s > h, which is similar to k’ > s > sh in Lithuanian or Indic. The k- vs. s- doublets are well know from satem languages (Slav *korwa vs. *serna), so the copresence of kardia and rhadiks in Greek is not extraordinary. /s/ is regularly lost in front of a sonorant in Latin. The phenomenon of s-mobile (mostly initial) is pervasive in IE languages (Slav *vendati ~ Goth swintan ‘disappear, wane’): I’m not abusing the similarity and not hiding behind this poorly understood phenomenon, but believe that we need more data to understand the contexts in which /s/ is lost. I’m not providing this additional data. Interestingly, palatalization is conventionally thought of as getting lost in kentum languages, so k’ > k already presumes as s-mobile-like phenomenon.
@ David
“So why doesn’t aśva have this p?”
As we know from kentum languages, labiovelars sometimes stay as k(u), sometimes change to p.
“I’d be very interested in seeing them.”
Another good one is IE *esH2r-/-n (Hitt eshar, Skrt asrk, Gk ear, etc.) ‘blood’ and IE *(d)akr-/-n ‘tear’ (Hitt ishahru, Skrt asru, Gk dakruma, etc.) The two sets have already been compared to each other but only as a case of mutual contamination. The morphology is identical (heteroclitic -r-/-n-). IE *kmtom or *kntm ‘hundred’ can be compared to IE *seno- ‘old’ (Lat senatus showing the same extension -t- as centum). IE *swekuro- ‘husband’s parent’ ~ IE *sweso:r ‘sister’ (Initial sh- in Lith sesuras and Skrt svasura does not need to be interpreted as assimilation from medial -s- but a perfect pair to Gk h in hekura-.)
I’d keep Aeolic βρίζα out of it for now, although I agree that the connection is tempting.
@ David
I continue… My comp is acting funny…
“If you really want to compare śapʰa- with *kopyto despite the latter’s *k…”
It’s a standard cognate set. There are a number of cases where k ~ s alternate within a “satem” or between “satem” languages. Again, there has not been a good explanation for it.
“you are aware that s /s/ and ś /ɕ/ are two completely separate phonemes in Sanskrit, right?”
yes, of course.
“The ś in aśva is not at all anomalous if you derive the word from PIE *(h₁)ékʲwos, as current textbook wisdom has it. Please explain what you mean.”
Your reconstruction doesn’t take into consideration the fact that Latin, Greek and Mycenaean attest for a labiovelar and not a cluster. We should have ak(w)a** in Sanskrit, not asva. Something else is clearly going on here.
So the price of uniting the “root” and “heart” sets includes at least (a) banishing ῥίζα “root” from the former set because of its *w-; (b) divorcing ῥάδιξ from the set of English wort etc., where it fits straightforwardly, in order to give it an *s- instead; and (c) positing an irregular pre-Proto-Greek change of PIE *k’ > *s just to account for that *s-. And presumably some further fiddling to get rid of the laryngeal that shows up in the “root” words but not the “heard” words. All because you feel that “root” and “heart” are semantically close and because they share two segments. I still don’t see how s-mobile has anything to do with it, but honestly, this doesn’t inspire confidence in your new and improved methodologies for historical linguistics.
@David
“I thought consonant lengthening is completely regular in Greek after a stressed short vowel?”
How about melo? hippos has a triple problem: h-, i- and -pp-. Pretty much the whole word. Time to rethink the fundamentals.
“But *-aHp- would have yielded -āp-, not -apʰ-, probably before *h₂ actually became [h]. I would certainly not call [χp] and [pχ] “perceptually likely identical”.
Yes, good thinking. Like I said, I don’t have all the answers. We need to look at a number of cognate supersets and revisit PIE phonology. -ph- in sapha- is not expected, neither is h- in Skrt hrd ‘heart’ but both seem to correspond to /s/ as seen in Slav *srudice and Skrt asva.
@TR
“divorcing ῥάδιξ from the set of English wort etc., where it fits straightforwardly,”
Who’s divorcing it? Not me.
“And presumably some further fiddling to get rid of the laryngeal that shows up in the “root” words but not the “heard” words.”
You are rushing through issues. h- in Gk hippos, rhadiks is taken as a reflex of a laryngeal (H1) in a number of recent linguistic works, so we have a laryngeal in both HEART and ROOT sets.
“positing an irregular pre-Proto-Greek change of PIE *k’ > *s”
Why is it irregular? It’s more parsimonious (if supported by right data, of course), then postulating two /s/ – one PIE, the other one ‘satem’.
“this doesn’t inspire confidence in your new and improved methodologies for historical linguistics.”
Fine, at this point I would settle for your anonymous curiosity, rather than your anonymous confidence. 🙂
So what is the actual form of the PIE root which you think underlies both sets, and how does it give rise both to words which seem to reflect *k’- as well as to words which seem to reflect *w-?
h- in Gk hippos, rhadiks is taken as a reflex of a laryngeal (H1) in a number of recent linguistic works, so we have a laryngeal in both HEART and ROOT sets.
Wait, now hippos is part of the “heart” set?! Surely not, so which “heart” word shows a laryngeal?
Why is it irregular?
Because PIE *k’ is otherwise not known to give Greek s, but Greek k. You’re positing an ad hoc change for the purpose of this single etymology.
Btw, I’ve finally looked up Greek ῥάδιξ (which sounded unfamiliar) and it turns out to be a post-Classical word first attested in Nicander (2nd century BC), and very likely a borrowing from Latin.
GD: h- in Gk hippos, rhadiks is taken as a reflex of a laryngeal (H1) in a number of recent linguistic works
So rhadiks is no longer from *sr- ??
Btw, a recent attempt by Chiara Bozzone to explain the initial aspirate of hippos can be found here. I’ve yet to fully think it through, but it looks interesting.
TR: Thanks for looking up rhadiks! A borrowing from Latin makes the best sense.
anonymous curiosity […] anonymous confidence
Pseudonymous people, particularly lightly pseudonymous people who are using abbreviations of their real names, are by no means anonymous. A statistician who heard talk of “Gosset’s t” would be completely confused; it is always called “Student’s t“, though “Student” was a pseudonym for William Sealy Gosset (his employer was concerned that his work might reflect badly on them, perhaps because they did not understand it). The work of Nikolas Bourbaki is too well-known to discuss. And once we get out of science and mathematics, non-anonymous authors who use pseudonyms are everywhere.
If you insist on real names, consider visiting Paleoglot.
—John Woldemar Cowan, writing under the pseudonym “John Cowan”
(Bozzone and Felisari, I should have said). The troublesome i, as mentioned in that paper, has been explained as a case of schwa epenthesis in a zero-grade form *h1k’wó-, for which there are other Greek parallels probably including our word ῥίζα; though I would want to see a good explanation of the subsequent accent retraction.
@Marie-Lucie,
“So rhadiks is no longer from *sr- ??”
My bad. I created a confusion. We don’t need this. There’s a simpler way to counter TR’s objection: -a- in Gk rhadiks (just like -a- in Gk kardia, per the conventional reconstruction) come from syllabic R, which regularly gives ar in Gk and ur in Germanic (*wurtiz). TR assumes that Gk h corresponds to w and postulates *wreH2d- for the ROOT set. But in fact w (as I mentioned above) is just a prothesis in front of -ur-, which is a regular reflex of syllabic R. So, the only “mismatch” between germ *wurtiz and, say, Slav *srudice is the Slavic s- vs. Germanic o (zero)- (not w-).
@TR
“Because PIE *k’ is otherwise not known to give Greek s, but Greek k. You’re positing an ad hoc change for the purpose of this single etymology.”
I’m giving examples where Gk /h/ corresponds to /k/. It’s not a single etymology. Of course I’m shooting for having it regular. We’re just looking at this one at the moment. A moment ago we were looking at hippos vs. sapha- (< *k'-). Stay tuned.
GD: a- in Gk rhadiks (just like -a- in Gk kardia, per the conventional reconstruction) come from syllabic R, which regularly gives ar in Gk
Even if rhadiks can be assumed to be a genuine Greek word rather than a Latin borrowing, your rule should give ardiks not r(h)adiks. Or hardiks, if the word cannot start with a vowel?
@TR
“Btw, a recent attempt by Chiara Bozzone to explain the initial aspirate of hippos can be found here.”
I read it some time ago and had it in mind when I took a wrong curve and began talking about H1.
@John Cowan
“If you insist on real names…”
Online pseudonyms are indeed annoying, especially when their owners make metascientific claims, passionately defend mainstream views that give them comfort but that they didn’t take part in building or launch ad hominem attacks. The use of a pseudonym is excusable when their owners are not making metascientific claims, don’t glamorize mainstream views or launch ad hominem attacks but communicate something concrete, valuable and memorable. Then they begin building a new equity behind their abbreviated name.
Kindly consider languagehat, our gracious pseudonymous host, who was in fact anonymous for the first several years of this blog, to no one’s detriment.
@Marie-Lucie
“Even if rhadiks can be assumed to be a genuine Greek word rather than a Latin borrowing, your rule should give ardiks not r(h)adiks.”
Its immediate cognates such as Slav *ord-ti (next to derived *rodu, *rasti) ‘grow’ and Germ *wurtiz have the shape that you are describing. The shape of Gk rhadiks and Lat radix is different from those but approximates Slav *srudice. We can’t divorce the two half-sets from each other by this measure.
marie-lucie: That’s exactly the attitude Ruhlen tries to foster (thereby downgrading the work of linguists) in his book on the origins of language (a misleading title). He takes the reader through some (carefully chosen) material, adding here and there “linguists know that (such and such a rule applies)”…
I realize that Ruhlen is not the most admired figure in the linguistics community (to put it mildly), but there is one point of fact I’d like to raise with you. He claims that when Greenberg first proposed his classification of African languages he was subjected to much the same sort of criticisms as later greeted his classification of American languages, but that now everyone agrees that his classification of African languages is correct. Is that in fact true, and is there a qualitative difference between African and American families that would make one correct and the other not?
A statistician who heard talk of “Gosset’s t” would be completely confused; it is always called “Student’s t“, though “Student” was a pseudonym for William Sealy Gosset (his employer was concerned that his work might reflect badly on them, perhaps because they did not understand it).
I’m surprised they would care. Did they think they would sell less Guinness if people knew that one of their employees was a distinguished statistician? How many Guinness drinkers follow the statistics literature? (I do, or at least I once did, but I don’t suppose I’m typical.)
much the same sort of criticisms as later greeted his classification of American languages, but that now everyone agrees that his classification of African languages is correct
I think there was controversy early, then a period of quiet, then doubts, and now open (though not noisy) rebellion.
Afro-Asiatic has never been controversial, except for the shaky status of the Omotic family within it: most don’t go so far as to say Omotic is an isolate family, but some do, and certainly the quantity and quality of the evidence tying it to (the rest of) Afro-Asiatic is not very great.
Niger-Congo is, as far as I know, fairly uncontroversial as a genetic grouping, though there is no consensus about its internal classification. There may be noise around the edges of this group as well. It’s in this family that Greenberg did most of his actual work, drawing in languages that were formerly not thought to be related to the core group whose recognition predates him.
Nilo-Saharan is increasingly recognized as what biologists call a wastebasket taxon: a language spoken in the rough and fractal borderland between the first two families that did not look like either of them tended to get dumped into Nilo-Saharan. It should probably be broken up until proper comparative work is done. Some linguists do defend it as written, however.
Khoi-San is typologically defined by a single property, the presence of click consonants. Nobody has ever found (or thought of, depending on how you look at it) a plausible phonological process by which non-clicks could be transformed into clicks, and so the assumption has been that it must be a primitive character. (That in itself would not be enough to demonstrate relatedness anyway, as it could have survived from the ancestral language in these groups but not others, as five-toedness survives from the ancestor of all tetrapods.) The languages are intensely diverse otherwise, and there seems to be nobody who believes any more that they can possibly all be related.
I just read presentation slides by Blench drawing large conclusions from the worldwide pattern of isolates and small families. There are lots in the New World, few in Africa, concentrated in the north in Australia, and so on. But I greatly fear that what he is really investigating is the worldwide pattern of resistance among specialists to Greenberg’s lumping: very high in the New World, until recently low in Africa, mixed in Australia, and so on.
I didn’t have the Student story quite right (post in haste, repent at leisure). Here’s Wikipedia (emphasis added):
Online pseudonyms are indeed annoying, especially when their owners make metascientific claims, passionately defend mainstream views that give them comfort but that they didn’t take part in building or launch ad hominem attacks.
The only person launching ad hominem attacks in this thread is you. I don’t care whether your real name is “German Dziebel” or not; I suppose if I googled it I’d find there is such a person, but how do I know you are that person? I could post as “Barack Obama”: a real name! I don’t care what name people post under (I still miss a commenter from the early days of the site who went by “a”), I only care that they not behave as jerks. Frankly, you have been behaving as a jerk far too often; I’m letting the conversation proceed because it’s interesting and everybody seems to be more amused than annoyed by your heavy-handed attempts to throw your weight around, but if SFReader or any other long-standing and valued commenter feels offended and asks me to ban you, I will gladly do so. I don’t demand politeness, but I draw the line at personal insults, which (again) you are the only one here to have indulged in.
Nobody has ever found (or thought of, depending on how you look at it) a plausible phonological process by which non-clicks could be transformed into clicks, and so the assumption has been that it must be a primitive character.
Never thought of that, but if indeed it is the case, you still have cases like the Bantu languages of South Africa, where you borrow words with the clicks in them. A couple of ten thousand years will make the borrowings unrecognizable and the language will safely possess clicks.
Athel: Greenberg’s reputation
John Cowan has answered your question much better than I would have about the African classification. What I have read about it was that he corrected some groupings which were based on irrelevant criteria (such as the race of the speakers, or the presence of gender) but did not really do very original work. But I am not competent to have an opinion either about his African work or the responses to it.
JC: Initial responses among North American linguists have been either “He did a great job in Africa, so his Amerindian work must be great too”, or some time later after negative comments from specialists: “He did a lousy job in America, so his African work must not be as great as reported”. I think that both responses were inappropriate, but I know of no Amerindianist on this continent who approves of Greenberg’s classification. However, his and Ruhlen’s work seem to be very popular in France, where his comment that older linguists did not wait for PIE reconstruction to classify the languages (which is true and valid) is taken as showing that his Amerindian work was right and the gainsayers must have all sorts of axes to grind. No matter that the proposed “Amerind”, if correct, would be on the order of Greenberg’s proposed Eurasiatic (which includes Nostratic as well as yet other groups) rather than Indo-European.
Thanks John and Marie-Lucie. That’s quite enlightening.
Seeing that you’re a specialist in languages of the Pacific Northwest, Marie-Lucie, I was remembering today that Maud Menten, author of one of the most best known papers in biochemistry (though most of the people who cite it just think of her as M. L. Menten and have no idea that she was a woman, and, indeed, Canadian) was a speaker of Halkomelem, which she learned from school friends while growing up in Harrison Mills. Later in life she was also fluent in English (of course), French, German, Italian and Russian.
where you borrow words with the clicks in them
But it can’t be borrowings all the way down: somewhere there must be languages with non-borrowed clicks.
I’m reading a paper by George van Driem with the innocuous-sounding name of A Holistic Approach to the Fine Art of Grammar Writing, which contains the following paragraphs guaranteed to bring warmth to the heart of Hat, Marie-Lucie, Etienne, and all the other pariahs from mainstream linguistics who cluster so thickly on this blog:
Preach it, brother. Tell it like it is.
Wonderful, true and indicting.
German, your etymology keeps jumping around with each new comment so that I can’t keep track of it; now we have a syllabic R all of a sudden, but you still haven’t answered my question: what’s the actual PIE form you’re positing? Specifically, what consonant does it begin with?
It made me think of an idea I have long ago. I think that it’s important to keep the flame of historical linguistics alive and ensure that future fieldworkers all get a proper training in historical linguistics, if only for lexicons of endangered languages to be as well documented as they should.
The current description industry privileges grammars to everything else. The model of a PhD thesis is a fairly well-written grammar with a 800-word lexicon with minimal definition, often one or two English words. This is understandable. One of the baser human motives of science for scientists is to say interesting things. Having the prospect of saying interesting things motivate people to collect data. The current grammar model works because there are often interesting things to say about morphosyntax and phonology, if you happen to land on a difficult or unusual system. On the other hand, you don’t have a universal (not UG but comparative-across-continents) way to talk about lexicon or much of morphology. There is a way to talk about lexicon, which is historical linguistics. The thrill of finding an exciting etymon should be there for languages that happen not to be Indo-European, and for fieldworkers to understand that there could be some excitement over there, the current way of teaching linguistics should be recalibrated somewhere to the pre-Saussurian, let alone pre-Chomskian, equilibrium.
I for one wish more people were writing these model Ph.D. theses you’re talking about… Grammars, well-written or otherwise, constitute an almost negligible proportion of linguistics dissertations these days.
I would hope those who have written the grammars for their PhD would do the reconstruction of the immediate parent group and an etymological dictionary for their Habilitationsschrift. (I would prefer the reverse order, in fact, as a really good grammar is very difficult to write.)
That archaeology parallel is apt in another way: Conrext is everything. Shiny artifacts without context are next to nothing. To be understood for what they really are, linguistic features must be seen in the multifaceted context of overall grammar, sociolinguistics, historical phonology, cultural influences, whatever relevant background there is to collect.
JC: I just read presentation slides by Blench drawing large conclusions from the worldwide pattern of isolates and small families. There are lots in the New World, few in Africa, concentrated in the north in Australia, and so on. But I greatly fear that what he is really investigating is the worldwide pattern of resistance among specialists to Greenberg’s lumping: very high in the New World, until recently low in Africa, mixed in Australia, and so on.
I have been trying to see the slides, but no luck thus far, so I will just reply to the rest of the comment.
I can’t speak for the whole New World as I am only familiar with Western North America, but I think that the number of ‘isolates and small families’ is exaggerated. I have mentioned several times that the current “mainstream” classification of North American languages is little different from what it was in 1862 when the first comprehensive survey was completed, using data compiled from missionaries, traders, and sundry other people, few of whom had much training in language studies. Sixty or so years later, the great linguist Sapir proposed a classification of these languages into six “phyla”, or groups sharing some typological characteristics and considered beyond the reach of the comparative method. Two of the “phyla” (though no longer called that) correspond to Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut, which are acknowledged by Greenberg as quite different from each other and from his “Amerind”. Sapir’s other phyla have been struck off the maps. One of them, “Aztec-Tanoan” still has a few – very few – adherents, as I mentioned not too long ago. The one I have been working on, “Penutian”, was defined as including about 15 language families and isolates more or less covering the Pacific coast, from California to the tip of the Alaska panhandle. It is no longer officially accepted, and is now considered to consists of a few small families and some isolates. But my own research has convinced me that most of the Penutian languages and families are indeed related to each other. Most previous scholarship has emphasized the search for “lexical sets” (potential cognate sets), which has been frustrating because of some unusual correspondences, while I have worked on morphology, especially irregular, archaic morphology, with continuing results. Also, I have been struck by many resemblances between Penutian and Uto-Aztecan, while U-Az is quite different from Tanoan. Although I found this independently, it is not an original discovery as it was anticipated by Whorf and Swadesh decades ago. So I think that the description of the New World as containing a large number of totally separate families is inaccurate. I think that further research (which might take a long time) will eventually reduce the acknowledged groups of the continent to a number closer to that of Sapir, and include some large groups and a few true isolates (such as Zuni in the US Southwest).
As for the “very high pattern of resistance” to Greenberg’s classification (a phrase which presumes that Greenberg was right), it is easy for people outside the field to compare reactions to Greenberg’s work on different continents as if the linguistic and scholarly situations were the same. I already mentioned that “Amerind” would be of the order of Eurasiatic, not Indo-European. Also, Indo-European and some of the other families of Eurasia have long written traditions, sources of documents which do not exist in Australia or the Americas where the “window” of time in which the languages are attested is very short, and moreover these continents have seen the loss of many of the original languages.
Re minus273’s point, I guess the question is how do we get there from here. Pick a random underdocumented non-Sinitic language of Taiwan. Let’s say you have someone who would be willing to write a check in the amount necessary to support a grad student with sufficiently modest standard-of-living expectations to do two or three years of fieldwork there and another year back on campus writing it all up, all with the approach minus273 suggests. (It’s not going to be a huge sum, all things considered; and it doesn’t need to be a grad student from a First World university who’s an L1 Anglophone — write up the results in Mandarin or Tagalog or Tupi-Guarani and assume someone else will be willing to fund a translation.) Do we have a supply of grad students on hand who’d be willing and able to do that sort of project if the funding were made available? If not, do we have the institutional infrastructure at hand to create such grad students if the right people decided we ought to be doing that? If not, how do we create that infrastructure?
When I said that Eskimo-Aleut and Athabaskan are very different from “Amerind”, I didn’t mean to suggest that “Amerind” is a single, valid genetic group (which is what Greenberg said). The languages and families included in it can be very different from each other, just perhaps not quite as distinctive as the aforementioned two.
Preach it, brother. Tell it like it is.
Amen! My heart is well warmed.
@JWB, I would say the problem is not the supply of grad students willing to do fieldwork so much as the supply of jobs for such grad students after they file. The institutional culture is unfortunately such that, given two job candidates of whom one has written a grammar of Shipibo and the other a thesis ironing out some kink in Stratal Optimality Theory, the vast majority of search committees are likely to prefer the latter to the former.
Thanks TR. That’s helpful, if depressing. And it would require a lot more $ to endow a different-emphasis tenure-track gig for the grad student to be hired into than to support a few years of fieldwork.
“very high pattern of resistance” to Greenberg’s classification (a phrase which presumes that Greenberg was right)
Why would it presume that? I certainly meant no such thing. Resistance to error, like resistance to oppression, can be correct and even heroic. (Indeed, where error hardens into orthodoxy it inevitably becomes oppressive.) Like you, I think neither the orthodox nor the Greenberg view of the New World is necessarily right.
I heard back from Blench, who says that he is personally convinced by the evidence for Nilo-Saharan, Central Khoi, and Pama-Nyungan, but thinks Trans-New-Guinea, Oto-Manguean, and Altaic may have insuperable problems. In my (private) reply, I urged him to look at Penutian, and took the liberty of dropping your name.
By the way, you write “Amerindianist”. Has this displaced “Americanist”? I don’t wish to sound old-fashioned, even if I am.
@TR
“German, your etymology keeps jumping around with each new comment so that I can’t keep track of it; now we have a syllabic R all of a sudden>.”
Nothing is jumping. You just can’t follow a simple logic, it seems. Syllabic R was there from the beginning. The HEART form is currently reconstructed as *k’Rd (where R is syllabic R). This is fully compatible with the vocalism of Gk rhadiks or Germ *wurtiz, so we don’t even need a laryngeal there (see above).
“Specifically, what consonant does it begin with?”
Like I said, classification precedes reconstruction, so I keep PIE reconstructions open for now because one
doesn’t provide a new reconstruction on the basis of a single form, especially since the flaw I’m correcting is a methodological one. We can keep the traditional *k’Rd for now, which accounts for both HEART forms and ROOT forms (*Rd-). My point was that k’ > s (just like kw > p) may have been a PIE sound change, hence we see s- in Greek and Latin.
@languagehat
“The only person launching ad hominem attacks in this thread is you.”
Incorrect. I haven’t launched any ad hominem attacks whatsoever (I’m only interested in the discussion of the comparative method here and the relationships between amateur and professional linguists) but countered the one launched at me. It’s bizarre that you can’t see it. And now, after several serious posts I left on your website, you’re threatening to ban me instead of banning SFReader who was digging through dirty laundry?! I wonder who taught you the difference between “good” and “bad” in life.
Your comment is truly insulting. And I don’t care if you are the owner of the site. You have been rather unwelcoming to me. Anybody can open a site and start blogging. I guess I now understand why SFReader has been around here for a long time.
@Athel Cornish-Bowden
I can add to JC’s and ML’s responses that in Africa Greenberg relied on the robust continent-wide classification by the German missionary linguist Westermann. He tightened it up in places but for the most part followed in Westermann’s footsteps. These days linguists count 20 language families in Africa where Greenberg left 4. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00085.x/references.
Greenberg and Ruhlen continue to hold a spell over population geneticists working on Amerindian populations. Linguists had to publish a kind of “cease and desist” article in AJHG demanding geneticists to stop using Greenberg’s classification of Amerindian languages.
But: Edward Vajda who recently proved the reality of the Dene-Yeniseian language family acknowledged Greenberg and Ruhlen as one of the sources of his inspiration.
That’s true, but not just anybody can keep it going steadily for more than a decade and attract a community of commenters who stick around for years having informative and enjoyable discussions.
Anybody can open a site and start blogging.
And you think that languagehat is no different from some random WordPress blog. What a barren taste, German Valentinovich.
@Keith Ivey
“a community of commenters who stick around for years having informative and enjoyable discussions.”
I guess everybody, including languagehat, has bad days. I just happened to stop by during those days.
“And you think that languagehat is no different from some random WordPress blog. What a barren taste, German Valentinovich.”
Coming from an anonymous poster, this looks like promotional spam. That’s why you need real names. Real names make people responsible for what they post, especially when addressing other people.
@Marie-Lucie,
“Also, I have been struck by many resemblances between Penutian and Uto-Aztecan, while U-Az is quite different from Tanoan. Although I found this independently, it is not an original discovery as it was anticipated by Whorf and Swadesh decades ago. So I think that the description of the New World as containing a large number of totally separate families is inaccurate.”
This is interesting. Do you have anything to share? As you may know, my key area of expertise is kinship terminologies (Amerindian and Indo-European especially). I know Uto-Aztecan and Penutian systems pretty well on the structural semantic level (see my Database at http://kinshipstudies.org/kinship-studies/database/) and there are indeed some interesting parrallels between the kin terminologies of the two language families. but I obviously don’t know much about the actual kinship terms from the linguistic point of view. But once I happened to be right regarding an aspect of proto-Athabascan kinship systems just by looking at their semantic structures comparatively and was happy to receive an encouraging note from Golla (http://kinshipstudies.org/category/victor-golla/).
I’d be very curious to see if you’ve come across any lexical matches between Penutiuan and UA kinship terms.
We can keep the traditional *k’Rd for now, which accounts for both HEART forms and ROOT forms (*Rd-). My point was that k’ > s (just like kw > p) may have been a PIE sound change, hence we see s- in Greek and Latin.
But we don’t see s- in either Greek or Latin, and *k’Rd can only account for the “root” words by a lengthy series of unsupported ad hoc suppositions: an Indo-European k’-mobile which no one has ever heard of, a Greek sound change *k’ > s ditto, some kind of laryngeal loss (since there’s clear evidence of *h2 in the long ā of Latin rādix), irregular prothetic w- in Germanic, some other arbitrary change to take care of the Celtic cognates (which also point to *w). Not to mention that adopting your etymology means losing the etymology for ῥίζα. I don’t see you correcting a methodological flaw, I see a textbook example of the classic methodological fallacy of assuming two words are cognate because of vague semantic and phonological similarity and then concocting ad hoc changes to support one’s hunch.
@TR
“But we don’t see s- in either Greek or Latin.”
What do you mean? We do! /h/ in Gk rhadiks is from *s. /s/ is regularly lost in Latin before a sonorant, so we can reconstruct *sradiks for proto-Italic.
“(since there’s clear evidence of *h2 in the long ā of Latin rādix),”
There’s just as much evidence for a laryngeal in Gk ke:r ‘heart’. But Gk rhadiks is lacking a:. Its a comes from syllabic R just like ur in Germ *wurtiz.
“Not to mention that adopting your etymology means losing the etymology for ῥίζα.”
Not losing it. Just putting it on a back burner in view of its strange vocalism (to your own point),
“a lengthy series of unsupported ad hoc suppositions”
They are all products of your imagination.
“I see a textbook example of the classic methodological fallacy of assuming two words are cognate because of vague semantic and phonological similarity and then concocting ad hoc changes to support one’s hunch.”
I disagree. You just biased in favor of conventional thinking. And since you can’t defend it, you fall into the psychological trap of attacking your opponent’s position.
/h/ in Gk rhadiks is from *s.
You keep stating this as a fact — are you just unaware that both PIE *sr and *wr- > Attic rh-? On the other hand, PIE *sr- > Lat fr- (e.g. frigus : ῥῖγος), which is yet one more reason your account is impossible.
“Not to mention that adopting your etymology means losing the etymology for ῥίζα.”
Not losing it. Just putting it on a back burner in view of its strange vocalism (to your own point),
It’s not the vocalism that’s the problem (this can be explained by schwa epenthesis, as I mentioned above), it’s the fact that this word is actually attested with initial w-.
A good rule of thumb in proposing new sound laws is that if the number of such laws is larger than the number of new etymologies they’re required to prove, something is wrong. This is one of the more extreme examples I’ve seen of that situation.
@TR
“You keep stating this as a fact ”
Because it is. There are dozens of examples that prove it. Cases when /h/ seemingly corresponds to y or w are false positives. Scholars have started reconstructing H1 to explain Gk h in those cases, which is methodologically correct, but my idea is better because it’s more parsimonious and does not require laryngeals unattested even in Hittite. IE *w is regularly lost in Greek and cluster sw- yields s- (hekura < *swekuro- 'mother in law'), so your ad hoc postulation of sr Lat fr- (e.g. frigus : ῥῖγος)”
Another ad hoc theory of yours. frigus : ῥῖγος is a unique isogloss, with no cognates in other languages and no other similar cases between Greek and Latin. Again, it’s likely a misanalyzed cognate set. It is interesting (potentially parallel to IE *-sr > Lat -br-, but never in the anlaut) and I thought quite a bit about it but don’t use it as proof that Gk sr- should be expected to correspond to Lat fr-. In Latin, s is regularly lost in the anlaut before any sonorant (r, l, n or m). This is the rule we should follow.
“It’s not the vocalism that’s the problem (this can be explained by schwa epenthesis”
Keep putting on your ad hoc show!
“A good rule of thumb in proposing new sound laws is that if the number of such laws is larger than the number of new etymologies they’re required to prove, something is wrong. This is one of the more extreme examples I’ve seen of that situation.”
The irony of the situation is that you don’t see that you are making all the mistakes that you think I’m making. Schwa epenthesis here, wr > hr there, no etymology for PIE *kRd heart – all the no-nos of historical reconstructions. This is because you are basing yourself in a flawed methodology where you are not even looking at the right material to deduce your conclusions.
Sorry, it should read “so your ad hoc postulation of *wr- > Attic rh-” is phonetically impossible and contradicts other existing evidence.” (My computer froze on me.)
@TR
“an Indo-European k’-mobile which no one has ever heard of.”
I treat it as a compliment. 🙂 On a more serious note, there’s certain kinship between IE s-mobile and the behavior of the “satem”s/PIE k’. The palatal feature is lost in all of kentum dialects, so there’s a loss of a palatal feature of a stop to match a palatal spirant loss, and even in satem dialects s is unstable as can be seen from my example Skrt sapha- ~ Slav *kopyto instead of expected sopyto**(and there are many more). So, both the so-called IE s and Satem s/IE k’ are mobile. Traditional s-mobile, although observed across all of IE dialects tend to pop more systematically in the “satem” area, as can be seen in, e.g., Gk nipha but Slav *sne:gu- ‘snow’, Lat nurus ~ Slav *snoxa ‘daughter-in-law.’ It’s just by this measure Germanic tends to cluster with satem languages and not with kentum languages, while Armenian with kentum languages and not with satem languages.
I’m only interested in the discussion of the comparative method here and the relationships between amateur and professional linguists.
Erunda. You also have an obsession with legal names, as if everyone had to present a passport before entering Languagehattia. I invite you once again to relocate yourself to Paleoglot, where that obsession is shared with the host and the others that can survive his fierce scrutiny.
Coming from an anonymous poster
What the devil do you know about whether Keith Ivey is anonymous or not? If his name is good enough for LinkedIn, it should be good enough for you.
German, this is getting comical. I haven’t brought any arguments into this discussion which are not widely accepted among Indo-Europeanists. You’ve introduced some half dozen. If you want anyone to consider these seriously, your work is cut out for you — find some evidence which doesn’t rely on an infinite regress of building one unsupported theory on top of another, and show how your account is better than the unproblematic accepted etymologies. Good luck rewriting the textbooks.
@TR
” I haven’t brought any arguments into this discussion which are not widely accepted among Indo-Europeanists.”
Why did you bring them up? I know accepted viewed even without you. But my models work better than those “accepted ones” because “accepted” doesn’t mean “supported.” Have fun reading textbooks!
@John Cowan
“What the devil do you know about whether Keith Ivey is anonymous or not?”
My comment was directed at minus273. I should have been clear about it. But you, too, should have followed the thread. What business do you have chiming in on that all the time in the first place?
I know accepted viewed even without you. But my models work better than those “accepted ones” because “accepted” doesn’t mean “supported.”
I assume most readers of this discussion will by now be able to assess the truth of both those statements for themselves, so I’m going to leave it there.
@TR
“I assume most readers of this discussion will by now be able to assess the truth of both those statements for themselves,”
For this to happen, we need to have people in the audience who meet the following two criteria: a) know the IE material well; b) have proven experience advancing alternative models to explain facts. I doubt we have such people in attendance here, but who knows…
JC; Thank you for the recommendation to Blench! I just found out that my 1997 IJAL paper is now on Academia. I did not put it there as it was a copyrighted article (to IJAL) and I did not think that would be legal, but there is is for all to read and even download (I think). I still agree with the article with a couple of very minor corrections which I can provide on request and which do not invalidate the major findings and conclusions.
“Amerindianist”. Has this displaced “Americanist”
It seems to me that “Americanist” is a more general term, including anthropology as well as linguistics. “Amerindian languages” is a common term (I think!), hence “Amerindianist”. But I could be wrong. On the negative side, “Amerind” is a back-formation from “Amerindian”, which can lead to an undesired interpretation.
GD: Edward Vajda who recently proved the reality of the Dene-Yeniseian language family acknowledged Greenberg and Ruhlen as one of the sources of his inspiration.
Even a very flawed work can provide “inspiration” for research, if only for checking the data. Vajda is an excellent linguist who certainly did not follow Greenberg’s advice about how to proceed. Ruhlen had earlier written an article about lexical resemblances between Ket (the last living Yeniseian language) and the Athabaskan languages, with a list of potential cognates containing many errors. Vajda would have been remiss in not consulting (and later mentioning) this article.
Personally, I was “inspired” to start investigating Penutian after reading a few papers which were full of mistakes (of data and interpretation) about a relevant language family I knew well from firsthand acquaintance, while none of the other authors were familiar with it.
there is is for all to read
Actually it isn’t. There is a reference page giving the title, author, etc., but no one can either read or download the paper. Instead, there is a button (at least for me there is) that I can push to ask you to upload the paper as a scanned PDF. Copy shops can do this readily if you don’t have a scanner at home. I have pushed the button now. Whether you upload the paper in response is up to you.
I interpret the “Green Open Access” section of this page to mean that the University of Chicago Press allows self-archiving by the author of articles published in IJAL in accordance with the Research Council of the UK’s policy on open access (linked from there), even though the author (you) did not receive UK funding. That policy requires social-science articles older than 24 months to be freely available to all via self-archiving. So upload away.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice; but scholarly publishers suing authors for self-archiving would be an execrable precedent and horrible public relations, and they are not going to begin with you.
@German Dziebel: You probably do not care about my opinion, since I do not know Indo-European linguistics well. In fact, I am only a very amateur linguist. However, I am a professional researcher in a entirely different (and often contentious) area, so I am quite familiar with the sociological hallmarks of good arguments and poor ones. Your comments, larded with bombast, are not very convincing when they are being rebutted by a whole crowd of other commenters here—people whose demeanor and linguistic acumen I have come to respect over years of reading this site.
And “Brett” is my real first name, by the way.
Note about my IJAL paper
The bulk of the paper is about morphological resemblances throughout the “phylum” (including about 35 common grammatical morphemes). That part is still strong. The paper also has an appendix with what could be called “potential cognate sets”. This part I am less happy with, as it is not organized as clearly as I would wish, and also some of potential cognate sets need to be revised in the light of my ongoing research since then.
@Brett
“Your comments, larded with bombast, are not very convincing when they are being rebutted by a whole crowd of other commenters here—people whose demeanor and linguistic acumen I have come to respect over years of reading this site.”
There was no bombast, on my part (I just want to be crystal clear about certain things such as “methodological flaws”, so that my proposals don’t get confused with disagreements regarding individual reconstructions that are ultimately based on the same methodology), or rebuttals, on “their” part.
90% defended, 10% taken as homework.
BTW, there was an experiment done on human children and chimps. A treat was put in a glass box with an open door. An experiment supervisor showed both chimps and kids a convoluted path to get to the door and get a treat. (Although the door was right in front of them.) Human kids ended up repeating that convoluted path and reaching for the treat only after they’d performed all the steps showed to them by the supervisor. The chimps ignored what the supervisor was telling them and reached for the treat directly.
So, I’m well aware of the fact that humans are social beings and they tend to follow traditional rules, seek approval from seniors and do what everyone else does. They will support trolls as long as a troll has been with them for a few years. They will check new ideas against textbooks. And they will measure a horse’s speed in “car powers.” Your response did not come as a surprise but rather as a payoff from my unintended experiment. You can follow “authority”as much as you want. I’m just gonna go directly for the treat.
Do you have a last name? Or just Brett? 🙂
JC: Thanks for the clarification about how to access my paper. I guess I was not aware of what “self-archiving” means. I will gladly help you access the paper. Should I email it to you? If you have changed your address, email me has mine is still the same.
JC, sorry, I think I misinterpreted again. Can you email me?
@Marie-Lucie
“Even a very flawed work can provide “inspiration” for research, if only for checking the data.”
Well, the inspiration came with some hard cash in the form of “at least 8 valid cognates” that Vajda confirmed with his sound correspondences (Vajda, “The Dene-Yeniseian Connection,” p. 106).
BTW, what’s your take on Lyle Campbell’s critique of Vajda? He was the only negative outlier, as far as I know, but I hold his opinion in high regard. (He was a very helpful reader of my book, too.)
I was present the first time that Vajda presented his hypothesis of a link between Ket and Athabaskan (in the 90’s) on the basis of morphological and morphosyntactic similarities. He then went on to do more research on Ket (including travelling there for fieldwork with some of the remaining speakers nt historical linguists had been invited (Michael Krauss, Eric Hamp, Johanna Nichols), and the 2009 SSILA summer meeting in San Francisco where Vajda presented another paper on the topic. The audience at that meeting included John Bengtson and George Starostin. The latter had a number of objections, which Vajda met very graciously. It would be surprising to me if Vajda did not acknowledge that he was encouraged in his own researches by previous work by other linguists (something that is routinely done by authors of scholarly books and papers).
The fact that some of Ruhlen’s cognate sets were correct is not surprising (he is a linguist after all), but has no bearing on the correctness of his and Greenberg’s “Amerind” classification.
Oops, I think an entire line disappeared itself. Here is a rewritten version of the paragraph, with missing words in italics (for now):
I was present the first time that Vajda presented his hypothesis of a link between Ket and Athabaskan (in the 90′s) on the basis of morphological and morphosyntactic similarities. He then went on to do more research on Ket (including travelling there for fieldwork with some of the remaining speakers. I also attended the 2000 meeting in Fairbanks, to which some prominent historical linguists had been invited (Michael Krauss, Eric Hamp, Johanna Nichols), and the 2009 SSILA summer meeting in San Francisco where Vajda presented another paper on the topic. The audience at that meeting included John Bengtson and George Starostin. The latter had a number of objections, which Vajda met very graciously. It would be surprising to me if Vajda did not acknowledge that he was encouraged in his own researches by previous work by other linguists (something that is routinely done by authors of scholarly books and papers).
sorry, the 2008 meeting, not 2000.
GD: I have not read Lyle Campbell on Vajda, but I am aware of his work. He is very hard to please, so congratulations.
Campbell on Vajda is in the 2008 proceedings published by the university.
@Marie-Lucie
“The fact that some of Ruhlen’s cognate sets were correct is not surprising (he is a linguist after all), but has no bearing on the correctness of his and Greenberg’s “Amerind” classification.”
Absolutely agree. BTW, George Starostin later published a critique of Vajda in his Journal of Linguistic Relationship.
I can’t seem to find my copy of The Dene-Yeniseian Connection, but as I remember it, Vajda’s attitude to Ruhlen’s work is politely dismissive.
@Trond Engen
“Vajda’s attitude to Ruhlen’s work is politely dismissive.”
Nah…I think Marie-Lucie is right about the fact that Vajda is a genuinely nice person. He appreciates being part of a scientific community of linguists of different creeds who together solve the mysteries of prehistory. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong but their mistakes don’t belittle their essential professionalism and integrity.
Yeah, well, OK, I might just as well have written “nice but dismissive”. But I’ll reread it if I find it.
Vajda is careful to say that Ruhlen had 8 cognates right; he is also careful to say that Ruhlen proposed 35 cognates in all, for a less than stellar hit rate. (Numbers from memory, may be wrong.)
P. 108: “In spring 1996 I invited Merritt Ruhlen,..to present a talk at my university. I was impressed that Ruhlen was actively working on the problem of Yeniseian genetic linguistics, while no one else seemed to have given a second thought since Trombetti…I greeted his subsequent publication of 34 putative cognate sets linking Yeniseian and Na-Dene…as an important event, though most linguists took at best only cursory notice.”
Yes, you are right: “nice but dismissive”. Dismissive of “most linguists,” not of Ruhlen. There’s this attitude, too, you know, showed by an “excellent linguist,” as Marie-Lucie referred to Vajda.
@John Cowan
“proposed 35 cognates in all, for a less than stellar hit rate.”
This is currently a world record. But we of course are all waiting for a linguistic Hussein Bolt who will take us out of the 8-cognate range for a long-range family.
@Marie-Lucie
Campbell on Vajda: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lylecamp/Campbell%20Yeniseian%20NaDene%20review%2011-2-10.pdf
GD: Thanks for the link to LC’s article.
The article is balanced between pros and cons, which is good. I am not very familiat with either of the languages (or families in the D case), but I did know (from various sources including Vajda’s early presentation and a course on Athabaskan languages) that the verbal structures in both are multipartite rather than merely bipartite as are so many languages.
Having read several other reviews by LC of comparative proposals in various languages, I feel that LC tends to overemphasize the dangers of “onomatopeia” and “semantic latitude”, seeing the first in too many cases (what could be onomatopeic about a word for “shadow”?) and insisting on very close meaning resemblances (equivalences of lexical items) without reflecting on what apparently completely different words might be considered to belong together. Consider “hook” and “come back”: at first sight it looks like these two meanings have nothing to do with each other, but what is a hook? an object made by curving back a straight object on itself, just like the path of a person or animal may turn back to return to where the starting point.
In conclusion, I have neither an axe to grind nor enough knowledge to really evaluate Vajda’s work (or Starostin’s or other linguists who have dealt with the case), but it does look promising.
@Marie-Lucie
Thanks! It’s very helpful. Dene-Yeniseian and even Dene-Causcasian look promising/intriguing from the kin terminological perspective as well (http://kinshipstudies.org/2015/06/26/dene-caucasian-kinship-and-dene-caucasian-kinship-terms/), but it’s still rather daunting and too good to be true. Starostin (https://www.academia.edu/2497705/Dene-Yeniseian_a_critical_assessment) does criticize the key part of Vajda’s proof, namely the multipartite verb morphology.
““hook” and “come back”:th
I couldn’t agree more with you in this instance. That’s exactly one of the problems I have in mind when I mention errors in cognate set composition.
@Marie-Lucie
” “Amerind”, if correct, would be on the order of Greenberg’s proposed Eurasiatic (which includes Nostratic as well as yet other groups) rather than Indo-European.”
Am still thinking through what you wrote earlier….Greenberg was mislead by the impression fostered by mainstream American archaeologists that Amerindians for the most part are recently (as in 12,000 years ago) derived from a single Asian source. (And those that aren’t are even more recent!) This made Amerind look as a taxon of roughly the same age as relatively unproblematic Afroasiatic. So, Greenberg did not anticipate any problems with arriving at an essentially correct classification and leaving reconstruction to Amerindian linguists to figure out later.
“However, his and Ruhlen’s work seem to be very popular in France, where his comment that older linguists did not wait for PIE reconstruction to classify the languages (which is true and valid).”
Greenberg is considered “great linguist” in Russia, too. And Ruhlen a respectable one. This is because lots of mainstream Russian linguists support the Nostratic concept (and the Dene-Caucasian concept and the Khoisan concept), which is close to Greenberg’s Eurasiatic. There’s this intriguing cultural aspect to science.
@Marie-Lucie
“older linguists did not wait for PIE reconstruction to classify the languages (which is true and valid).”
Narrowing down to this very important argument used by Greenberg, Indo-Europeanists set the wrong precedent of thinking about languages, and not cognate sets, as the minimal units of classification. Remember how often pater, pita:, pate:r and fadar ‘father’ have been celebrated as a great example of the reality of the IE family? You don’t need a reconstructed PIE to see that IE languages are related. And establishing linguistic kinship is the primacy goal of historical linguistics as a science! The fact that 1) Hittite and Balto-Slavic showed no reflexes of this presumably PIE etymon; 2) that in the Gothic corpus fadar is found only once (the regular word for father is atta, just like in Hittite and likely Balto-Slavic (but those are baby words, so you wouldn’t use them as proof of linguistic kinship); and 3) that Slavic has the form *strujus ‘father’s brother’ which is a morphological and semantic near-copycat of Skrt pitrvya, Lat patruus but with an unexpected phonetic correspondence non-Slav *p- ~ Slav *s- has never been explained or properly thought through during the past 150 years. (And Arm has yawray ‘step-father’, with a strange correspondence p > y next to the “normal” hayr ‘father’.) If you really scrutinize the IE cognate sets (as I did), you’ll see how messy they are. At some point you’ll stop seeing the critical difference between Greenberg’s one-man Amerind work and Indo-European studies. Indo-European is just a vastly younger language family, hence the sheer amount of cognates doctored out of their messy cognate sets and nicely packaged by generations of scholars to showcase their discipline leaves no doubt they are all related. But is it truly reconstruction?
Greenberg once said that all those Amerindian linguists can’t get their collective act together to arrive at higher order groupings in the New World, so all the work falls on the shoulders of “one man” (or one man and a half, if Merritt is brought into the picture 🙂 ). In Indo-European studies, the problem is of the opposite nature: Indo-European is collectively thoroughly overcooked, and it takes “one man” (say, yours truly, for the sake of the argument) to actually think through the myriad of misnalyzed, phonetically irregular, antietymological “cognate” sets and ad hoc semantic and phonetic solutions left behind by a horde of Indo-Europeanists.
GD, thank you.
It makes sense that Greenberg’s Amerind concept was influenced by the then prevailing idea that the peopling of the Americas was thought to be relatively recent and resulting from a single migration. My impression (based on a variety of criteria) is that although it is plausible that 12000-odd years ago saw the first entry of humans into the New World (Bering strait etc), there must have been one or more subsequent migrations, mostly by boat. The currents in the North Pacific regularly bring Japanese flotsam and sometimes wrecked boats (and even survivors) to the North American coast. ( I don’t mean that only Japanese items are coming, but those seem to be the most identifiable).
kinship terms
I posted a link to some of them (mostly from Penutian languages) in the Mama-Papa thread.
And establishing linguistic kinship is the primacy goal of historical linguistics as a science!
Why so? It seems to me that historical linguistics has at least the goals of establishing kinship, genetic classification, and reconstruction. Evolutionary biology does all these things, and why should linguistics be behind?
@John Cowan
I meant it as a statement about what people (in and outside of historical linguistics) think, not what I think. I think exactly what you just described but in an even more extreme formulations: unless ALL three are done, no one of them can be considered finished.
@Marie-Lucie
“I posted a link to some of them (mostly from Penutian languages) in the Mama-Papa thread.”
Thank you! The mama-papa terms are hard to analyze historically. They are either too short (na) or two patterned (nana, tata). They form very interesting worldwide areal clines (studied as early as mid 19th century by Buschmann in “Naturlaut”) with intriguing local reversals but they are weak as evidence for pairwise kinship between languages.
What caught my attention regarding the potential Penutian-UA links is the so-called self-reciprocal terminology between grandparents and grandchildren and aunts/uncles and nephew/nieces. It’s a relatively rare semantic and pragmatic pattern that’s very stable in UA and it doesn’t have the problem that terms for parents have. It shows up as a complete set in some Penutian languages.
I agree in general that kinship, classification and reconstruction all need to be done (but rarely all at once), but I disagree that comparison has to start with “cognate sets” (or rather, “sets of resemblant forms suggesting cognacy”, since cognates cannot be established just by looking at individual resemblances. Early Indo-Europeanists put great emphasis on common morphology (especially what can be shown to be archaic, now “irregular” morphology) and wrote “comparative grammars” of various families before they got really serious about reconstruction. Many current linguists minimize (or even ignore) the role of morphology, but a secufe morphological and morphophonemic foundation greatly reduces the likelihood of basic errors such as those described by Lyle Campbell in several of his works (and mentioned in his review of Vajda).
GD: The list I linked to on the mama-papa thread does include the mother-father terms for comparison.
the so-called self-reciprocal terminology between grandparents and grandchildren and aunts/uncles and nephew/nieces. It’s a relatively rare semantic and pragmatic pattern
I don’t think it is restricted to just Penutian and Uto-Aztecan, but I have not looked at other languages from that point of view. I thought it must be an areal phenomenon.
an unexpected phonetic correspondence non-Slav *p- ~ Slav *s- has never been explained or properly thought through.. and in Armenian a strange correspondence p > y
Sorry, these cannot be right. Just because the sounds in question occur in the same place in words which have “some” similarity in shape and meaning does not mean that they constitute a valid correspondence. You have to have some phonetic plausibility. I cannot see that either p or s could derive one from the other, or that both could derive from yet another sound. Sometimes an unusual correspondence does occur, which would presume a chain of changes, but if it is valid it should be consistent over a series of word pairs or sets, and some parts of the chain would also likely be found in other languages, since the number of sounds the human vocal apparatus is capable of producing is large but not infinite.
@Marie-Lucie
“I disagree that comparison has to start with “cognate sets” (or rather, “sets of resemblant forms suggesting cognacy”, since cognates cannot be established just by looking at individual resemblances.”
Good point.
“I don’t think it is restricted to just Penutian and Uto-Aztecan, but I have not looked at other languages from that point of view. I thought it must be an areal phenomenon.”
That’s what we don’t know. Everything has an areal distribution of sorts. They could be related or unrelated, or, if related, related at a deep or recent level. Self-reciprocal terminology does seem to be a (North) Amerindian phenomenon (in the Old World it doesn’t show up until such remote places as Australia and Papua New Guinea). It’s reconstructible for proto-Athabascan and proto-UA. The advantage of looking at self-reciprocal terminology is that it forms sets (sometimes very large sets). With time, a self-reciprocal set degrades, simplifies and becomes irregular. (E.g., in IE Hitt huhhas ‘grandfather’ has its self-reciprocal counterpart in OIr (h)aue ‘grandfather’ but otherwise the pattern is broken.) if a subgroup or a language has a full set of self-reciprocal terms, then it gives one a cue as to what to look for in other subgroups or languages of the family.
“Sorry, these cannot be right. Just because the sounds in question occur in the same place in words which have “some” similarity in shape and meaning does not mean that they constitute a valid correspondence.”
Absolutely agree. Some people tried to force IE *pH2ter and Slav *stryji (sorry I misspelled this form before) together and proposed a sequence *ptr > *ttr- > *str. (Or *ptevis for Lith tevis ‘father’). But others remained unconvinced. The shared morphology and semantics, however, are so specific that one is left without any other choice but to keep thinking about a phonetic solution. This example is not the only one. Lat nepo:s, Lith nepuotis, Gk anepsios correspond to Slav *nestera, *netiji ‘niece, nephew’.
I don’t buy the IE *pt > Slav *tt transition but then tt > st seems very natural and well-known in Slavic. Using my methodology, I did arrive at a solution for the puzzle, which I think works better than anything proposed before but it again requires a large-scale rethinking of IE phonology. (Not a bad thing by itself, IMHO.) But recently I lost a Facebook friend (a sharp and thoughtful Indo-Europeanist) over my solution. He thought it was too radical for our friendship, so I better keep it for myself here, or SFReader and TR will call cops on me for disturbing their sleep. 🙂
Erratum: “(E.g., in IE Hitt huhhas ‘grandfather’ has its self-reciprocal counterpart in OIr (h)aue ‘grandfather’…” should read: in IE Hitt huhhas ‘grandfather’ has its self-reciprocal counterpart in OIr (h)aue ‘grandson’..”
No time tonight to catch up with the thread, so just so much for now:
1) On the long consonant in hippos: I misremembered Donald Ringe’s blog post about this putative cognate set; probably I was thinking about the Anatolian development instead of the Greek one. In the post, Ringe never once mentions the pp as anything that would need an explanation, despite dwelling quite a bit on the h and the i.
2)
The ancestors of Latin and Greek (including Mycenaean Greek) had undergone the kentum merger: they merged [kʲ] into [k]. This turned the cluster [kʲw] into the cluster [kw]. As the next step, they both merged this cluster into [kʷ].
“Latin, Greek and Mycenaean” don’t distinguish between the outcomes of *ḱw, *kw and *kʷ. They are useless for determining which of these three the PIE “horse” word had.
3) So, the Germanic word for “root” has a prothetic *w? Why, then, isn’t there a *w before every *u that results from a syllabic sonorant? It’s wunbelievable that this would happen specifically with syllabic r but not with syllabic n.
I’m off to
bedreading that preprint-like object by Bozzone & Felisari.@David
Thanks!
I like Ringe’s post. But here are my thoughts:
1. He doesn’t discuss gemination in depth because he doesn’t have anything to say about it. He probably ranks it lower in importance than the problem of Gk -i- and h-. But if you take the gemination -pp- in Gk and -zz- in CLuwian seriously, then it makes the cluster interpretation impossible because it would require two identical back-to-back clusters *kw turning into labiovelars *Kw (-*kwkw > *KwKw). You could argue that gemination postdated the formation of /p/ from labiovelar kw but then what about CLuw -zz-? It must have happened independently and affected the postulated original palatovelar.
2. The cluster k’w is rare, and Ringe mentions this. So we’re already risking postulating an ad hoc development. I would consider interesting an idea of reconstructing a compact voiceless palatolabiovelar phoneme for PIE (matched by a voiced aspirated palatolabiovelar as seen in Gk the:ros ~ Slav *zve:ri ‘animal’) but the cluster is just not compelling enough. One could reconstruct a cluster in place of any labiovelar attested in Gk, Latin, Myc or Gothic. But nobody does this.
3. A good example of a cluster would be PIE *pek’u- (Skrt pasu-, Lith pasu-, Lat pekus ‘cattle’). There’s a palatovelar, /u/ but no conversion into /q/ in Latin.
4. It’s a minor quibble but an objection nevertheless: H1 is unattested in Hittite, so with it in the anlaut of *H1ekwo- we have an etymon with a rare cluster in the middle and an unattested consonant in the onset. This is not a convincing reconstruction.
5. The current reconstruction *H1ek’wo- leaves the IE word for HORSE without an etymology. Ringe acknowledges it. For me, this is a big problem because if a reconstruction doesn’t elucidate the origin of a word, there must be something wrong with the reconstruction.
Alternatively, the equation Skrt sapha-/Slav *kopyto ~ Gk hippos/Lat equus is etymologically informative. Indo Europeans after all classified the horse either as a hoofed animal or as a hornless animal. It has a number of advantages over the conventional reconstruction *H1ek’wo-: 1) it’s phonetically crisp (no soupy clusters, no attested consonants), with a necessary conclusion that palatovelars turned into /s/ and labiovelars turned into /p/ already in PIE times, or prior to the divergence of IE languages; 2) it’s semantically straightforward; 3) it’s morphologically compatible (comp. Slav *kopyto and Gl hippotes) and 4) it fills in a distributional gap: Slavic is currently thought to lack a cognate for the IE word for HORSE but it turns out that it has a form that’s potentially a phonetic and semantic archaism.
I treat the little phonetic puzzles that the equation Skrt sapha-/Slav *kopyto ~ Gk hippos/Lat equus poses more as a bonus, than a liability. Any solution to a big problem opens the gates for some smaller problems. (Grimm’s law had issues and those issues were later successfully resolved by Werner’s Law.) The conventional etymology doe the opposite: it reflects all the busy attempts to explain every little phonetic detail but as a result it generates a completely inscrutable etymon.
@David
“So, the Germanic word for “root” has a prothetic *w? Why, then, isn’t there a *w before every *u that results from a syllabic sonorant? It’s wunbelievable that this would happen specifically with syllabic r but not with syllabic n.”
Could you give me a couple of examples? In Germ *wurtiz < *Rd- the prothesis is motivated by the previous loss of the front consonant. Sort of like in Armenian the famous metathesis that created elbayr out of *bhreH2ter 'brother' resulted in the emergence of a prothetic vowel e- because now the word began with a resonant and this was against the rules of the ancient Armenian language.
The current reconstruction *H1ek’wo- leaves the IE word for HORSE without an etymology. Ringe acknowledges it. For me, this is a big problem because if a reconstruction doesn’t elucidate the origin of a word, there must be something wrong with the reconstruction.
Suppose that in the near future the Americans colonize Mars, and they bring horses, who are able to survive thanks to the brilliant technology that has been invented for adding oxygen to the atmosphere. After a few centuries or millennia, Martian English has turned into a number of mutually incomprehensible languages. At this point, the Martians rediscover historical linguistics. A perceptive scholar is able to deduce that the horse in Proto-Martian was *hors. But there are no other words in the proto-language that appear to be related to *hors (other than compounds containing *hors) and so no one can offer a clue to the etymology of this reconstructed word. This does not mean it is a false reconstruction.
Proto-Indo-European was not in any significant sense a ‘younger language’ than modern languages: it already had a history stretching back thousands of years and so had plenty of words, no doubt originally derived, but without identifiable etymologies.
I have read that the ancient Indian grammarians debated whether or not all nouns in Sanskrit were derived from “roots” (the answer clearly being “no”), but I don’t know if this means verbal roots or a more general concept.
@Geroge Gibbard.
It’s a nice thought experiment – science fiction as a guide for science. 🙂 However, I wouldn’t use unique cases (Eng horse, Eng dog) as a material to inform a general methodology. Especially so, if so much of Indo-European cultural reconstruction, homeland and dating hinges on its wheeled transport pulled by horses. In your thought experiment it amounts to a situation when the English word ‘rocket’ suddenly becomes etymologically opaque to future scholars.
What’s also interesting about the hoof > horse transition in PIE is that the HOOF isogloss is attested in Slavic, Indo-Aryan and Germanic, while the derived HORSE isogloss in Baltic, Greek, Latin and Celtic. Indo-Aryan and Germanic have both forms. Slavic has only HOOF, while Baltic (Slavic and Baltic form a subclade with IE) has only HORSE. So there’s an east to west cline in the transition from HOOF to HORSE: western dialects are HORSE only, while eastern are both HOOF and HORSE. This can be interpreted as a lexical trace of the westward expansion of IE languages.
If all knowledge of Italian had been lost, rocket would be etymologically opaque, and we would have conjectures that it was an ironic name derived from a diminutive form of rock.
Others would, of course, point to French perroquet “parrot”, and to colorful fireworks to bridge the semantic gap.
I gave one: the prefix un-, from PIE */n̩/ (zero-grade of */ne/), lacks a prothetic */w/ in every Germanic language I’m aware of, and has never been reconstructed with one either.
I can’t think of other examples off the top of my head; there can’t be examples with */r/ because */r/ was not allowed as a PIE word onset. But un- alone already makes your hypothesis rather wunbelievable.
I’ll now try to catch up with the rest of this thread.
@David
“But un- alone already makes your hypothesis rather wunbelievable.”
That’s an overstatement, but I’ll keep looking into this issue.
BTW, re cluster vs. labiovelar in the HORSE set, I can accommodate a cluster-like solution, so that Gk hippos < *hipwos < *hik'w-wos, with -wo- as grammatical marker to turn the root with the meaning HOOF into an adjective "hoofed." A cluster hypothesis does not contradict the reconstruction of a labiovelar.
German Dziebel, Nov. 4, 10:20 am:
I have now read the whole paper again. (BTW, it has two first authors – “These authors contributed equally to this work” –, so it should be Raghavan, Skoglund et al..) Maybe you should do the same. Yes, MA-1 is indeed “closer to modern Amerindian populations than it is to any modern Eurasian population” – but the paper (p. 88) puts a direction on this:
“However, a significant residual was observed between the empirical covariance for MA-1 and Karitiana, a Native American population, and the covariance predicted by the tree model (Supplementary Fig. 12). Consequently, gene flow between these lineages was inferred in all graphs incorporating two or more migration events (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 13). Bootstrap support for the migration edge from MA-1 to Karitiana, rather than from Karitiana to MA-1, was 99% in this analysis.”
“This result is consistent with allele frequency-based D-statistic tests^20 on SNP arrays for 48 Native American populations of entirely First American ancestry^19, indicating that all tested populations are equally related to MA-1 and that the admixture event occurred before the population diversification of the First American gene pool (Fig. 3a, Supplementary Information, section 14.4 and Supplementary Fig. 24).”
In other words, the authors thought of the possibility that MA-1 could be a back-migrant from America, tested it, and found it insufficient. In the next sentence (still on the same page) they even spell it out:
“The genetic affinity between Native Americans and MA-1 could be explained by gene flow after the split between east Asians and Native Americans, either from the MA-1 lineage into Native American ancestors or from Native American ancestors to the ancestors of MA-1. However, MA-1, at approximately 24,000 cal. BP, pre-dates time estimates of the Native American–east Asian population divergence event^24,25. This presents little time for the formation of a diverged Native American gene pool that could have contributed ancestry to MA-1, suggesting gene flow from the MA-1 lineage into Native American ancestors.”
Take a good look at figure 2, too.
On the next page, you’ll see that the authors took the idea of a back-migration really seriously and tested it again and again, always with the same result:
“Thus, if the gene flow direction was from Native Americans into western Eurasians it would have had to spread subsequently to European, Middle Eastern, south Asian and central Asian populations, including MA-1 before 24,000 years ago. Moreover, as Native Americans are closer to Han Chinese than to Papuans (Fig. 3c), Native American-related gene flow into the ancestors of MA-1 is expected to result in MA-1 also being closer to Han Chinese than to Papuans. However, our results suggest that this is not the case (D(Papuan, Han; Sardinian, MA-1) = −0.002 ± 0.005 (Z = −0.36)), which is compatible with all or almost all of the gene flow being into Native Americans (Supplementary Information, section 14.6). Similar results are obtained when MA-1 is replaced with most modern-day western Eurasian populations, except populations with recent admixture from east Asia (Russian, Adygei and Burusho) and Africa (Middle Eastern populations) (Fig. 3c). The most parsimonious explanation for these results is that Native Americans have mixed origins, resulting from admixture between peoples related to modern-day east Asians and western Eurasians. Admixture graphs fitted with MixMapper^27 model Karitiana as having 14–38% western Eurasian ancestry and 62–86% east Asian ancestry, but we caution that these estimates assume unadmixed ancestral populations (Supplementary Information, section 12).”
Later on that page:
“allele frequency-based D-statistic tests^20 show that all 48 tested modern-day populations with First American ancestry^19 are equally related to MA-1 within the resolution of our data (Supplementary Information, section 14.4)”
I honestly wonder if perhaps you never made it past the paywall. But even if so, the paywalled “paper” is just an extended abstract. The actual paper is the so-called supplementary information, a doorstop of 12.9 MB and 110 pages that you can freely download as a PDF from the link at the bottom of this page. Section 14.4, which stresses that all Native American samples except those from Eskimo-Aleut speakers are equally close to MA-1, begins on p. 90; also check out the end of 14.5 and all of 14.6 (p. 92).
John Cowan, Nov. 5, 8:15 pm:
I’ve certainly never heard of an attempt to discover regular sound correspondences or shared morphology for it, but it is a hypothesis. Start here.
German Dziebel, Nov. 8, 12:39 am:
Well, that would be convienent. Nowadays, however, [sʷ] is such a rare phoneme worldwide – Wikipedia lists only Archi, Lezgian and Lao as languages that have it – that I’d require really strong evidence to reconstruct it for an unattested language.
So is, to me and everything I’ve heard or read about science so far, your claim that the goal of establishing “laws” as in “natural laws” that make a theory “proven.” I don’t know of anybody who’s looking for laws in all of biology! (Everything you might have read about “laws of evolution” is either flat-out wrong or grossly exaggerated, and that’s current consensus and textbook wisdom speaking, not just me.) That’s not surprising, because all laws that have been postulated elsewhere can be derived from those of physics and mathematics.
A law is just a generalization across a lot of observations, usually expressible as a mathematical formula. It states; it doesn’t explain.
Laws don’t prove theories. Theories explain laws.
I have no way of accessing your paper.
marie-lucie, Nov. 8, 1:56 pm:
I mean he should have tried to find regular sound correspondences (which he only did in a very approximate way in his macrofamily work). Without that, reconstructing a common ancestor isn’t possible in the first place.
German Dziebel, Nov. 8, 4:26 pm:
If it’s not a Latin loan, it presupposes either *s or *w; *w is present in the putative Germanic cognates. Both would have been lost in Latin.
But why should we?
Where do Latin cord-, Greek kard-, Germanic *hert- come from? You leave them dangling.
Are potential cognates with meanings like “middle” or “core” attested? And does a shift from “core” to “root” have any parallels elsewhere?
Only if they understand the morphology and the sound systems of the languages they’re comparing. That’s generally not the case.
Nov. 9, 8:36:
That simply doesn’t follow. Such an immigration would not at all have needed to be large to have the effects observed in history.
=====================
I’m too tired to continue, I’m off to bed.
@David
“Yes, MA-1 is indeed “closer to modern Amerindian populations than it is to any modern Eurasian population” – but the paper (p. 88),”
So it is an Amerindian marker in the Old World by definition.
“puts a direction on this.”
Raghavan et al’s argument on directionality is mired in assumptions (they assume that Amerindians must have diverged from East Asians before the link with West Eurasians appeared but what if East Asians and West Eurasians both split from Amerindians but didn’t admixed with each other afterwards, so they would be equidistant to Papuans). See more in the comments section here: http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org/2015/07/amerindians-are-even-more-genetically-diverse-and-older-than-we-thought/.
“I honestly wonder if perhaps you never made it past the paywall.”
You must be kidding. I actually read both the main text and the supplementary material. You didn’t even know the paper I initially referenced.
“Nowadays, however, [sʷ] is such a rare phoneme worldwide – Wikipedia lists only Archi, Lezgian and Lao as languages that have it – that I’d require really strong evidence to reconstruct it for an unattested language.”
Thanks, that’s useful.
“If it’s not a Latin loan, it presupposes either *s or *w; *w is present in the putative Germanic cognates. Both would have been lost in Latin.”
Why would it need to be lost in Greek or Latin? E.g., we would expect vardix** in Latin and v- would have been perfectly safe in Latin.
“But why should we?”
Because we need to bake an etymological solution into the cognate set composition. Instead, we’re not first building a set, reconstructing an etymon and only then trying to find a match with a different cognate set to supply an etymology. This is ahistorical and results in dead-ends as *H1ek’wos.
“Only if they understand the morphology and the sound systems of the languages they’re comparing. That’s generally not the case.”
But someone needs to do the work of looking at the vast amount of data in search of potential patterns. Most amateurs do have a basic knowledge of linguistics but I agree they should learn more of it.
“Such an immigration would not at all have needed to be large to have the effects observed in history>”
yes, that’s one of the counterarguments.
*eyeroll* If you want a theory-free description, as “by definition” heavily implies, you can’t say it’s either an ANE marker in the New World or an Amerindian marker in the Old World.
…No, they test this hypothesis and find it more consistent with their data than any alternative. The scenario follows straight from their data.
That’s a really telling post, you know. You present the latest papers, then you state your conclusions in the last paragraph – and how you arrived at those conclusions is only revealed when commenters pull your arguments out of your nose one by one.
Well. There are so many of those arguments now, and there’s so much wrong with them, that I don’t have time to pick them apart now or anytime soon. So, just one thing: are you aware that all these papers contain both phenetic and phylogenetic analyses and simply expect the readers to recognize which are which?
Well. You cited one figure of the paper to support your conclusion, but completely ignored everything else, including the salient fact that the paper explicitly tested and rejected your very hypothesis several times. I was left with two conclusions: either you hadn’t read those parts, or you were cherry-picking the paper based on your wishful thinking. I went with the more charitable assumption.
I did; it was, after all, all over the popular media, so there was no way to overlook it. Being affiliated with an academic institution, I downloaded and read it long ago. I just didn’t remember the names of the authors.
You see, this isn’t my field, so I’ll never need to cite the paper in a publication of mine; and that means I have no reason to pay attention to who wrote what.
Paying attention to names, or more generally to persons I don’t interact with much, doesn’t come naturally to me. You seem to come from a completely different headspace, seeing as you have lots and lots of people as categories on your blog.
I didn’t say anything about Greek. About Latin, I actually don’t know what happened to syllabic */r/ there; in the “bear” word, it turned into ur – PIE *h₂ŕḱtsos, Latin ursus.
Besides, **var- doesn’t look Latin to me. There are plenty of words with vor- < ver-, but with var- I can only think of varius and its derivatives.
What if your assumption that the “heart” and “root” words in question need to form a cognate set is false?
I asked a few specific questions about that that you haven’t answered.
I’ll get to that one. 🙂
Back to catching up.
Oh, on phenetic vs. phylogenetic, that’s why I asked what you meant by “closer”.
Lewis & Short give us vāra ‘trestle or forked pole for spreading nets on’, vargus ‘vagabond’ (said to be a Celtic borrowing), vārico ‘straddle’ (with the delightful derivative varicator ‘one who walks with his legs spread apart’), varix ‘dilated vein’, vāro ‘stupid boor’, varus ‘pimple’, and a lot of proper names. Some of these may be related to varius somehow, but I don’t see it.
@David
“either an ANE marker in the New World or an Amerindian marker in the Old World.”
ANE is a hypothetical population. Amerindian is a real one. Remember: MA-1 is closer to Amerindians than to any Old World population. So by definition it’s an Amerindian signature found in the Old World.
“No, they test this hypothesis and find it more consistent with their data than any alternative. The scenario follows straight from their data.”
No, they everywhere assume that Amerindians derive from East Asians. That’s precisely why, when they see that Amerindians are closer to East Asians than to Papuans, while West Eurasians are not closer to East Asians than they are to Papuans, they conclude that MA-1 admixed into Amerindians and not the other way around. If, however, East Asians and West Eurasians are both derived from Amerindians but there was no gene flow between EA and WE since the split, we wouldn’t expect West Eurasians to be closer to East Asians.
“You present the latest papers, then you state your conclusions in the last paragraph – and how you arrived at those conclusions is only revealed when commenters pull your arguments out of your nose one by one.”
That’s fair. It’s a blog, you know… But you got to read previous posts, too.
“You cited one figure of the paper to support your conclusion…”
It’s the one that people tend to ignore… All of the authors’ tests are based on an assumption of an East Asian origin of Amerindians prior to admixture with West Eurasians. The whole thing is untenable because based in assumptions and not data. For instance, there are no West Eurasian components in Amerindian populations, only “ANE” but MA-1 is a geographically East Asian sample. But at 24,000 YBP instead of an East Asian genetic component it showed an Amerindian one.
” was left with two conclusions: either you hadn’t read those parts, or you were cherry-picking the paper based on your wishful thinking. I went with the more charitable assumption.”
Thank you, I deserve it. But I won’t return you a favor. You simply didn’t know this paper, or utterly forgot about it and now you’re desperately trying to catch up. Sorry, I have to go with the facts.
“Oh, on phenetic vs. phylogenetic, that’s why I asked what you meant by “closer”.
That’s indeed a critical distinction. On PCAs (phenetic) MA-1 is closer to West Eurasians than to Amerindians (but still closer to Amerindians than to East Asians), while f3 stats (phylogenetic) show that MA-1 is closest to Amerindians.
“You seem to come from a completely different headspace, seeing as you have lots and lots of people as categories on your blog.”
People, haplogroups, everything. You gotta keep track of things.
BTW, I’m happy to discuss both my IE etymologies and out-of-America but I’d prefer to split them into two threads. I invite you to visit my site and we can talk about out-of-America there. And we can keep the IE discussion in this thread.
“I didn’t say anything about Greek. About Latin, I actually don’t know what happened to syllabic */r/ there; in the “bear” word, it turned into ur – PIE *h₂ŕḱtsos, Latin ursus.
Besides, **var- doesn’t look Latin to me. There are plenty of words with vor- < ver-, but with var- I can only think of varius and its derivatives."
Good observations, thanks. In any case, the Latin and Greek forms are hard to reconcile with the Germanic and Celtic forms, if we are really strict about phonomorphology here. And it's hard to resolve those issues having only one heavily doctored set of forms. My approach opens it up to more data and hence more chances to solve it.
"What if your assumption that the “heart” and “root” words in question need to form a cognate set is false?"
Sure, that's how science works. If you can provide a different set of pairs of forms that bake an etymological solution into them, I'd be happy to consider them. But the problem is the comparative method as it exists now is vulnerable at that fundamental level. I'm trying to make it less vulnerable.
David,
I’m fascinated by this conversation for completely non-linguistic reasons. I hope my question doesn’t offend you because it comes from a place of respect and I’m legitimately curious, but, what do you get out of your participation this thread?
vargus ‘vagabond’ (said to be a Celtic borrowing)
Or Germanic? Cf. vargr.
The question of syllabic R in Latin is a red herring because the standard etymology has an e-grade: PIE *wreh2d- > Lat ra:d- (completely regular).
Re: de vivre’s “I’m fascinated by this conversation for completely non-linguistic reasons. I hope my question doesn’t offend you because it comes from a place of respect and I’m legitimately curious, but, what do you get out of your participation this thread?”
Another ad hominem post. This time from a passive-aggressive type. Confirms my hypothesis that anonymous posters are more likely to write adhominem posts.
@TR
“The question of syllabic R in Latin is a red herring because the standard etymology has an e-grade: PIE *wreh2d- > Lat ra:d- (completely regular).”
How do we get Germ *wurtiz from *wreh2d-? If we reconstruct R (syllabic) instead, Germ *ur is a matter of course.
Fair enough, the Germanic forms do point to a zero-grade. But that too would give a long a in Latin, where *CRHC > Cra:C; the Latin form is inconclusive as to the vowel grade, but the *w- etymology works unproblematically either way.
German Dziebel,
I love you, please never change.
@de vivre
Can you get off the German Dziebel topic? Anybody can discuss that. But do you have anything substantial to contribute? If not, just remain silent and don’t troll the thread.
@TR
“*w- etymology works unproblematically either way.”
Just to confirm: are you now reconstructing *wRH2d-? Either way, how can it be unproblematic if it requires *w > h in Greek, which is contrary to common sense?
German Dziebel:
You are not entitled to say on this blog what is and what is not an acceptable posting. That privilege belongs exclusively to our host, who has in this (one) case delegated it to me. Please talk about languages, or indeed anything else (topic drift is always encouraged here), but not about other posters, even if they provoke you (as it seems to you) by talking about you.
“I have strange powers, people. Don’t make me use them. Don’t even make me show them.” —The Lord Redlady of the Instrumentality of Mankind
Everyone,
I think we’ve gnawed enough on the HEART-ROOT example. Let’s switch gears a bit. Here’s a good parallel example to the HEART-ROOT situation, which will allow us to refresh our thinking on it. IE *wLkwo- ‘wolf’ is well represented across the IE dialects (Lat lupus, Gk lykos but Germ. *wulhwaz, Lith vilkas, Slav *vliku ‘wolf’, Toch B walkwe ‘wolf’, etc.), but, again, this set does not have a good etymology. Below I’m showing that it’s morphology has been misanalyzed, too.
Here’s my analysis of the WOLF set, which parallels my analysis of the HEART-ROOT superset. I reconstruct PIE *k’we- ‘wolf, dog’ that yielded two early affixal derivatives – *k’wen- ‘dog’ (Gk kuo:n, Lat canis, Slav *senka, Arn sun, etc.) and *k’wel-kwo- ‘wolf’. Skrt svaka ‘wolf’, vrka ‘wolf’ and Avest spaka ‘dog’, verka ‘wolf’ establish the possibility of the connection between the IE sets for the dog and the wolf. Skrt svaka/Avest spaka are morphologically archaic as they don’t have either the -n-, or the -l- (> InAr -r-) suffix. Arm skund ‘young dog’ and Gk skulaks ‘same’ show that indeed affixes -n- and -l- were in alternation. OIr cuilen and Welsh colwyn ‘young dog’ (forms without the difficult s-mobile) also confirm that the l-suffix alternated with the n-suffix. (They are not product of dissimilation from *kunen, but independent l- formations from more basic *k’we-.)
So, basically, l- in lykos and lupus corresponds to the affixal -n- is kuo:n and canis. Gk lykos (< *lhykos) is the same as -ulaks in Gk skulaks, just like Gk rhad-i-ks is the same as -ard- in kard-i-a.
On a methodological note, if we reconstruct PIE *k'we- 'wolf, dog' we can easily compare it with Uralic *kujna 'wolf' and Eskimo-Aleut qenRa 'wolf'. Even the IE DOG form is presently compared with this "Nostratic" set but the fact that the IE term for 'wolf' can be shown to be related to the IE term for 'dog' makes this long-range equation quite intriguing. So my methodology can actually clear some obstacles for long-range comparison.
@John Cowan
“Please talk about languages, or indeed anything else (topic drift is always encouraged here), but not about other posters, even if they provoke you (as it seems to you) by talking about you.”
Fair.
Just to be clear, if I haven’t been clear yet, Germ. wulhwaz, etc. from the WOLF set show the loss of a frontal palatovelar that’s retained in the DOG set.
Wait, are you now disputing any Greek etymologies where PIE *w(V)r- corresponds to Greek rho? If I remember correctly, it’s a pretty widely used correspondence, regardless of what you think of it in terms of common sense. Rough breathing on word-intial rho was not contrastive, so you could also consider it as a simple loss of the *w (as happened in modern English) followed by allophonic word-initial devoicing of the rho. Unfortunately I don’t have access to a professional etymological dictionary right now, but here are some correspondence sets using it that are listed in Wiktionary: Germanic : *wurmiz “worm”, Latin vermis “worm”, Ancient Greek ῥόμος “wood-worm”; Ancient Greek ῥέζω “I do” and the “work” words; Latin ūrīnor ”submerge in water” and Ancient Greek ῥαίνω “sprinkle”. There are also words possibly not descended from PIE that show loss of w before r, such as ῥόδον “rose” which Wiktionary says has been connected to Arabic warda “rose, blossom” with the ultimate origin likely being Persian. Wiktionary even lists ϝρῆξῐς as an attested alternative form in Aeolic dialects of ῥῆξις “breaking.” Are all of these erroneous?
simple loss of the *w (as happened in modern English)
Despite intuition, there’s a good case to be made that /r-/ and /wr-/ merged into /wr/ rather than /r/, or at any rate that all /r-/ in English is strongly labialized, which is probably what /wr-/ was before.
@Eli Nelson
“Wait, are you now disputing any Greek etymologies where PIE *w(V)r- corresponds to Greek rho?”
As I mentioned somewhere above, the most stable and natural correspondence is IE s ~ Gk h. Greek also shows the ubiquitous loss of IE *w. I therefore think that the handful of examples where Gk h SEEMS to correspond to IE w and y must be false positives. They are neither phonetically natural, nor systematic.
I haven’t worked through all the cognate sets you listed but regarding Germanic : *wurmiz “worm”, Latin vermis “worm”, Ancient Greek ῥόμος “wood-worm” I compare it with IE *kwrmis ‘worm’ (Skrt krmi-, Lith kirmis, Alb krimb, etc.) I would prefer if the *kwrmis set turned up a palatovelar (to link to h < *s in Greek ῥόμος) but in any case IE w does not correspond to h in the Greek word. -w- is regularly lost in Greek.
Why does anything need to correspond to an h in the Greek word? As mentioned earlier, word-initial rho was regularly written with a rough breathing. This is true even for loanwords and placenames that had word-intial /r/ in the source language, where there is clearly no historically distinct /h/ segment. I think I remember reading about one exception to this rule involving a Greek goddess whose name was written with a rho with smooth breathing, but the general practice seems to show that there was no exception for words without etymological /h/.
My point is that the rough breathing on rho does not seem to be sufficient evidence for reconstructing an independent /h/ segment before it historically. There may have been; but I don’t see how you can say that there must have been.
German Dziebel, Nov. 10, 9:53 am:
You mean *sr > *hr and *sr > *r, right?
Morpheme-initially, *sr wasn’t allowed to become r in Greek. Nothing was allowed to become r there. “Rh” was the only option.
Perhaps an intermediate stage *hr, from earlier *sr, is the reason why “rh” was generalized to every morpheme-initial r; but the fact is that both *sr- and *wr- ended up in Greek as “rh-“, and that loans with truly initial r also did.
In short, we cannot distinguish *sr > *hr > “rh” from *sr > *r > “rh” in Greek. We must expect the same outcome either way.
For a voiceless r that is not descended from earlier [hr], see Welsh. It’s even spelled rh.
Wow, what a splendid return of conjectures on the investment of so little fact.
What, if anything, makes you think that the Skt for “horse” and the Skt for “hoof” are cognate with each other and yet follow completely different sound correspondences? If at least one of them were a loan… but no…
I thought trikhos is simply the completely regular genitive of thriks? Because if so, we’re not dealing with a doublet here.
What we’re dealing with is Grassmann’s law: from some rather late stage onwards (*s had already turned into *h), Greek only allowed one aspiration per word. If there were two, the first was deleted. So, first, on the morphophonemic level, you get thrikhs, genitive thrikhos; on the phonemic level, gs, ks and khs merge into something where aspiration is at least not contrastive, so you get thriks at the phonemic level, and that already fulfills the new constraint; in thrikhos, you have two at the phonemic level, and Grassmann’s law deletes the first, yielding trikhos. (And ultimately Trichosurus, the brushtail possum.)
Nov. 10, 2:22 pm:
If you say so…
If that form is real, I must mention that Skt h (voiced [ɦ]) can’t be derived from *s either, only from *ǵʰ.
Nov. 10, 2:32 pm:
It’s recursive. First you classify tentatively, then you find regular sound correspondences, then you find irregularities, then you revisit the correspondences and/or the classification, then you try again…
I don’t quite understand what you mean. After all, you haven’t claimed that different sound correspondences can apply to different sets in the same language.
marie-lucie, Nov. 10, 2:50 pm:
Greenberg didn’t build his “Amerind” from the bottom up, though. The subclassification is later and, by his own criteria and – IIRC – his own frank admission, less well supported than “Amerind” as a whole.
German Dziebel, Nov. 10, 3:12 pm:
I don’t think any approach can fully explain the German synonyms lecken (northwest?) and schlecken (southeast?) or a number of other such cases.
Nov. 11, 12:52 am:
It absolutely is, because that would be the one and only case of s from a palatalized velar in the whole language.
Not at all. It’s a regular merger of two (series of) phonemes, as opposed to the random presence or absence of one phoneme.
…But that happens in different languages, not in different randomly selected words in the same language.
OK, in Greek it does happen in the same language, but in different (and easily identifiable) phonetic environments.
These are supposed to be cognate? Are you serious?
So is that of “liver” and “water” and a bunch of others. I don’t see your point…?
Or textbook wisdom could be correct, and “100” is simply formed from “10”, *dḱm-t-ó-m, with simplification of the impressive consonant cluster by loss of the *d.
Why is “old” *sen- and not *sem-?
The latter fairly obviously contains the root *ser-, which was used to form words for women in Anatolian and also shows up in the feminine forms of “3” and “4” that only Celtic and Iranian have (*tisres < *trisres; *kʷetesres).
TR, Nov. 11, 1:43 am:
Why, though, would this Nicander borrow a Latin word for “root” as soon as the Romans show up?
1:56 am:
That’s fascinating!
Section 3.1 says: “In treating the etymology of ἵππος, de Vaan (2009:203) […] explains the –i– vocalism in the root by schwa epenthesis, after Vine (1999), a phenomenon situated in Pre-Greek. The ø grade in Greek is explained as deriving from a Late PIE (=Core PIE) thematization of the original –u-stem noun (preserved in Hittite), based on the genitive singular of the inflection.”
The last sentence says that the form *h₁éḱwos isn’t PIE at all, but belongs to the non-Anatolian branch, and was built from the actual PIE form, which was *h₁éḱus!
And then it turns out this has been on Wiktionary all along. Just goes to show how maddeningly heterogenous Wiktionary is.
Next, Bozzone & Felisari mention that Greek not only has ἵππος from zero-grade *h₁ḱwo-, but also a person name Ἐπειός from e-grade *h₁eḱwo-: no /h/, no /i/, and no length on the /p/.
I conclude that the /h/ and the /i/ that still puzzled Ringe in 2009 are explained; what’s left is the /pː/, which wasn’t mentioned by either Ringe or Bozzone & Felisari, but which appears to be a development within Greek if Ἐπειός isn’t some kind of loan.
John Cowan, Nov. 11, 2:08 am:
Heh. That would be a vicious kookfight… but a very short one, alas.
TR, Nov. 11, 2:09 am:
Some kind of nominalization after a non-trivial amount of derivation?
John Cowan, Nov. 11, 9:42 am:
Have there been any new developments since this thread (where we both commented)?
I’m surprised you haven’t encountered the idea that clicks come from consonant clusters. Start from clusters; proceed to coarticulated consonants like this kind of situation; then get the timing subtly wrong, and suddenly there are clicks all over the place.
“Nobody” is a strong word; this page links to PDFs of five papers on the subject by G. Starostin. I haven’t read them, though, except probably the one on Hadza long ago.
marie-lucie, Nov. 11, 12:21 pm:
Not quite. Greenberg’s Eurasiatic included Nivkh and, puzzlingly*, Ainu; Nostratic excludes Ainu and at least nowadays also Nivkh, but… used to include Afro-Asiatic, though now the Moscow School has changed its terminology and excludes Afro-Asiatic while maintaining that it’s the closest relative of “Nostratic”. Clearly, they could have called that “Eurasiatic”, but didn’t because they don’t want to be seen as accepting Greenberg’s work.
* Typologically, the other language families in the group range from lightly agglutinating with suffixes and postposed clitics (like Japanese) to fusional with suffixes (IE); Ainu uses long chains of prefixes instead. It’s probably Austric, but that’s another story.
John Cowan, Nov. 11, 12:54 pm:
None of them?!? That’s surprising. And horrifying.
German Dziebel, Nov. 11, 5:38 pm:
People who use the same pseudonym consistently for years and years on different sites are hardly anonymous for this purpose. They build up a reputation, for starters.
You really haven’t thought this through. I’ll have to compare you to Zuckerberg again.
6:23 pm:
No, that’s not how it works. “Rh” is just the word-initial allophone of /r/. The aspiration/devoicing is automatic and inevitable. They did it to Rome, for crying out loud.
It so happens that PIE didn’t allow /r/ at the beginnings of words; so, if this word is inherited from PIE (rather than borrowed from Latin), it must have begun with either */sr/ or */wr/.
You assume the former possibility and ignore the latter for no discernible reason… other than your desire to connect the word to the Balto-Slavic “heart” word, that is.
Nope, that length comes rather transparently from Szemerényi’s law.
How do you know? If it doesn’t appear in poetry somewhere, you don’t know. Length on /a/ wasn’t written.
Can’t the /i/ be explained as an epenthetic vowel inserted into zero-grade */wr̩d/- as evidently happened in ἵππος?
Nov. 13, 12:34 am:
…Everyone should read this paper and Vajda’s reply which is included in the same file. Thanks a lot for the link!
And so, to bed, it’s 1:42 am over here. As a more famous Austrian has said a couple of times: I’ll be back.
Long comment currently in moderation.
http://xkcd.com/386/
On top of that, I’m learning interesting things here. Particular highlights so far are the explanation of the /h/ and the /i/ in hippos, and G. Starostin’s critique of Dene-Yeniseian – with Vajda’s reply attached.
As Eli says, there is no /h/ in the Greek words that are transcribed rh-. It’s just a voiceless R. In Greek all initial R’s are voiceless. Since Attic Greek lost /w/, initial /wr-/ became /r-/, and /r-/ was pronounced [r̥]. There’s nothing either controversial or phonetically unnatural there, and it involves no change *w- > h-.
@David
” *sr- and *wr- ended up in Greek as “rh-”, and that loans with truly initial r also did.”
You want to have the cake and eat it too: on the one hand, r is always rh in Greek regardless of its etymological source; on the other hand, rh comes from *sr or from *wr. I don’t care if all loans with r- turned into rh-, I care that all rh that are not in loan words come from *sr and IE wr ~ Gk hr is a false positive (in reality, s > h and w lost).
“Wow, what a splendid return of conjectures on the investment of so little fact.”
This is the opposite from truth. I offer facts and logic, you offer only tradition and belief. I’ve noticed that this blog is notorious for its ad verecundiam thinking. Even trolls with a tenure becomes authorities here.
“What, if anything, makes you think that the Skt for “horse” and the Skt for “hoof” are cognate with each other and yet follow completely different sound correspondences?”
There’s work to be done here, indeed. That’s what reconstruction is all about. It doesn’t just land on your lap. But you need to have the right material to even pose the right questions. *H1ek’wos, on the contrary, is a dead-end.
“What we’re dealing with is Grassmann’s law.”
Yes. That’s why it’s interesting. Something of similar suprasegmental nature may have caused the disparity between asva and sapha, or svaka and vrka.
“If that form is real, I must mention that Skt h (voiced [ɦ]) can’t be derived from *s either, only from *ǵʰ.”
Indeed, Skrt hrd- contradicts the traditional reconstruction of *k’rd. Hence, we need more material and better thinking. I tentatively note similarity between -ph- in sapha and h- in hrd.
“E *(d)akr-/-n ‘tear’ (Hitt ishahru, Skrt asru, Gk dakruma, etc.)
These are supposed to be cognate? Are you serious?”
Yes. You asked me for more examples and now you are complaining. Scholars have already noticed similarity between the two, so why not interpret it as “identity by descent” and not contamination if it’s logical, semantically valid (tear and blood are both bodily liquids) and supported by other examples???
“Why is “old” *sen- and not *sem-?”
Fait. *sem- looks better in some respects. Both would work formally at the moment. We need to better understand how the whole numeral system of IE evolved to see which one is better.
“The latter fairly obviously contains the root *ser-, which was used to form words for women in Anatolian and also shows up in the feminine forms of “3″ and “4″ that only Celtic and Iranian have (*tisres w? *s > h and *w > 0, on the other hand, are natural and well attested. Discernible enough?
“Can’t the /i/ be explained as an epenthetic vowel inserted into zero-grade */wr̩d/- as evidently happened in ἵππος?”
I didn’t buy that epenthesis argument for hippos, so it’s hard for me to use it as a model. But -i- from *ye would make sense if the front palatovelar in PIE *k’ek’wo- ‘hoof, horse’ was reanalyzed with as a cluster *kye- and then became -i in Greek.
“No, that’s not how it works. “Rh” is just the word-initial allophone of /r/. The aspiration/devoicing is automatic and inevitable. They did it to Rome, for crying out loud.
It so happens that PIE didn’t allow /r/ at the beginnings of words; so, if this word is inherited from PIE (rather than borrowed from Latin), it must have begun with either */sr/ or */wr/.”
So, I’m only interested in the cases when it’s inherited from PIE. *wr > hr doesn’t work, so one is left with *sr > hr and *w > 0. I hope you’re not denying multiple uncontroversial cases when rh- in Gk corresponds to IE *sr.
“Nope, that length comes rather transparently from Szemerényi’s law.”
It’s so funny. You tend to say something with utmost confidence but then it quickly turns out to be wrong. Your sources says literally this: “The PIE reconstruction for “heart” is the single instance where *d is deleted after *r, with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. It is not clear whether this is an isolated example, or a part of a broader process such as Szemerényi’s law.”
Why is it that what’s transparent to you is unclear to others and the other way around? 🙂
@David
““The latter fairly obviously contains the root *ser-, which was used to form words for women in Anatolian and also shows up in the feminine forms of “3″ and “4″ that only Celtic and Iranian have (*tisres w? *s > h and *w > 0?”
Something happened here. My response should have read the following: “This is one of the worst IE myths, the one fueled by generations of thinking using a flawed methodology. There’s not a single IE language in which *ser/*sor is attested as a term for ‘woman’. The evidence is circumstantial (HLuw nanasrai-, hassusara, Celt *tisres are all compounds) and very gappy. How can it be used to explain such a pervasive IE form as *sweso:r?! Indo-Europeanists don’t realize how kooky their etymologies sometimes are. Sister = ‘one’s own woman’. What an intellectual breakthrough!
@David
“People who use the same pseudonym consistently for years and years on different sites are hardly anonymous for this purpose. They build up a reputation, for starters.”
And then they lose it in one day! 🙂
“You really haven’t thought this through. I’ll have to compare you to Zuckerberg again.”
In my personal experience, over the past 10 years, the most meaningful contributions were made by people with real names or with easily traceable identities. I don’t want to oversimplify the situation, but I just follow the facts as they come along. On this blog: SFReader, minus209676, joie vivre are all ad hominem. Marie-Lucie, David Marjanovich are not. TR in between. I don’t why, though. Maybe anonymous people don’t like strong opinions. they want everything, not just names, to be understated. 🙂
Ainu uses long chains of prefixes instead. It’s probably Austric, but that’s another story.
Not to derail from the horses and heartroots, but… so far the best arguments I’ve seen for Ainu as part of “Greater Austric” are a bunch of loose wordlists where, for example, proto-Ainu initial /k/ corresponds to /k/, /x/, /s/, 0, etc, “ear” and “dirt” are supposed to be cognates, etc. Overall the evidence for this “Greater Austric” including Ainu hasn’t seemed to me any more convincing than the evidence for “Greater Altaic” including Korean and Japanese (or GAlt including Ainu, for that matter). What makes you come down on the “probably” side?
And then they lose it in one day! 🙂
The only one who has lost it here is you. The others you mention are all longtime contributors who have always had sensible and interesting things to say; you show up parading your (alleged) real name and (alleged) credentials and produce endless strings of (to be generous) inadequately supported ideas, and when called on the obvious failings say something like “There’s work to be done here.” I have been staying away from the thread because I find you so irritating, but since others seem to enjoy interacting with you despite your obnoxious ways I have let the thread take its course, asking John Cowan (who I know is not easily offended) to keep an eye on it and let me know if you were crossing the line. This is just a note to urge you in the strongest terms to stick to discussing the linguistic issues and refrain from any personal comments whatever about your interlocutors, however strongly you feel the urge to call them trolls or ignorant or the like. Treat everyone here as though they were respected equals; if you can’t bring yourself to do that, then just go away. Thanks!
@languagehat
You just proved my point. Get a real name, real creds and learn how to counter an argument with an argument and not with an ad hominem attack. I haven’t attacked anybody on this blog and only defended myself a few times against the personal attacks by others. “when called on the obvious failings say something like “There’s work to be done here.” and “inadequately supported ideas” are not rational arguments.
“I have been staying away from the thread because I find you so irritating.” Sure, a carefully argued and well-supported position from a self-critical commenter is always irritating to someone like you.
I don’t need to blog here. And don’t try to bully me with your rants. If you block me, you will leave me with no other option than to have you join my Kunstkamera collection of dishonorable online individuals at http://www.anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org.
Otherwise, as Hat is too polite to say but I am not, the Strange Powers come into play: third time is the charm.
Back to semantics:
horse/hoof
Even though horses have big hooves, they are far from being the only animal that has them (see the name “Ungulates”), so I don’t see the rationale for naming the one after the other (in any order).
tears/blood
If the common meaning is “liquid”, there is at least one other liquid rejected by the body: urine. The appearance, smell and feel of these various liquids are quite different, as well as the conditions under which they leave the body. I would be extremely surprised to learn of a language in which their names (in twos or threes) derive from a common ancestor.
A sense of infallibility is a wonderful thing to possess.
Get a real name
Your powers of observation apparently do not extend to casting your eye to the right, where it clearly says “My name is Steve Dodson.” I have been languagehat all over the internet since 2002; it is a nice, memorable moniker and has served me well, but my real name is not a mystery. You could of course respond “How do I know that’s your real name?” — to which I would respond “a-HA-a!” You will of course have contempt for my responding with a video clip of a joke instead of a reasoned argument, but that’s OK, because you’re out of here.
I don’t need to blog here. And don’t try to bully me with your rants. If you block me, you will leave me with no other option than to have you join my Kunstkamera collection of dishonorable online individuals at http://www.anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org.
You sure don’t, I’m not bullying but banning you, and I am thrilled to join your collection of dishonorable online individuals; believe me, you’re far from the first internet kook/jerk who’s become annoyed with me. We’ll just each have to pronounce anathema on each other and accept our respective fates. At any rate, any further comments from you will be deleted, but I urge everyone else to carry on discussing whatever interesting topics have arisen.
David:
Fair enough. It’s often easy to forget that not everyone has the same temperament as I do.
L-hat:
I apologize if I’ve needlessly aggravated the situation. I saw behaviour I didn’t understand and so I asked about it, but I probably could have phrased my question better for the sake of the overall tone of this thread.
I apologize if I’ve needlessly aggravated the situation. I saw behaviour I didn’t understand and so I asked about it, but I probably could have phrased my question better for the sake of the overall tone of this thread.
Nonsense, I’ll have no self-flagellation among my valued commenters! It was perfectly in order to ask, and there’s no requirement to be ostentationsly polite; the only requirement is not to stoop to open insults, and the only one who has done that is “German Dziebel” (if that is his real name). Well, and maybe me, but I don’t respond well to jerks, which is why I was staying out of the thread.
@David:
Why, though, would this Nicander borrow a Latin word for “root” as soon as the Romans show up?
Well, I don’t know, but it’s not like there aren’t Latin loanwords in Greek (though of course not nearly as many as the other way around). If it’s a native Greek word, it stayed in hiding for a very long time. Not that it matters for the ultimate etymology, which is the same either way.
[hippos accent retraction] Some kind of nominalization after a non-trivial amount of derivation?
Yes, presumably that’s what you’d have to say, but it still strikes me as needing specific parallels. It’s not like there’d be anything wrong with a Greek noun ἱππός.
[ῥίζα] Can’t the /i/ be explained as an epenthetic vowel inserted into zero-grade */wr̩d/- as evidently happened in ἵππος?
That’s more or less how it has been explained, by Brent Vine: http://www.pies.ucla.edu/IESV/1/BV_rhiza.pdf
The Strange Powers have done their work, and the Bone-Hammer (< OE ban-hamor, but widely misunderstood on the Internet) has struck a blow for peace, order, and good government.
David, TR: Why, though, would this Nicander borrow a Latin word for “root” as soon as the Romans show up?
It makes a big difference whether the “root” in question is the part of a tree that is below ground, for which a word would hardly need to be borrowed, or an edible root such as a carrot, radish, parsnip, etc. Unlike green vegetables, many edible roots can be stored for quite a long time and transported with a minimum of care, making them possible items of long distance commerce witness the occasional appearance of a strange root with a Japanese or other foreign name in the vegetable section of a supermarket). One would have to know the semantic contrast between the referent of the borrowed word in question and other “roots” the writer was familiar with (but did not call by the normal “root” word).
Oh dear, I haven’t been here for just a few weeks and look what happened in the meantime. Hundreds of posts to catch up with and a brawl I seem to have missed.
Well, welcome back in any case! The kerfuffle was confined to this thread, and hardly worth it from a linguistic point of view.
[ῥίζα] Can’t the /i/ be explained as an epenthetic vowel inserted into zero-grade */wr̩d/- as evidently happened in ἵππος?
That’s more or less how it has been explained, by Brent Vine
To be a bit clearer: Vine’s idea isn’t purely phonological, since *wr̩h2d- would regularly give Greek (w)ra:d-. He assumes the later analogical creation of an oblique zero-grade stem wrd-y-, and it’s this stem which would have undergone schwa epenthesis into wridy- and later been generalized.
*phew* Well, catching up just became a lot easier, even though I won’t stay up much longer tonight. The most urgent things:
Well, first of all I have a lower threshold for saying “probably” than you do. 🙂 There’s evidence (however little) for Ainu being Austric, there’s no evidence for it being anything else, so it’s probably Austric. I’d rather have a weakly supported hypothesis than none at all.
Also, I find some of the evidence for Altaic – including Korean and Japanese; they don’t fit in worse than, say, Mongolic does – convincing enough. But of course plenty of work remains to be done; in particular, loans between Turkic and Tungusic that bypass Mongolic are not in fact impossible, and the Proto-Japonic reconstruction that was used in the 2003 reconstruction of Proto-Altaic was outdated (at least the vowel system was).
The paper I’ve seen I only have on paper, and not here. Maybe I’ll find it later. There was a word list, but I can’t remember “ear” and “dirt” being declared cognate; “blood” and “blood” were. Concerning the sound correspondences you mention, that’s exactly what you can see within Indo-European today…
Oh, sorry. I expected a nominative *-s, which would disappear with compensatory lengthening by Sz.’s law, but – being neuter/inanimate – it wouldn’t actually get this ending. The long vowel in Greek, which is projected straight back to PIE in the Wikipedia article for unstated reasons, could of course be analogical to those produced by Sz.’s law in other words, but that says nothing about the *-d that’s missing from the nominative.
Would *ḱérd actually be a permissible word in PIE, though? It certainly wouldn’t be in Greek, which only allowed very few consonants at the end of a word, and /d/ isn’t one of them. Latin seems to have disliked consonant clusters at the ends of nouns (the nominative of lact- is lac). In Germanic the *d is saved by turning the word into an n-stem, so no evidence is left either way. The article mentions Hittite ker, apparently without evidence for vowel length; whether the *d was genuinely missing or just not written because there’s no clear way to do that in cuneiform is perhaps another question.
A few interesting problems were brought up. It’s just the proposed solutions that wander off the deep end.
Vine’s paper, incidentally, confirms long /aː/ (and long /iː/) for rhadix… which means “branch, frond” rather than “root”, but otherwise really does look like a very early Latin loan.
It makes a big difference whether the “root” in question is the part of a tree that is below ground, for which a word would hardly need to be borrowed, or an edible root such as a carrot, radish, parsnip, etc.
Well, the same Latin word is where English gets radish, so…
@David: what’s left is the /pː/, which wasn’t mentioned by either Ringe or Bozzone & Felisari, but which appears to be a development within Greek if Ἐπειός isn’t some kind of loan.
I’m not sure why you see a problem with the standard account, by which PIE *ḱw gave Greek /p:/ (basically, just like a single labiovelar *kw gives /p/, but preserving the phonological weight of the cluster). I don’t know if there are supporting parallels, since this cluster was rare, but it seems natural enough. Of course if this is so, Ἐπειός can’t be related, but there’s no particular reason it needs to be.
(Off topic, can someone tell me why the HTML sup and sub tags I’ve been using for kw and h2 respectively are getting ignored?)
I’m afraid sup and sub tags only work in posts, not in comments. It’s a WordPress thing.
Got it. What I should have asked was, how do savvier commenters get their subscripts and superscripts to display correctly?
By using Unicode characters in plain text rather than HTML makeup. Here are some useful samples: h₁ h₂ h₃ kʷ pʰ. Anything that’s in IPA can be created using the Weston Ruter virtual keyboard, which provides a clickable IPA chart and puts what you type into a box, where it can be copied or cut and then pasted elsewhere. You can, for ease of use, type ordinary letters to the page as well.
If you use Windows and either the US or the UK physical keyboard, see the page for my Moby Latin keyboard (you can google it), which allows typing almost 1000 characters including a useful subset of IPA, mostly for transcribing English.
Arrgh. HTML markup, of course.
Thanks, JC!
I’m afraid sup and sub tags only work in posts, not in comments. It’s a WordPress thing.
So you’re saying that the violence is inherent in the system?
David: Thanks!
There’s evidence (however little) for Ainu being Austric, there’s no evidence for it being anything else, so it’s probably Austric. I’d rather have a weakly supported hypothesis than none at all.
But “not discernably related to any other known language” is a hypothesis too, admittedly supported only by negative evidence (necessarily). I can certainly see good reasons for encouraging the exploration of non-null hypotheses instead of just waiting for some genius to come along and convincingly demonstrate a relationship in a single blow, but that “shouldn’t be ruled out” seems very far from “probably”, even allowing for different thresholds (we want a baseline of “more likely than not,” surely).
Concerning the sound correspondences you mention, that’s exactly what you can see within Indo-European today…
Oh, absolutely! But the situation there is not higgledy-piggledy; the data has been combed through and convincing arguments made that in environment X, you get /x/, in Y, you get /y/, and so on. Not having seen any of that for Ainu, the only reason I can see to rank the Austric hypothesis above, say, the Semitic one (for which I have seen wordlists too) is because of geography.
TR: Latin radix, Greek rhadix: the same Latin word is where English gets radish, so…
Actually the English word is not borrowed directly from Latin but from French le radis. The plain French word is for those cute little red (and white) raw titbits, as well as for le radis noir ‘horseradish’, which is a much larger root, dark outside and white inside.
David: rhadix… which means “branch, frond” rather than “root”
That would make sense if the PIE root has wr- and is related to English wort, which always refers to a green plant, not its root. Actually the young fronds of red/white radishes are edible (preferably cooked, as in soup).
German must have borrowed radix more directly: Rettich. Just the long consonant doesn’t make sense.
German Wurzel means “root”. German does have unextended -wurz in a bunch of plant names, but there are dialects which use this form for “root”.
…Well, no, they extend it with -n, but analogical meaningless -n on feminines is not surprising at all.
…Rettich means “radish” of course.
Concerning special characters, I copy & paste them from the Windows character map. It’s intricately hidden in Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Programs* > Character Map, but after you’ve used it once it stays in the start menu.
* Because where else other than in Accessories would you ever put System Programs. *facepalm*
@Piotr Gąsiorowski
Is the apparent raising of ō to ū in this word the same thing as the one seen in, among others, *kamy, *mati (and *netopyrь??).
(How did Latin acquire the -tor : -tōris alternation anyway, some kind of open syllable lengthening?)
@Ксёнѕ Фаўст
My suspicion is that it’s the same process (yes, in the ‘bat’ word too, and also in ‘four’)
The vowel quality and length in Latin were levelled out to match the nom.sg. Then long vowels were shortened in final syllables before any consonant other than /s/, which paradoxically made the nom.sg. different again from all the case-forms it had influenced.
David: Sounds like you’re a candidate for my (projected) QWERTZ version of the Moby Latin keyboard driver.
Perhaps, but the character map works fine for my purposes. I don’t need to write whole texts…
A few loose ends…
German Dziebel, Nov. 13, 11:42:
lolwut?
1) What if the word is simply inherited, turtles-all-the-way-down? Perhaps it goes back to the origin of language, and its first ancestor meant “zebra” or “eland” or who knows what?
Seriously, what did he want, circular derivation of all PIE roots from each other, like Tangut characters?!?
That would be as wrong-headed as the Tangut script itself, now that I’m thinking of it.
2) The Moscow School has proposed that */(h₁)ekʲwos/ is a loan. That’s because they reconstruct the Proto-(North-)Caucasian “horse” word as */ɦint͡ʃwi/ (IIRC). Imagine a language closely related to PNC that had lost */n/ in this environment, apparently a typologically common phenomenon. Arguably, */kʲ/ was the closest thing PIE had to [t͡ʃ]…
3) An IE etymology for */(h₁)ekʲus/ has of course been proposed: as a noun derived from a root */(h₁)ekʲ/- which would underlie the word for “swift”. More on this here.
Nov. 14, 9:41 am:
I can’t see any reason to think that important words would be etymologically more transparent than others. The domestication of the horse may have been recent to PIE speakers, but the species certainly wasn’t!
Nov. 15, 11:21 am:
I want to quote this in Comic Sans.
That’s not how their analyses work!
Projection from someone who cares more about persons than about facts.
Nov. 15, 6:16 pm
What is this, some kind of internal reconstruction? Or forward projection from PIE? From Germanic data you can only get */f/, not */xʷ/.
(And yes, that requires an explanation – personally, I suspect that assimilation to the other labial consonant in the same root is regular, but that’s not much more than a guess.)
A PIE root that doesn’t end in a consonant?
Yay, unexplained suffixes (*-l-kʷo-) out of nowhere (just like *-n-), plus */kʲ/ mobile again.
Also, */s/ mobile on top of */kʲ/ mobile. Panta rhei.
Suddenly an unexplained suffix can become an unexplained prefix in PIE?
This is really, really funny. First he desperately tries to explain away the *-n- of the PIE “dog” root, even at the cost of assuming a PIE root that ended in a vowel, and then he doesn’t blink when this same -n- shows up in Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut?
Nostraticists do indeed compare these three words – -n- included. The Proto-Nostratic reconstruction, last time I looked, was *küjna, with a vowel that would nicely explain the strange PIE cluster; I have no idea if the PEA *-ʁa is a suffix (EA wasn’t considered at all in the first round of Nostratic research).
Me, Nov. 15, 8:43 pm, way down in a long comment:
Turns out my memory was pretty bad on this. Greenberg’s E-A excluded Kartvelian and Dravidian, which are very much part of Moscow School Nostratic (and also of Bomhard’s); and G. Starostin does use the name E-A (while very much excluding Ainu).
Finally, German Dziebel, Nov. 16, 1:20 am:
…Perhaps there was a period when unattested early forms of some Greek dialects had both [hr]- from *sr- and *r- from *wr-, and then the aspiration/devoicing was generalized. Wouldn’t be the first time: every word that would be expected to begin with υ in Greek got a /h/ in front of it, whether etymologically expected or not. The only ὐ that was left in the entire language (not counting οὐ-) was the one in the name of the letter, “naked y” (y psilon), called “naked” precisely because it lacked the spurious [h]. Probably */hu/- was so much more common than */u/- that the latter was abandoned in favor of the former by simple analogy; perhaps the same happened with */hr/- vs. */r/-.
The alternative is obvious: first step: */sr/- > */hr/-; second step: */hr/-, */wr/- > *r-; third step: *r- is devoiced like in Welsh, with no /h/ anywhere in sight (because it was lost in the second step).
But the similarity between the voiceless [pʰ] and the breathy-voiced [ɦ] does have its limits.
Ah, editing. Both *[hr]- from *sr- and *[r]- from *wr-.
…or εὐ- or αὐ-, obviously…
I enjoy all discussions about etymologies (as that is my main forte) thus I noted the one on hound / wolf.
The trolling side-snipes I prefer to eschew as much as possible, especially as at the Ancient, and always at the *Proto level we all have to involve ‘educated guesses’!
Before getting apoplectic about the minutae of conjectures perhaps some of your contributors may wish to review assumptions that pass for foundations. Thus if any wish to see what Proto-Indo root-words look like when purged of all the false ‘ghost laryngeals’ please consult the following 2 books, bound as one.
● Kaledon Naddair–”Proto-INDO-EUROPEAN √Root-Word DICTIONARY–Thematically Sorted
& -“Proto-INDO-EUROPEAN√Root-Word DICTIONARY-Alphabetically Sorted whilst they can be bought seperately – I have bound them together as one volume, 2014 InPrint
hence £20 (+£7 Gt.B) / £20+£14 (Eur.), / £20(+£24 P&P USA), number of pages (c.350 A4 size in total);
for more details on this and many other Ancient Language Dictionaries consult my website
http://keltia-publications.com
Thus if any wish to see what Proto-Indo root-words look like when purged of all the false ‘ghost laryngeals’…
Oh, dear… (shuts the door).
Shut The Door, They’re Coming Through The Window.
This post is magical.
Having taken the time to read all the entries in this thread I might be able to contribute a few items of worth, especially as regards Keltic materials. Thus I beg to differ with German Dzeibel in his attempted linkage of KRED-heart & radix-root. This is mainly due to having a different etymology for heart, I presume he was following Matasović in the notion that it was the ‘middle’ or ‘central organ. I differ thus
*KRED-, (Pr.Kelt.) > CRIDE, (O.Ir.) `heart’ ie. the Pulsing, Throbbing, quivering, trembling,warm pumping thing’. [n.] this concept is surely the most striking feature of this organ, for when it stops pulsing, pumping and quivering death quickly ensues. The Anceint Kelts (& other Indo-Europeans) knew this not only from feeling humans’ throbbing chests, but also observing the gore of battle, and seeing hearts of animals as they killed and dismembered them after a successful hunt for food.
KERDa > KERDe, KERD, KERT, KRID = heart (the quivering, trembling, throbbing, pulsing organ) (Pr.I-Eur. CRITHEACH, CRITHEANN, (Sc.G.) for the quivering-leafed Aspen tree(whose leaves shake in the slightest breeze), and the Ir. & Sc.G. Critheach for a shaking Bog (once found in some peat-bog parts of Eire, Alba, Cymru & Kernow – one could stand on the somewhat wobbly surface, but if one ‘shoogled’ too much one was in danger of sinking into the liquid mud underneath, farmers lost some cattle & sheep drowned in such spots before they did extensive drainage in the last 100 years; & criathar (O.Ir.) = a sieve that one shakes. Also one might wish to involve the quivering-stringed harp (CRUT > CRUTH O.Ir.,Pict.) whose very shape (cruth, cruith) reminded the Gaels of a heart, and was employed both in bardachd & artworks displaying that very notion, although the Bards & Fili did enjoy multi-level puns note!
*KRIDos, *CRIDos // CRIDIon (Goid.) n.c.neut. = heart > CRIDE[ion]; CRIDE = Heart (O.Ir.)
CROÍ, CREID, CRITH (Sc.G.) = heart (the quivering, trembling, pulsing organ) ; CRADIon > CRAEDIon > CREDIon // CRIDIon (Goid.) n.c.neut. heart (mostly figuratively);
CRADIA // CRIDIO = Heart (O.Ir.) ; CRAIDD = Heart (Kym.)
CRI / CRIDHE = the Heart, Heart (Sc.G.)
*CRIDICos = Hearty or Courageous (Goid.) > CRIDHEACH = Hearty or Courageous (Sc.G.)
NOTE : Thus I contend that other notions about (X1) ‘center / middle’, for the heart is not in the middle of the body, rather the softer organs around the navel (omphalos) are; or (X2) creed, belief, faith etc are but homonyms from originally slightly different roots, and are not a source concept related to the heart!
(X1) CRAIDD ’center’ (M.Kumb.) ; (X1) CREIS `center’ (M.Bret.) ; (X1) CREYS `center’ (Kor.)
(X2) CRAT = Faith (Skt.); (X2) CREDA = Creed (A-Sax); (X2) CREDO = I Believe (Lat.)
(X2) CREID = to believe (with one’s whole Heart) (Sc.G.); (X2) CREIDSINN = Belief (Sc.G.)
(X2) CREIDEASACH = Credible, Worthy of Belief (Sc.G.)
(X2) CREIDHEAMH, CREIDEAS = Faith, Credence (Sc.G.)
(to avoid being misled by puns into false etymologies one should use a dependable source for Ancient Celtic materials- by far the best is : ● J.MONARD – “ANCIENT CELTIC DICTIONARY”, 2000 & reworked as ● J. MONARD – ANCIENT CELTIC DICTIONARY – arranged as a THEMATIC LEXICON- (extensive Anc.Celtic > Français & English) Keltia Publications 2013 £35 (+ £8 P.&P. in Gt.B.) / £35 (+ £16 P.&P. to Europe), / £40 (+ £25 P.&P. to USA,etc), a huge tome – 386 A4 size pages
And Hittite is what, chopped liver?
Answering another question of mine:
More in the next comment if this one gets through.
Well, I still have no idea where in the next sentence the problem lies.
From about the middle of this page. A bit farther down, there’s an example of a nontrivial regular sound correspondence among clicks between North Khoisan and South Khoisan (disclaimer: I have no idea if those groupings are themselves uncontroversial).
If you guys are taking requests, I’d like a pan-IE cognate family for “shoogle” next, please.
@ David Marjanovic
“2) The Moscow School has proposed that */(h₁)ekʲwos/ is a loan.”
Well, this indirectly supports Dziebel’s views, for, if it’s a flawed Indo-European reconstruction, as he claims, then obviously some folks may end up deriving it from a non-Indo-European source.
“Remember: MA-1 is closer to Amerindians than to any Old World population. So by definition it’s an Amerindian signature found in the Old World.
I want to quote this in Comic Sans.”
I’m not very familiar with the topic, but what exactly is so comical about it?
@marie-lucie
“Even though horses have big hooves, they are far from being the only animal that has them (see the name “Ungulates”), so I don’t see the rationale for naming the one after the other (in any order).”
Indo-Europeans apparently saw this rationale, as they had no problem calling bear (in Germanic languages) using an earlier word meaning ‘brown’, although there are many more animals that are brown besides the bear.
Well, “that brown guy” is obviously apotropaic. Surely there’d be no need to fear the arrival of horses, as long as they were one’s own.
And not, for example, those belonging to the mistranslated Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses, recte ‘They even fear his horses’.
The bear is a taboo animal, so ‘brown one’ and ‘honey eater’ are suitable replacements, whereas beaver needs no such replacement (though it got one in French).
His claim strongly implied that all PIE words must have an internal etymology.
Comic Sans is a font best used for extreme mockery. “MA-1 is closer to Amerindians than to any Old World population. So by definition it’s an Amerindian signature found in the Old World” is a really embarrassing thing to say if you consider basic logic: it means either that MA-1 had ancestry in America – or that (some of!) the ancestry of Amerindians comes from a source that was very close to MA-1!
That’s one hypothesis. The other hypothesis is that the bear is The Beast, PIE *gʷʰēr (from which Greek θήρ “wild beast” is also derived, for example).
beaver needs no such replacement (though it got one in French)
Looks to me like French castor was taken pretty much as is from Greek κάστορας.
Well, via Latin castor. I don’t know the order in which castor (Greek) and beber (supposedly Celtic) moved in on the territory of native fiber.
The old French word for ‘beaver’ was bièvre. While the replacements for ‘bear’ (whatever the original was) were due to taboo avoidance, the French replacement with castor was probably due to the widespread use of the beaver glands for pharmaceutical purposes, while the animal itself was getting scarcer in the country because of the destruction of its habitat.
That’s clearly descended from beber rather than fiber, which as far as I know was lost entirely.
@Rodger C
“Surely there’d be no need to fear the arrival of horses, as long as they were one’s own.”
I think there’s a difference between a semantic pattern and cultural content. Whether the Germanic words for ‘bear’ originated from a taboo because early Germanic peoples were afraid of bears is beyond the point. It’s cultural history. Semantically, there’s a pattern whereby one member of a class appropriates the name for the whole class. The hoof-to-horse fits this semantic pattern. BTW, I read around and Russian (my native language) has a word for ‘male horse’ which is kon’. Other Slavic languages have it, too. Mallory & Adams (Oxford Introduction…) derive it from *komni and compare with other Indo-European words that mean ‘hornless” (Eng hind). So the Slavic form for horse appropriated the name for the whole class of hornless animals.
@David Marjanovic
“That’s one hypothesis. The other hypothesis is that the bear is The Beast, PIE *gʷʰēr (from which Greek θήρ “wild beast” is also derived, for example).”
That’s interesting. But even if bear is from ‘beast’ there are many more beasts out there but only one of them claimed the name of the whole class.
BTW, Vasmer’s Etymological Dictionary connects the Germanic word for ‘bear’ with the IE word for ‘beaver’ (as a reduplicated ‘brown’ stem). This would mean that Balto-Slavic (Lithuanian bebras, etc.), just like Germanic, turns up a labial outcome for a labiovelar.
“is a really embarrassing thing to say if you consider basic logic: it means either that MA-1 had ancestry in America – or that (some of!) the ancestry of Amerindians comes from a source that was very close to MA-1!”
I’m sorry, I must be very far away from this topic – I don’t see where Dziebel’s statement contains a logical mistake. Seems to be pretty matter-of-course.
Dziebel assumed that MA-1’s genetic pattern was a North American innovation, but it could equally well be a relic that has been outcompeted in the Old World in the last 24ky.
@Vladimir
The hypothesis supported by Vasmer is that both Germanic ‘bear’ and PIE ‘beaver’ derive from the colour adjective ‘brown’. However, there is no other reason to connect bears with beavers, and the comparison is a mere root “equation” (there is or might be a *bʰ(e)r- element in all these words). What exactly was the form of the adjective, and how do you derive both animal names from it? Without answering this question, i.e. without a morphological analysis, no IE etymology is worth the ink it’s written with (or the typing effort).
bear
I don’t know about the merits of PIE bear/beaver, but in several Penutian languages (North American West coast) there is a definite relationship between words for bear and badger. Since these animals do not look much like each other, the naming connection might have to do with their habits of hibernating in deep burrows.
On the other hand, words referring to smaller furbearers (no more than beaver size) often apply to different species in different languages. This may have to do with the preferred or locally most common animal sought for its pelt.
David Marjanovic: “This is really, really funny. First he desperately tries to explain away the *-n- of the PIE “dog” root, even at the cost of assuming a PIE root that ended in a vowel, and then he doesn’t blink when this same -n- shows up in Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut?”
Sorry, I’m still catching up…. This is all fair and true but I know that Afroasiatic has a very similar root *k(w)alp- ‘wolf, dog’ (Bomhard & Kerns, no. 319) that shows -l- where Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut have -n-. Bomhard and Dolgopolsky still believe that Afroasiatic is part of Nostratic. In Uralic, Eskimo-Aleut and Afroasiatic languages the same root means both ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’. The Indo-Europeans forms with the meaning ‘wolf’ (*wlkwko-) and ‘dog’ (*k’wo:n) are both of Proto-Indo-European age, so it would be unusual if they were unrelated. I don’t particularly like long distance comparisons, as the picture gets grainier and grainier, but taking this material at face value, Dziebel’s idea of connecting PIE *wlkwko- and *k’wo:n phonetically may mean that Indo-European preserved the traces of ancient Nostratic/Eurasiatic morphological variation, whereas Afroasiatic generalized -l- and Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut generalized -n-.
BTW, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov reconstructed roots of the shape CV- for the early stages of Proto-ndo-European.
in several Penutian languages (North American West coast) there is a definite relationship between words for bear and badger.
In Japanese the word for bear is kuma/くま/熊 and the word for badger anaguma/あなぐま/穴熊 (ana=hole, burrow + kuma).
@Piotr
” What exactly was the form of the adjective, and how do you derive both animal names from it?”
Good question. AFAIK, there are only two reduplicated roots of PIE age: *bhebhro- ‘beaver’ (< *gwher- 'beast' or *bher- 'brown') and *kwekwlo- 'wheel' (< *kwel- 'go around'). Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (p. 225) note that in both Kartvelian and Indo-European languages the words for 'bear' (or 'beaver') and for 'wheel' are reduplicated. (The actual forms are unrelated but the morphological approach is the same.) Ironically (considering that Marie-Lucie is an Amerindianist) they also cite a reduplicated Squamish (Salishan) form for 'bear' as a typological parallel.
I understand that Nostratic, Glottalic, etc. are not most Western linguists' cup of tea, but we Russians love our linguists…
John Cowan: “Dziebel assumed that MA-1′s genetic pattern was a North American innovation, but it could equally well be a relic that has been outcompeted in the Old World in the last 24ky.”
Sounds like an equally possible but different interpretation, not a logical mistake.
Dziebel has written a book arguing that humanity originated in America, not in Africa.
Marie-Lucie: “Dziebel has written a book arguing that humanity originated in America, not in Africa.”
Yes, I know. I even bought it for 140 US dollars. It’s mostly on kinship systems, which is a topic that is hard to follow. There’re only a few specialists on kinship left (at least in Russia) and Dziebel came out of one of the academic traditions of kinship studies in Russia. One of his arguments is that there are many more language families in America and Papua New Guinee than in Africa, so diversity means greater age, etc. As an Amerinidianist, what are your thoughts on that?
Good question. AFAIK, there are only two reduplicated roots of PIE age: *bhebhro- ‘beaver’ (< *gwher- 'beast' or *bher- 'brown') and *kwekwlo- 'wheel' (< *kwel- 'go around').
There were probably quite a few of them. “Wheel’ and ‘beaver’ (and possibly ‘meat’) are simply the most widespread ones. Paul S. Cohen has been working on them for several years. He has collected a number of plausible candidates and has made substantial progress towards identifying the morphological processes that produced them. I have discussed some of those etymologies with him and even suggested one or two, but since Paul has not published it all yet, I’d rather not divulge any details.
Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (p. 225) note that in both Kartvelian and Indo-European languages the words for ‘bear’ (or ‘beaver’) and for ‘wheel’ are reduplicated. (The actual forms are unrelated but the morphological approach is the same.) Ironically (considering that Marie-Lucie is an Amerindianist) they also cite a reduplicated Squamish (Salishan) form for ‘bear’ as a typological parallel.
(1) The IE word for ‘bear’ is not reduplicated (nor is the Germanic one). (2) Klimov’s (1998) reconstruction of the Kartvelian ‘bear’ word is *datw-, which doesn’t look reduplicated to me. According to Klimov, Svan -št- is a reflex of *t in this position (resulting from some kind of preaspiration), not evidence of reduplication. (3) Georgian borbal is isolated; *br- ‘whirl, twirl’ is Proto-Georgian/Zan, not Proto-Kartvelian, and the connection between the two is uncertain.
I understand that Nostratic, Glottalic, etc. are not most Western linguists’ cup of tea, but we Russians love our linguists…
I wonder if I count as “Western”, being Polish and living in Poland. It wouldn’t occur to me to classify historical linguists into those I love and those I do not love depending on where they come from.
Vladimir: they also cite a reduplicated Squamish (Salishan) form for ‘bear’ as a typological parallel
Since reduplication occurs in widely separated families, I don’t think that this parallel really counts as particularly relevant. Salishan make use of some quite complex forms of reduplication.
[Dziebel’s] arguments is that there are many more language families in America and Papua New Guinee than in Africa, so diversity means greater age, etc.
I understand that Papua New Guinea tops the rest of the world in terms of language diversity, most likely related not only to the great age of its settlement but also to the fact that its geography makes internal communication quite difficult.
About the Americas, as I have written before I think that the number of “families” is exaggerated by the fact that many of the acknowledged small families and isolates probably belong together, in the way that Romance, Germanic, Slavic etc (which are internally quite recognizable even by untrained persons) are not isolated but belong together as members of the larger Indo-European group. I don’t think that “Amerind” will prove valid, but there are probably several groups on the order of IE.
It wouldn’t occur to me to classify historical linguists into those I love and those I do not love depending on where they come from.
Hear, hear! Nationalism has no place in science (or rational thinking in general).
@Piotr
“I wonder if I count as “Western”, being Polish and living in Poland. It wouldn’t occur to me to classify historical linguists into those I love and those I do not love depending on where they come from.”
Russian linguistics has always been somewhat isolated from the West due to world politics, so it spawned some regional peculiarities of different degree of extremism: first, Marrism, then Nostratics, then Glottalics. I know that Russian Indo-Europeanists and Nostraticists tend to reject Laryngeal Theory (apart from what’s actually attested in Anatolian) but Western linguists mostly support it. (Szemerenyi and his followers in Finland and elsewhere also reject it and Szemerenyi was Hungarian.) At the same time, Russian historical linguistics are largely supportive of the Nostratic grouping, while Western linguists are very critical of it. I don’t want to push the geopolitics of science too far but there may be some rationale behind it.
I suppose Poles are lucky because they have options to choose from. 🙂
One of his arguments is that there are many more language families in America and Papua New Guinee than in Africa, so diversity means greater age, etc.
This is an artefact of classification. If you follow Greenberg, there are four families in Africa and three in the New World, so Afica wins. I believe there are more splitters in American Indian studies than among Africanists, which doesn’t necessarily mean there are more New World language families.
If humans evolved in America, what did they evolve from, being the only catarrhines in those parts? Bigfoot?
Marie-Lucie: “About the Americas, as I have written before I think that the number of “families” is exaggerated by the fact that many of the acknowledged small families and isolates probably belong together.”
Thank you for your insight. But I wonder if this is balanced off by the number of extinct small families and isolates that were exterminated during the first 300 years of the European conquest of the New World (before linguistic data began to be collected). Africa did not experience this level of language extinction in the past 500 years.
@ Piotr
“If humans evolved in America, what did they evolve from, being the only catarrhines in those parts?”
What I gathered from Dziebel’s website is that he believes that modern humans originated from an East Eurasian archaic hominin (so, yes, a catarrhine), migrated to the New World, speciated into modern humans (I guess isolation is good for speciation) and then migrated back to replace all the archaics in the Old World. That’s why it’s the New World and Papua New Guinee that have more language families than elsewhere. Because they were first to be peopled by modern humans armed with language and culture.
I also read on Dziebel’s website that there’s a ethnomusicologist Jordania who argued that the reason there are more language families in the New World vs. Africa (but Africa has more diverse musical traditions) is because humans transitioned from a “musical” language to a real language earlier in Asia and later in Africa. Jordania is a multiregionalist, though.
Africa did not experience this level of language extinction in the past 500 years.
European colonisation has not been the only cause of language death. Agricultural revolutions, in particular, can be quite destructive. Certainly lots of tiny language families in sub-Saharan Africa went extinct as a result of the Bantu expansion, and the same happened in North Africa as the Afro-Asiatic languages swept across it (the Sahara was still green and well-populated).
@Piotr
“Agricultural revolutions, in particular, can be quite destructive.”
Certainly, and the New World had a fair share of their own agricultural expansions (Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Mangan, etc.). What’s noteworthy is that the New World also knew recent large-scale forager expansions such as the Athabascan spread. Considering that there are more language isolates in the New World than elsewhere, they could have easily been an easy prey for more successful foragers. So chances of pre-Columbian language extinction seem to be comparable to those in Africa, if not higher.
Considering that there are more language isolates in the New World than elsewhere
How do you know?
@Piotr
Fig. 1 in Roger Blench’s paper: http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/Amerindian/Lyon%202008%20Amerindian%20classification.pdf
diversity means greater age
That is only a heuristic, anyway. Etienne pointed out that Corsica is the most diverse portion of the Romance-speaking area, yet we know that the Romance languages did not originate on Corsica.
Linguistic diversity is hard to measure, since “language families” are not a natural level of grouping. Instead, they reflect the current limit of our reconstructions. In some parts of the world families tend to be bigger just because the languages in question are better studied and have some historical documentation. In other places we have “documentation” in the form of short word lists, family classification is to some extent a matter of faith, and nobody can tell with much confidence how many families (including isolates) could be distinguished if we were to go about classifying them with any rigour. So many currently recognised groupings should be taken with a grain of salt. Africa has more languages than any other continent (and I suppose some twenty-odd bona fide families), but there seems to be more fragmentation into small families and isolates in the Americas. But Atlantic-Congo (including Bantu but probably excluding some outliers) and Afro-Asiatic (there are doubts about “Omotic” and some languages tentatively grouped with Cushitic) are huge families, which have spread over most of the continent, leaving only residual areas occupied by a large number of small families (I don’t think the genetic unity of “Nilo-Saharan” and “Khoisan” is defensible). Nobody knows how old the family divisions are, either in absolute terms or in comparison to the New World.
Anyway, where are the bones of our American ancestors? May I see some archaic humans or pre-humans from America, please? There were anatomically modern humans in the Indo-Pacific region well before 40 kya, still earlier in the Middle East, and much earlier in Africa, so the American ancestors should be still older. DNA markers don’t suggest a New World human homeland unless you focus on carefully selected haplotypes and ignore all other evidence. Dziebel sees himself as a latterday Florentino Ameghino, but Ameghino died more than 100 years ago and speculation that could be entertained during his lifetime is ruled out by what we have learned since.
@Piotr
“Linguistic diversity is hard to measure, since “language families” are not a natural level of grouping.”
I wholeheartedly agree. I think only with Nichols’s Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time linguists have started to seriously apply global and regional linguistic patterns to understanding population prehistory. A lot still needs to be figured out. I found the following discussion interesting:
https://www.academia.edu/13246715/Wichmann_S%C3%B8ren_Andr%C3%A9_M%C3%BCller_and_Viveka_Velupillai._2010._Homelands_of_the_world_s_language_families_A_quantitative_approach._Diachronica_27.2_247-276
This said, at least one well studied case seems to support the argument that greater diversity means greater age. It’s the dispersal of Austronesians from Taiwan. The Formosan branch is by far the most diverse of all and this seems to be in good agreement with both archaeology and genetics.
“Dziebel sees himself as a latterday Florentino Ameghino,”
He does mention Ameghino on his website, but I think he believes as strongly as you that Ameghino has been disproven.
“Anyway, where are the bones of out American ancestors? May I see some archaic humans or pre-humans from America, please?”
I don’t know what his answer to this would be. At one point, he made a comparison between Louis Leakey’s approval of some super-old sites in the America as an example of how America is both understudied linguistically and archaeologically but to a different effect: more comparative work will necessarily reduce the number of linguistic families in the Americas, while more archaeological work will generate proof of greater human antiquity in the New World. Also, Russians are very proud of Denisovan man (and Derevianko is almost a national hero there) and what’s left of that hominin? Just a couple of teeth and fingers. Who knows how many of those are hidden in caves in America.
That’s a pretty long root.
AA historical linguistics hasn’t advanced very far, because hundreds of AA languages are underresearched. What evidence did Bomhard & Kerns use to arrive at *k(w)alp-, and why aren’t they sure about the *w? I don’t have their book.
All this is possible. But without a reconstruction of Proto-Nostratic morphology that would explain what this *l/n suffix is, it’s just a stab in the dark, I’m afraid.
That’s internal reconstruction, which has the disadvantage of being unconstrained…
The “Glottalic theory” isn’t Eastern or Western in origin. It also used to have a pretty large following in the West.
The Moscow School Nostraticists do not accept it – but Allan Bomhard does!
There are two (a priori) equally possible interpretations. German Dziebel pretended there was only one; he even added “by definition”. That is a logical mistake.
It also makes research quite difficult; not as much has been done as in most other places. Consequently, it is easily possible that large language families still await discovery there.
…Right.
So, a crackpot.
Khoisan, including Sandawe but not necessarily Hadza/Hatsa, looks fairly promising. So do parts of Nilo-Saharan, but probably not the whole thing.
A long comment with three links is in moderation; it will appear above this one.
There are linguists now who wonder if PAN was instead spoken in eastern Borneo… and the Formosan languages are apparently all woefully underresearched.
Native Americans don’t carry a greater proportion of Denisovan DNA than other people, though.
The orthodox view is that Taiwan is an AN dispersion zone, but it’s also possible that it’s a convergence zone, in which case the Formosan languages descend from random Austronesian languages that have strongly affected each other. I linked a paper by Blench to this effect.
As for the archaeological evidence, Taiwan was certainly settled long before the time-depth of AN.
The Indo-Europeans forms with the meaning ‘wolf’ (*wlkwko-) and ‘dog’ (*k’wo:n) are both of Proto-Indo-European age, so it would be unusual if they were unrelated.
Why would it be “unusual”? It’s perfectly normal for words to be unrelated. And assuming two words are related because they have a vague partial similarity is something historical linguistics quite rightly got away from well over a century ago.
@David Marjanović: The Denisovan issue confuses me. The commonly stated position, in line with the paper by Reich et al., is that Denisovan DNA is largely absent outside of Australia, Melanesia and eastern Indonesia – but then there are things like the Genographic Project, which has told legions of people of West Eurasian ancestry that they have significant shares of it. For example, my mother’s results were 3.1% Denisovan and only 2.0% Neanderthal, even though her ancestry is entirely European and southwest Asian.
This said, at least one well studied case seems to support the argument that greater diversity means greater age. It’s the dispersal of Austronesians from Taiwan. The Formosan branch is by far the most diverse of all and this seems to be in good agreement with both archaeology and genetics.
But in this case we are talking of a securely established family. We know that the Formosan branches are related to each other and to the rest of AN, and we have a fairly good idea how they are related (we know the structure of the family tree pretty well). If we didn’t know of the “basal” status of the Formosan languages, there would be no way of knowing that they are “more diverse” than other AN-speaking areas. This can’t be compared to counting known families and isolates in Africa and the Americas.
Will you say that, since South America is more “diverse” than North America in terms of family count, it must be the cradle of Homo sapiens? It’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. The burden of proof is on the shoulders of the proponents.
That’s indeed puzzling, but if nothing has come of it since January 2013 – I’m not aware of any published papers on this subject; bizarrely, there’s no trace of a comment function on the blog –, then probably there was something wrong with the algorithm.
LH thread about Roger Blench’s hypothesis that Proto-Austronesian wasn’t spoken on Taiwan after all.
@David Marjanovic
“Native Americans don’t carry a greater proportion of Denisovan DNA than other people, though.”
Actually, Dziebel claims (citing Qin and Stoneking 2015) that Amerindians have more Denisovan than East Asians, West Eurasians and Africans (http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org/2015/07/amerindians-are-even-more-genetically-diverse-and-older-than-we-thought/). I assume they have less Denisovan than Papuans and Australians but still more than everyone else. It’s interesting that archaic admixture is higher in the areas where linguistic diversity is the highest, too.
@ Piotr
“Will you say that, since South America is more “diverse” than North America in terms of family count, it must be the cradle of Homo sapiens?”
I’d say that the expectation from a theory like that is that North America should be more diverse but then I don’t know what’s the geographical unit (continent or subcontinent) for which the diversity-age principle works and how to factor in subsequent replacements.
@David Marjanovic
“What evidence did Bomhard & Kerns use to arrive at *k(w)alp-, and why aren’t they sure about the *w?”
I checked again and it was my mistake: they are affirmative about the labiovelar in Proto-Afroasiatic (*kw(h)alp). But the evidence they cite is restricted to Semitic (from Hebrew to Tigrinya), hence for Semitic they write *k(h)alp-.
Russian Nostraticists cite a bunch of forms, too, with more variable onset and affixation: http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/etymology.cgi?single=1&basename=%2Fdata%2Fsemham%2Fafaset&text_number=2599&root=config.
@languagehat
“Why would it be “unusual”? It’s perfectly normal for words to be unrelated.”
I know but if we take Uralic, Eskimo-Aleut in the north and then Afroasiatic in the south and they all link dog and wolf under one form, then Indo-European that’s geographically in-between looks “unusual.”
@David Marjanovic
“So, a crackpot.”
I don’t carry this word in my personal vocabulary. Jordania is a solid specialist in ethnomusicology, which is an arcane subject. He just began thinking about human origins before out of Africa emerged as an alternative to Multiregionalism.
I think we should also mention here a theory proposed by certain Russian “paleoantropologists” that monkeys of South America are actually degenerate forms of ancient humans.
“Degeneration theory” doesn’t limit itself to New World monkeys, but also claims that all apes and most monkeys of the Old World are also descendants of ancient humans.
And of course, currently prevailing mainstream theory of human origin is wrong – humans already existed 10 millions years ago and since then never stopped degenerating…
@David Marjanovic
“LH thread about Roger Blench’s hypothesis that Proto-Austronesian wasn’t spoken on Taiwan after all.”
Thanks for the link. I like Blench’s unorthodox views. I’m afraid though that he’s going to be as unsuccessful with upsetting the out-of-Taiwan orthodoxy as Dziebel is going to be with upsetting the Clovis-First model.
Oops, I posted this in the wrong thread. Let me try again:
Re: Denisovans
I’m a little worried by the fact that so much is being made of just three Denisovan genomes (two of them only fragmentary).
@ Piotr
“I’m a little worried by the fact that so much is being made of just three Denisovan genomes (two of them only fragmentary).”
It’s always prudent to be skeptical about the shortage of reliable data. One thing that goes for Denisova DNA is that it seems to over and over again cluster with Sima de los Huesos, which is a good cross-check because it has more solid cranial material to go with the DNA and it’s geographically remote from South Siberia.
Vladimir: the number of extinct small families and isolates that were exterminated during the first 300 years of the European conquest of the New World (before linguistic data began to be collected)
Actually, many people did collect linguistic data, starting from the early days of the conquest. Traders and missionaries, among others, needed to learn local languages. Chapter 2 of Campbell’s American Indian Languages: The historical linguistics of Native America contains a lot of information on the data collectors and early linguists. Small families and isolates, and their speakers, tend to persist in regions which are difficult to get to. On the other hand, the Algonkian expansion in the central plains after the adoption of the horse may have wiped out some languages (not necesssarily through massacres but also by language shift on the part of non-Algonkian speakers).
the New World had a fair share of their own agricultural expansions (Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Mangan, etc.). What’s noteworthy is that the New World also knew recent large-scale forager expansions such as the Athabascan spread.
Some of the U-Az spread may be related to agriculture, but the largest territory of U-Az speakers is in the Great Basin, a desertified area where “forager expansion” is more likely to have happened.
I know that Afroasiatic has a very similar root *k(w)alp- ‘wolf, dog’ (Bomhard & Kerns, no. 319)
Looks similar to Arabic Kalb and Hebrew כלב k-l-v. Wolf in Hebrew is זאב ze’ev.
Oh, sorry, I forgot about this. Yes, the evidence for an Australian-like migration to America is interesting.
I smiled when I read that, and then I giggled out loud. 🙂 There really is such a thing as a crackpot. Denying this may sound noble and all, but it’s… denial. 🙂
So? I’m not talking about his workd in ethnomusicology.
Multiregionalism has been completely out of the question for at least 20 years. Before that, it couldn’t perhaps be completely ruled out by what little was known of the evidence, but it never made sense: why would populations all over the world evolve in the exact same direction? What selection pressure could cause that?
…Clovis First is long gone. Several sites that are older than Clovis have withstood all scrutiny, Dziebel or no Dziebel.
@David Marjanonic
“There really is such a thing as a crackpot.”
Not at that level, not at the level of Jordania. There are plenty of crazy people in the web world, but as you go up (or down) an academic path crackpots are unlikely. All scholars look at humans origins out of their respective disciplines and they may see something other disciplines don’t. In the recent years, out of Africa got falsified twice: first, when it was showed that there was archaic admixture outside of Africa (a step back toward multiregionalism), second when it turned out that there was no serial founder effect as population colonized the globe. Should we now call all the people who developed the out of Africa theory crackpots?
I can’t agree with you there. Plenty of academics are crackpots when out of their subjects: creationist physicists and chemists, e.g.
Unlikely, yes. But the extreme case is Linus Pauling, who got the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the one in physics – and then went on to invent vitamin C woo, the idea that eating huge amounts of vitamin C is somehow good for you. (In fact, as one person found out the hard way, it kills you if your kidneys can’t get rid of it quickly enough.) Outside his original fields, Linus Pauling was a crackpot, even though he justly deserved both of his Nobel Prizes.
…OK, but that’s a very small step. The combined Neandertal and Denisovan contributions to extant human genomes hardly ever reach 10%; that’s very much unlike what multiregionalists thought.
That depends on how big the founding populations were! And to some extent, a founder effect has been discovered: open-access paper.
David Marjanovic: “the extreme case is Linus Pauling.”
Chemistry and Peace, not Chemistry and Physics. Yes, it is an interesting case of a genius who lost control of his own mind. “Crackpot” is too simplistic though to describe Pauling’s phenomenon. There must have been some kind of molecular change that caused it. 🙂
BTW, if not “musical language,” what heuristic regarding the origin of language do you maintain?
…got the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the one in physics
That was Mme Curie (but she remained sane).
Marie-Lucie: “Some of the U-Az spread may be related to agriculture, but the largest territory of U-Az speakers is in the Great Basin, a desertified area where “forager expansion” is more likely to have happened.”
I read somewhere that Uto-Aztecans actually abandoned agriculture in the course of expanding into the Great Basin. If so, this is pretty amazing and… funny: an agricultural expansion gone backwards.
Paul Ogden: “Looks similar to Arabic Kalb and Hebrew כלב k-l-v.”
Yes, they do list those forms. In Jibbali, Harsusi, Mehri, etc. the respective cognates mean both dog and wolf, which Illich-Svitych (Opyt sravnenija…, no. 238), citing Thomsen, called “archaic semantics.”
this is pretty common thing actually
Eurasian pastoral nomadism actually arose among settled agriculturalists who abandoned farming and expanded deep into great steppe.
Even European settlers in Americas or South Africa often did the same – all these trekboers, gauchos, vaqueros, cowboys, etc.
SFReader: “this is pretty common thing actually.”
Your examples include pastoralists, which is indeed common. A shift from agriculture (back) to hunting and gathering is not. As far as I know…
Many early Euro-Appalachian settlers practiced agriculture only to supplement hunting and foraging. Crevecoeur, long ago, explained the economic rationality of this shift.
The Moriori come to mind: the Chatham Islands are too cold and bleak to support agriculture, though they were settled by Māori agriculturalists.
@John Cowan
“Plenty of academics are crackpots when out of their subjects: creationist physicists and chemists, e.g.”
It’s an interesting subject for a philosophy of science study and I don’t know all the cases of course. But it’s possible that quackery is more of an absolute category in the exact and natural sciences and a relative category in the historical and social sciences because disciplinary boundaries and methodologies are generally fuzzier in the latter. Cultural biases (again, more likely to occur in the historical and social sciences) can also create an illusion of an evidence-based consensus, on the one hand, as well as false crackpots (if there are pseudo-scientists there could be pseudo-crackpots), on the other. Creationism is an example of a religious subculture bias that cuts across natural and social sciences but there could be others, less pronounced, often mainstream.
The poster baby for crackpots who were proved right in the end is, of course, Alfred Wegener who campaigned for the embryonic theory of plate tectonics 50 years before evidence was available to finally prove him right.
With a degree in astronomy and a career in meteorology he was indeed an outsider in geophysics, but he wasn’t as alone with his views as the ‘crackpot’ label implies — he built on earlier works, and a minority of researchers inside the specialty shared his opinions already then.
But when the ‘CONTINENTS MOVE!’ headlines hit the Sunday supplements (early 70’s, I guess, since I vaguely remember it), Wegener did get the vindicated crackpot writeup.
That’s a hard question! I haven’t thought about it much. Judging from what other primates do, and what they don’t do in the wild but are capable of, I imagine a very gradual origin. There are multispecies monkey communities in West Africa where each species has a set of different alarm calls for different types of danger…
Music is certainly old, and draws on some of the same capabilities as language, but I’m not aware of a reason to think it was directly involved in the origin of language.
Yes! It was a short revolution – 1968 to 1973 or so; then it was all over, and no “fixists” were left.
However, Wegener wasn’t vindicated across the board. He had thought that his equivalent of continental crust lies on top of his equivalent of oceanic crust, and that the latter is a single solid piece all around the Earth. In part for this reason, the only idea he had to offer for what moves the continents was inertia from the Earth’s rotation, which turned out to be completely wrong.
@ David Marjanovic
“but I’m not aware of a reason to think it was directly involved in the origin of language.”
It’s all speculative but with a good pedigree (Darwin was the first one to propose). Scholars like Fitch (“The Biology and Evolution of Music: A Comparative Perspective.”) observe that musical vocalizing is found outside of human species, while language is unique to humans. If they are related and music preceded language, then it’s likely that language evolved from music. Then there are at least two areas in which music and specific language forms seem to intersect (phonetically it’s tones and syntactically it’s polysynthetic languages). Apart from music, I don’t know of any other cultural system that could potentially provide clues to language evolution and I don’t expect archaeology or genetics to cast any significant light on this any time soon.
Also (if it hasn’t been exploded yet), the association between a tonal L1 and absolute pitch.
I would say music is almost pure syntax without (compositional) semantics. Human communication is multimodal. We have articulated speech (and of course its written representation), gestures (body language), and non-linguistic or paralinguistic vocalisation. The first is unique to humans, as far as we know, the other two are shared with many other animals. To me, music and language are parallel, co-evolving types of code. They both require complex syntactic structures, but there’s little reason to believe that language is historically derived from music.
Piotr: “I would say music is almost pure syntax without (compositional) semantics.”
Yes, that’s exactly how the supporters of a “musical protolanguage” express the similarity between language and music.
“gestures (body language)”
The gestural origin of language is a competitor of the musical protolanguage theory.
“there’s little reason to believe that language is historically derived from music.”
Skepticism is indeed a tempting position in this issue because it’s hard to offer anything but speculations.
This is a fascinating subject which I know nothing about, but the musical protolanguage idea would be a lot more convincing if other primates had anything similar to human music, which (AFAIK) they don’t. There’s also the fact that every neurally normal human is a competent language user, but very many people literally couldn’t carry a tune to save their lives, which seems a bit problematic if you think musical ability was subject to strong selection pressure.
To me, the musical protolanguage idea is one of the many, many things that fall into the category of “interesting but unresolvable,” and I try not to waste too much mental effort on such things. (See also “What if we’re all just brains in a vat, part of some huge AI experiment?”)
Appeals to ‘musical’ proto-languages always seem really cagey about what they mean by ‘musical’. Primates make use of things like pitch modulation and rhythm in their calls, and many (most? all?) human languages use f0 changes for some kind of linguistic purpose, whether it’s at the syllabic/moraic level in tone languages or a more global phenomenon like sentence polarity in English, but is that music? It seems plausible, but as you say unprovable, that before the current system of contrasts in place/manner of articulation, f0, and formant frequency, only f0 movement had the kind of discrete contrastiveness that appears to be unique to human speech, but it seems fundamentally misleading to call that ‘musical’. Or are we really suggesting that at some stage of hominid evolution a rising perfect 5th had discrete, contrastive meaning compared to a rising 4th? Or that some pre-linguistic groups spoke in makam while others spoke in equal-tempered scales in the same way that languages today can differ in dividing stops between voiced-unvoiced or aspirated-unaspirated? Everything that makes music music seems like a formalized elaboration of more rudimentary capabilities found in naturally acquired speech rather than vice-versa.
Gibbons spend a lot of time singing together to reinforce their pair bonds. Other than that, there are the howling monkeys, and that’s pretty much it.
“if other primates had anything similar to human music, which (AFAIK) they don’t”
Highly synchronized, antiphonic duetting (the closest parallel to Jordania’s polyphony, which he believes is ancestral in humans) sporadically occurs in lemurs as well as in monogamous, pairbonded, alloparenting primates (especially New World monkeys such as titi, but not in all platyrrhine species). Duetting is not known among any other mammals, which is interesting, but it’s more complexly developed among birds than among primates. Big apes don’t have duetting, which fits with the general observation that apes are socially very unlike humans. They are not paibonded, monogamous or alloparenting.
What’s also remarkable is that the same paibonded, monogamous, alloparenting, arboreal creatures developed rather complex language-like communications because they couldn’t rely on either smell or sight to communicate with each other. Too mobile and active to recognize each other by smell, too covered with leaves to be able to see each other.
https://www.academia.edu/10923561/Duetting_in_the_Titi_Monkey_Callicebus_cupreus_Structure_Pair_Specifity_and_Development_of_Duets
Eh… humans aren’t that pairbonded or monogamous either, on average. We seem to span the whole range from gibbons to bonobos and back.
@David Marjanovic.
” humans aren’t that pairbonded or monogamous either, on average. We seem to span the whole range from gibbons to bonobos and back.”
True. But we don’t know if polygyny was ancestral to humans or re-invented later. Typically, polygyny is most frequent in large, agricultural and pastoral societies, which emerged very late in human history. Small bands are more monogamous, but also more prescriptive in the choice of the partner. Also, low sexual dimorphism observed from the earliest Homo on is more compatible with monogamy, as a socially more egalitarian mating pattern, than polygamy.
Oh, monogamy and polygyny aren’t the only two choices. Have a look at chimpanzees and bonobos. Even gorillas aren’t as classically polygynous as people used to think.
@David
Yes, that’s a good point. It’s possible that the big apes retained more of the ancestral (assuming that New World primate attestations are phylogenetically significant) primate paibonded, monogamous and alloparenting behavior than we think, but hominins and humans have retained them in a stronger form. This would fit with growing body of evidence that apes, although the closest to us genetically, are not necessarily the best proxies for our MRCA.
Follow-up on Khoisan looking promising, including Sandawe and even Hadza, with much discussion of problems (mostly: first, lack of data; second, lack of adequately transcribed data) and some speculation that is clearly marked as such. Long.
Whoa. Even more recent paper by the same author finding a pretty large number of parallels between Hadza, Omotic and Cushitic in the basic lexicon and wondering if Hadza is basically an Afro-Asiatic language with a Khoisan substrate. Shorter than the previous one, but in Russian, so I’ve only read it rather superficially.
Thanks David. I didn’t see them. Now, I read them both and you pretty much got all the gist out of them. Pretty intriguing! Hadza’s population structure is very different from that of San. They are far less heterozygous than most Sub-Saharan Africans, especially San, and approximate North African heterozygosities.
That tells us little about their language. The Basques hardly differ genetically from their neighbors, having just the amount of Yamnaya admixture that you’d expect for their location; and the people with the largest percentage of Yamnaya ancestry today are the Estonians, whose language isn’t Indo-European but Uralic.
@David. Not directly of course, but it does add to the overall picture of the population/language/society, and who knows maybe subsequent research will show that those variables are more in sync than we currently can see. Lower heterozygosities mean that, while a language shift is still possible, it’s less likely to have happened as genetic admixture between an Afroasiatic- and a Khoisan-population clearly didn’t happen because an admixed population would have been more heterozygous.
One thing that Starostin doesn’t consider is that Afroasiatic and Khoisan may form a megaphylum, with Hadza as its linchpin.
Well, Afroasiatic already forms a megaphylum with Eurasiatic… it would be a bit strange if Khoisan were the closest relative of Nostratic.
I didn’t even think about it! But who knows…
The Basques hardly differ genetically from their neighbors, having just the amount of Yamnaya admixture that you’d expect for their location;
Does this admixture have to do with the higher proportion of Rh-negative blood among the Basques? (my mother, of Languedoc ancestry, not that far from earlier Basque territory, had Rh-negative blood).
No idea. Rh-negative is indeed very common in the Basque country and in the Caucasus, thought to be an effect of isolation.
I should have mentioned that the Basques have only slightly more Early European Farmer ancestry than their northern neighbors, and even slightly less than their southern neighbors; in spite of this, there are reasons to think that their language (and a few odd words in Sardinian) are all that’s left linguistically of the EEF people.
thought to be an effect of isolation
Caucasus isolated? It’s a showroom displaying samples from just about every migration that ever swept across the Eurasian continent.
A mosaic made out of shards from bottlenecks?
It’s not really PIE until there are potsherds involved, as *méh₂tēr used to say.
Heh, pretty much. The Caucasus as a whole isn’t all that isolated, but isolated mountain valleys are isolated!
I don’t think it’s reasonable to refer to Athabaskan as having undergone a long-range expansion in the sense of Indo-European, Uto-Aztecan, or Afroasiatic, just because there are some outlier Athabaskan languages in the U.S. Southwest and one on the Plains. Surely nobody supposes that the Algic outliers show that Algic was once spoken from coast to coast and that the historic distribution is just a remnant of it, any more than we think that because English is spoken not only in the British Isles but also in certain parts of Western and Southern Africa, it was once spoken all along the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa.
Do we in fact have any notion of how the Western Algic outliers did get there? If, as seems to be the standard view, they aren’t closely related, it suggests something very odd happening.
ObHat: Yurok, one of the two known outliers, is remarkable for its unusually large number of nouns that are suppletive for number: ko:ra’ ~ ko’r ‘1 person’, ni’iyel ‘2 persons’, nahkseyt ‘3 persons’, though what the general plural is I don’t know. English has only person/people plus the native titles mister, missis, which are pluralized (if at all) with French forms.
Algonquian comes from its current western end or thereabouts, and expanded eastwards. Wiyot and Yurok may have moved south instead.
Siouan, conversely, apparently got started in a more central or eastern location and expanded northwestwards.
JC: Surely nobody supposes that the Algic outliers show that Algic was once spoken from coast to coast and that the historic distribution is just a remnant of it, …. Do we in fact have any notion of how the Western Algic outliers did get there? If, as seems to be the standard view, they aren’t closely related, it suggests something very odd happening.
For a summary of opinions on this topic, see Campbell: American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America (Oxford UP 1997), pp. 152-154. Several authors have argued that Algic started rather than ended up on the West Coast, and although there is apparently no official consensus, Campbell seems to favour this opinion. Although I know little about those languages, I understand that Wiyot and Yurok (neighbours on the Northern California coast) are considered to be linguistically about as distant from each other as either is from the very large Algonkian language group found in a wide swath of East and Central North America. This suggests to me independently that the Algonkian differentiation is relatively recent and that Wiyot and Yurok must be the result of separate migrations (perhaps at very different times). In addition, they must also reflect a certain amount of mixture of the common incoming ancestor with two very different language groups already spoken in the area.
California languages, like others on most of the Pacific Coast of North America, are hemmed in by high, rugged mountains and other difficult terrain, while several language groups of the North American interior extend over vast territories with few obstacles to long distance travel. Thus it should not totally surprising that Wiyot and Yurok should have remained confined to California while a third, related language group should have expanded its territory toward the East and eventually spawned a very large language family. Nomadic speakers of this third element would not have had to remain in the intervening territory but could have traversed deserts and other unsuitable areas before finding places where to settle, gathering members of other groups and assimilating them in the process.
JC: Yurok nouns which are suppletive for numbers … English has only person/people plus the native titles mister, missis, which are pluralized (if at all) with French forms.
I am puzzled by “pluralized with French forms”. All the English nouns you cite are adaptations of (old) French forms, and only people is plural. I can’t think of what other French plural forms you mean.
I’ve often seen Messrs. in written English, clearly Messieurs; you can’t, after all, pluralize Mr. to Mrs. which already means something else.
I have seen Messrs too, apparently limited to business correspondence, instead of Sirs (I don’t think either can followed by names). . I don’t think there is a plural for Mrs..
The masculine plural form Messrs /ˈmɛsərz/ must always be followed by one or more surnames; if not, Sirs is used. The feminine plural is Mesdames /meɪˈdɑm(z)/ or more recently Madames /məˈdɑmz/. But the plural forms are thought of as much less nativized than the singular forms, though you’re of course right that all of them are from French originally.
Mssrs. is pronounced /ˈmɛsərz/, and it does precede surnames – e.g., “Mssrs. Smith and Jones”. The female equivalent is Mmes., pronounced /meɪˈdɑm/ or /meɪˈdæm/ .
I don’t think I have ever seen “Messrs.” in American English. Although I’m sure it exists to some extent in America, I very much associate it with British (or Commonwealth) English. I suppose this goes along with my remark, from several weeks ago, that “M.” for “Monsieur” is seldom used in America, for Frenchmen or anyone else.
In spoken American English, “Misters” before multiple surnames seems unremarkable to me, although it’s not particularly common. I don’t think it can be abbreviated though.
Yeah, I’ve never actually encountered those plurals in the wild.
Messrs.
Is (or was) widely used in Canada in business correspondence.
I just remembered where I first encountered “Messrs.” It was on a two-record set of Tom Baker reading The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. (It was directly abridged from the original, including the using the full title, but the script didn’t bother trying to hide that Jekyll and Hyde were manifestations of the same person; still, even knowing the reveal, it was pretty effective dramatically.) Jekyll addresses a letter to a chemist shop to “Messrs, Moore” (so that may have been part of the firm’s official name), and Baker pronounces the word as “MESS-uhs,” not sounding French at all. The meaning was obvious, but the word seemed very odd to my young-ish American ears.
Re “Messrs.”: That reminds me of my boyhood, reading Karl May (a German adventure story writer, many of whose books take place in the Wild West). He renders the pronunciation “Mesh’shurs” . Is that something he made up (wouldn’t be the only thing) or is a pronunciation like that attested?
How old is the pronunciation of /sr/ as something more like [ʃɹ] in… well, whatever English May may actually have heard? For groceries it even seems to be the only option left.
What, what, what? I say /groʊsriz/, with no shibilation whatever.
From what I have heard, grosheries seems to be spoken in the same geographical areas as warsh and rinshe, somewhere in the middle of US landmass.
Oh, good. I thought “great, another case where English spelling is a plain lie”.
I’ve never been to the middle of the US landmass, though, and I don’t think the people I’ve talked with much have spent much time there either.
How old is the pronunciation of /sr/ as something more like [ʃɹ] in… well, whatever English May may actually have heard?
/s/ may undergo place assimilation and become distinctly retracted especially if the /r/ has an apical or retroflex (rather than mid-tongue) articulation. The result, however, is an allophone modified towards [ʂ] (apical) rather than [ʃ] (domed). The same may happen to /zr/, as in Israel or newsreel.
I hear grosheries all the time here in NorCal.
According to Bert Vaux’s 2003 survey, 52% use /s/ and 45% use /ʃ/; I think this places it on a much stronger footing than “warsh”-style /r/-insertion. Interestingly, the same survey finds an 88%-to-11% preference for /s/ in “nursery” and a 94%-to-6% preference for /s/ in “anniversary”, showing that at least in most cases, “groshery” isn’t the result of a regular process.
And because why not, here’s a simple map I just made to give you a feeling for the regional distribution of “groshery”. (Vaux’s data presentation is a bit lacking in that regard.) The most notable things seem to be a particular concentration in Minnesota, Iowa and South Dakota and a relative absence from the urban Northeast, with most states falling in the middle ranges. Consistent with my state, I use /s/.
I would expect that as assimilation to “bunched” (palatal) /r/.
I, from Michigan, say gro[ʃ]ries, and I remember going to nur[ʃ]ry school (before kindergarten). The [ʃ] is not apical. I didn’t know the term “domed”, but I think it applies to both /ʃ/ and /ɹ/ for me: per Wikipedia “Palato-alveolar sounds are normally described as having a convex (bunched-up or domed) tongue, i.e. the front, central part of the tongue is somewhat raised compared to the tip, back and sides, which gives it weak palatalization.” No /ɹ/ in “wash” (which I mentally associate with hillbillies in West Virginia, where my dad grew up) or /ʃ/ in “rinse” (which I don’t recall hearing).
I think I’ve heard that.
@George Gibbard: According to Vaux’s data your “grocery” is typical for your state, but your “nursery” isn’t. Also I enjoyed making that map, so if anyone would like another one, just ask.
The map has disappeared.
Silly imgur. This one should work.
Sounds like an equally possible but different interpretation, not a logical mistake.
My point is that a statement like “Fact A, therefore conclusion B” is undermined if fact A is subject to a second interpretation that does not entail conclusion B.
@John Cowan
“My point is that a statement like “Fact A, therefore conclusion B” is undermined if fact A is subject to a second interpretation that does not entail conclusion B.”
I guess when Dziebel writes that “ANE is an Amerindian marker in the Old World by definition” he means that, if a genetic marker is ever given a geographic label, this label should come from the continent/area in which the said marker is found at highest frequencies. If this pattern is interpreted in the simplest of historical terms, this means ANE is an Amerindian population that came to the Old World. There could be other interpretations (ANE is an ancient Old World marker that declined in frequency in the Old World but increased in frequency in the New World, or that ANE is a New World marker that declined in frequency in the New World but increased in frequency in the Old World – still without reaching the New World maximums, etc.), but those are more special ones that require special proof. The problem, as I understand it now, is that mainstream science has adopted a “special” interpretation (which is rare for mainstream thinking), while Dziebel who is a heterodox thinker calls for a more basic, simplest interpretation of the data.
Yurok […] is remarkable for its unusually large number of nouns that are suppletive for number.
Yurok has a large number of dependent-specific numerals. Most nouns are not marked for number. So koːraʔ ʔoːɬ ‘one person’, niʔiɬ ʔoːɬ ‘two people’, naʔap’ puːwiʃ ‘two bags’, etc.
Y: Yurok is not the only one, several other Pacific Coast languages also has different sets of numerals depending on noun classes (eg humans, animals or their skins, roundish objects, longish objects, etc). This is true on both sides of the Pacific.
No. One marker cannot tell us much about its history; that it’s found on both sides of the Pacific doesn’t tell us which one it came from. Currently it’s known earlier in Asia (24,000 years ago) than in America, which is evidence that it came from Asia, while it has a stronger presence in America than in Eurasia in today’s populations, which is evidence that it came from America – that’s a stalemate, and Dziebel only looks at one side of it.
different sets of numerals depending on noun classes
Sounds like what happens when in a classifier system like Chinese or Japanese the numerals merge with the classifiers in idiosyncratic ways. In Dungan, something different again has happened: all the Mandarin classifiers have been lost except the most common (and default) classifier 個 ge, which has merged with the preceding numeral or demonstrative as a suffix, so that one counts yigɨ, lyongɨ, sangɨ, sigɨ, vŭgɨ, ljugɨ, čigɨ, bagɨ, jyugɨ, šigɨ.
Simplified: 个.
(I meant head-specific, not dependent-specific.)
That indeed seems to be the case. Mithun’s The Languages of Native North America calls these classificatory numerals, and gives examples in Carrier, Wiyot, and Nuuchahnulth (Nootka). In Nuuchahnulth the number-classifier compound can be used alone, in contrast to Yurok.
I meant head-specific, not dependent-specific
Yes, I wondered if you were saying that in two boots the head is two in these languages. Which I suppose is conceivable.
David Marjanovic: “that’s a stalemate, and Dziebel only looks at one side of it.”
So looks like both Dziebel and mainstream science are committing a logical mistake by favoring one interpretation over the other. But it does seem that the Old World attestation of an Amerindian component at 24,000 years is evidence not for the directionality of migration but for it’s timing. It must have happened prior to 24,000 years before present. As Dziebel point out in one of his posts, the fact that this Amerindian component in most frequent in the New World combined with the fact that typical West Eurasian components (WHG, EHG, etc.) are not attested in the Americas makes it likely that migration went from America to the Old World and not the other way around. The fact that it’s not yet attested in America earlier than 24,000 years is a matter of archaeology, ancient DNA recovery, etc., but not so much evidence for the directionality of the migration from the Old World to the New World.
What about the principle of parsimony…?
Mal’ta is far east of anywhere where WHG or EHG have been found. East Asian ancestry, in contrast, does occur in America.
David Marjanovic: “Mal’ta is far east of anywhere where WHG or EHG have been found. East Asian ancestry, in contrast, does occur in America.”
Mal’ta/Amerindian ancestry (distinct from East Asian/Amerindian ancestry) is found all over West Eurasia (any West Eurasian population is closer to Amerindians than it is to East Asians). Mal’ta is also known to contain no East Asian/Amerindian ancestry, although it’s geographically in East Asia. This leaves Amerindians as the common denominator between (or source of) West Eurasians and East Asians.
Note also that Oase is geographically a West Eurasian sample is just as close to Amerindians (if not closer) and East Asians than it is to modern West Eurasians. So, it’s a mirror image of the Mal’ta situation. West Eurasians and East Asians come and go but Amerindians are always around when it comes to the ancestry detected in ancient samples.
So, the principle of the economy of interpretations (parsimony) seems to favor a migration out of the Americas into the Old World, with subsequent divergence into East Asians and West Eurasians.
John Cowan: Vajda is careful to say that Ruhlen had 8 cognates right; he is also careful to say that Ruhlen proposed 35 cognates in all, for a less than stellar hit rate. (Numbers from memory, may be wrong.)
Here’s me quoting Vajda five years ago.
For the purposes of this discussion, Mal’ta isn’t in East Asia at all; it’s in North Eurasia, north of East Asia. 🙂
Mal’ta is what West Eurasians and Amerindians have in common; Amerindians are a mixture of (mostly) Ancient North Eurasians (Mal’ta) and East Asians.
It isn’t possible to reverse this scenario; a genome can’t unmix.
What is Oase? (And why is any place called “oasis” in German?)
@David
“What is Oase.”
Fu et al. “An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor.” 2015.
“It isn’t possible to reverse this scenario; a genome can’t unmix.”
Of course it cannot. But my question is why should it be admixture of East Asians and West Eurasians into Amerindians and not the divergence of East Asians and West Eurasians from Amerindians? I can’t help but agree with Dziebel that the latter is just a more natural way of looking at things. Otherwise, we have to a) postulate a hypothetical “ancient northeast asian” population of sorts that left more descendants in America than in the Old World; b) explain away the absence of East Asian ancestry in Mal’ta or ANE in East Asians (despite geography and the wide presence of East Asian alleles in modern Northeast Asian populations); c) explain away the absence of West Eurasian ancestry in Amerindians; d) postulate a unique event of admixture between widely divergent Old World populations at a relatively late moment in human prehistory and at a geographically out-of-the-way place.
In case, if anyone is wondering, Siberian Mal’ta has no relation to Malta in the Mediterranean and just means “bird-cherry place” in Buryat (Мойлт in Mongolian)
Elista in Kalmykia and Almata in Kazakhstan are formed with same suffix (‘sandy place’, ‘apple place’)
*facepalm* Oh yes, I knew the name was familiar! I’ve read that paper. That means I can answer your question:
The people from Oase 1 are indeed not descended from the ANE, and neither are the ANE descended from them. Nobody descends from them to a detectable amount. They died out in the Last Glacial Maximum, or nearly so.
Please explain.
Here’s a very simple scenario that accounts for all of these:
1) ANE live in central Siberia, East Asians in China.
2) ANE expand west and east, East Asians expand north. They mix in eastern Siberia.
3) This mixed population populates America.
4) In the west, ANE mix with WHG, forming EHG.
5) EHG and CHG mix and form the Yamnaya culture.
You seem to assume that all populations should be expected to spread in all directions equally, with no regard to geographic or climatic barriers. There’s no reason for such an assumption.
Why would there be WHG ancestry in Amerindians? I don’t understand why you ask that question.
Oh, nice! I was indeed wondering 🙂
Peștera cu Oase = “The Cave with Bones” (I was wondering why “Oase” looked so familiar — it’s the plural of os).
David Marjanovic: “Here’s a very simple scenario that accounts for all of these:
1) ANE live in central Siberia, East Asians in China.
2) ANE expand west and east, East Asians expand north. They mix in eastern Siberia.
3) This mixed population populates America.
4) In the west, ANE mix with WHG, forming EHG.
5) EHG and CHG mix and form the Yamnaya culture.”
Let me make it even simpler:
1) Amerindians live in America;
2) Amerindians expand out of America with one branch going south (to become East Asians), the other branch going west.
3) EHG, WHG and CHG progressively split from the west- (and south-) bound branch of Amerindians.
4) EHG and CHG mix and form the Yamnaya culture
This model parsimoniously explains the origin of two major human clusters – West Eurasians and East Eurasians. The mainstream model requires too many steps to explain a minor, Amerindian, cluster. The former seems to have more explanatory power.
“Why would there be WHG ancestry in Amerindians? I don’t understand why you ask that question.”
AFAIK, all and any modern, Mesolithic (La Brana, Loschbour) or Paleolithic (Kostenki) West Eurasians are closer to Amerindians than they are to East Asians. This means that they all have a fraction of ANE. At the same time, Amerindians who have ANE don’t have any of the West Eurasian proper (WHG, EHG) alleles. This is matter of course of ANE predates WHG and EHG, but it’s unexpected if ANE is derived from either WHG or EHG.
“You seem to assume that all populations should be expected to spread in all directions equally, with no regard to geographic or climatic barriers. There’s no reason for such an assumption.”
Au contraire, the diminishing fraction of ANE from Amerindians to EHG, WHG and CHG correlates well with geographic distance and geographic barriers from America.
What is this xHG of which you all speak? I gather it’s something to the north of ANE, and in some relation to East/West Eurasian, but from Google, Wiki, even Ancestral Journeys further details are unforthcoming. And where do you find data on the correlation of these (what I presume to be) complexes of genetic traits?
(I assume ANE is Ancient Near East, and Amerindian is transparent, though of course that doesn’t mean it automatically has an agreed well-defined meaning in this context).
That’s what I thought too, but no, ANE is Ancient North Eurasia(n). HG = hunter-gatherers.
Then why do the Amerindians look like a mixture of ANE and East Asians? You are saying that their genomes unmixed, right after you agreed that this isn’t possible.
Nobody said it is.
ANE = Ancient North Eurasians = the Mal’ta 1 individual and his inferred relatives that have left contributions to genomes all over the place east and west of there. I agree that the abbreviation is a bad choice.
WHG = Western Hunter-Gatherers = the Mesolithic people of western Europe from Spain to Sweden. Dark skin, blue eyes.
EHG = Eastern Hunter-Gatherers = same for Ukraine eastwards.
CHG = Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers.
Only in the primary literature (most of it paywalled, though not the paper I’m linking to in this comment) and on the blog Gene Expression I linked to in my previous comment. It’s all so new that no secondary literature on these topics exists yet.
Less so in Sweden, actually. And that link leads to the closest thing to secondary literature there is about this stuff; it’s from this year. (Open access!)
Comment 600!
And powered by he who has set the bar so high about non-anonymity.
(Sorry, finally can’t help it.)
*ḱlewos n̩dʰgʷʰitom
@David
“Then why do the Amerindians look like a mixture of ANE and East Asians?”
if they have some alleles the same with West Eurasians and some alleles the same with East Asians, they can be a mix of two or they can be an (subdivided) ancestor of the two. What is your expectation for an ancestral allele pattern if not that? To model Amerindians as an admixed population is problematic, as far as I understood from Dziebel, because Amerindians are very homozygous, while East Asians and West Eurasians are heterozygous. Two heterozygous populations can’t form a homozygous population unless another factor is postulated, namely a severe bottleneck after the admixture event.\
“Nobody said it is.”
If ANE is not derived from EHG or WHG but it’s related to them, then it must be ancestral to them, or, alternatively, all of them derive from another ancestral population but that population must share material with East Asians, so we again end up with Amerindians as the best proxy for an undifferentiated Eurasian population.
According to Wikipedia, bird-cherry in Buryat is Мойһон…
With possessive ending marker, мойhон becomes Мойhолтай or Мойhолтэй
anyway, it’s pronounced pretty close to Mal’ta
Testing confirmed the modern Irish are descended from Stone Age people from the pre-biblical Middle East and migrants from southern Russia.
The Middle Eastern wanderers displaced the native tribes and brought with them cereal, agriculture, cows and the feature of dark hair and brown eyes.
Later settlers with copper working skills arrived from the steppes of southern Russia, bringing a tolerance for milk in adulthood, blue eyes and the inherited blood disorder haemochromatosis – which is common enough in Ireland to be known as Celtic disease.
It is thought parts of that ancient Russian language are still used in modern Irish.
Irish DNA has Middle Eastern and Russian roots, gene study shows
Ancient Russian language, eh?
2015 – Russian
1000 AD – old Russian
500 AD – proto-Russian
2000 BC – proto-Balto-Russian
4500 BC – proto-Indo-Russian
;-))))
dark hair and brown eyes
Think Andrea Corr?
Testing confirmed the modern Irish are descended from Stone Age people from the pre-biblical Middle East and migrants from southern Russia.
Unless something has seriously changed since I learned the basics of population genetics back in high school, claims in this general form simply cannot be right, unless they are to be understood in some metaphorical sense that I don’t grasp. There is no population such that 100% of it has some particular allele and 0% of all other populations have the same allele, unless we define population simply as ‘those who have the allele’, without regard to temporal or spatial constraints. Nor can there be any guarantee that a particular mutation arose once and only once in human history. The most we can do without circularity (as far as I understand it) is to say that the proportions of some allele x of gene X and some allele y of gene Y are such in population α that it could have been derived from populations β, which is x-rich, and δ, which is y-rich, by random mating. And even then the conclusion is tentative, because admixtures of populations ζ, η, θ may serve as confounds if they were in fact contributors.
Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers
Much is now clear that was hidden. Thanks, David.
So if CHG was a component of Yamnaya, and Yamnaya carried pre-PIE as some people think, and pre-Pre-Proto-IE was typologically akin to Caucasian languages as some (not necessarily overlapping) people think, should we guess that the first seeds of Indo-European was carried by Caucasian hunter-gatherers?
And where does that leave the PIE-Uralic connection? I forget if there are putative identifications between archeology and pre-Uralic speakers, but the next question is if there are guesses at their genomical makeup?
@Lars
What I’ve garnered so far from sporadically reading around the web is that the Caucasus-affiliated component in Yamnaya is closest to modern Kartvelian-speakers and to the Caucasus hunter-gatherer (Kotia). Kotia also shows genomic affinity with Dravidian-speakers. So it’s possible that Uralic-related proto-Indo-Europeans (higher ANE) admixed with “southern Nostratic” speakers such as Kartvelians (lower ANE) who were in turn related to another “southern Nostratic” group such as Dravidians. These ancient Kartvelian-speakers must have extended into the steppe zone before being absorbed by a population of northern hunter-gatherers.
Lars: So if CHG was a component of Yamnaya, and Yamnaya carried pre-PIE as some people think, and pre-Pre-Proto-IE was typologically akin to Caucasian languages as some (not necessarily overlapping) people think, should we guess that the first seeds of Indo-European was carried by Caucasian hunter-gatherers?
Another recent study found (if I understand it correctly) that the genetic imprint on Yamnaya from Caucasus was almost exclusively from females, and that the process of admixture went on for some time. The implication is that men from the steppe for generations got wifes or female slaves from their southern neighbours. It seems more likely in this scenario that the men’s (and, possibly more importantly, the local women’s) language was carried on. But if (pre?-)Yamnaya men were bilingual in a North Caucasian lingua franca, that might also have had a chance. Should we start looking for substrate or adstrate effects in men’s and women’s vocabulary? Are there certain technologies that came from the Caucasus at the same time and can be associated with women (weaving? dyeing? poultry?)? How do the technical terms fit the general PIE scheme? If they fit, how do hunting or husbandry terms fit?
@Vladimir, Trond,
If I understand correctly, you’re both saying that (assuming PPPIE even has anything to do with Yamnaya) it probably came from the non-CHG parties to the paternity events that created the Yamnaya genomic profile?
Me? I think the most likely candidate for Yamnaya’s linguistic origin is the Eastern Hunter Gatherer element, i.e. the mixed European-Sibirian population of the steppe and forest-steppe. But Majkop isn’t out of the picture, rather strengthened by the discovery of the genetic input from Caucasius. Neither is Tripolye, yet, although recent genetic evidence pulls firmly eastwards from the Dnestr. All this will be much clearer in the next few years, as more and more high-quality genomes will be analysed and nailed onto timelines and maps. Glorious days! And while we wait we can play with different scenarios trying to make sense of what we learn.
But I’m no authority. I don’t read, comprehend and remember the papers the way David does. I don’t even follow Razib Khan’s Gene Expression Blog closely. In fact, I hadn’t even noticed he’s moved.
Caucasus, that is. Caucasius looks like the legendary forefather of all Caucasians, who in Yamnaya’s case is a foremother, Caucasia. Don’t say mytho-genealogy isn’t weird for a reason.
[Razib Khan]’s moved and he’d keeping very distracting company. A relief from the ubiquitous ’40 most amazing plastic surgery fails’ that adorn so many other places.
he’dhe’s[Edit button thirtysevened]
In the second option, you are saying that genomes unmixed, “subdivided”. That is (thermodynamically) impossible.
Small subsets of two heterozygous population can form a small homozygous population which later expands. Becoming heterozygous takes a lot more time, especially after a bottleneck.
Why must that population share material with East Asians (beyond signs of more distant common ancestry), when East Asian ancestry is absent in ancient western genomes?
That’s what comes out of this thread, which also mentions that both CHG individuals belong to Y haplogroup J while the Yamnaya men are apparently all R1. Also interesting is this thread, which said many of the same things a month before the CHG were discovered and also possibly sheds light on Dravidian origins; plus these quotes:
“Kurgans, for instance, were first erected south of the Caucasus by the Leyla-Tepe Culture, which appears to have been the result of peoples from the Northern Ubaid moving into Transcaucasia.”
“Ah yes, the ‘proto-Kurgan’ Leylatepe culture mentioned above (Azerbaijan, 5th millennium) a predecessor of the fully kurgan Maykop culture. Maybe they are also somehow related to all this phenomenon?”
“Most of the Y chromosome only exists so we can make trees and define haplogroups.”
More on Haplogroup J, just a single comment this time: it’s more widespread than implied above.
@David
“In the second option, you are saying that genomes unmixed, “subdivided”. That is (thermodynamically) impossible.”
I meant populations, not genomes. The contrast between admixture and ancestral substructure was often made in some of the first studies of “archaic admixture” in Eurasia.
“Small subsets of two heterozygous population can form a small homozygous population which later expands.”
This scenario seems to amount to postulating 3 bottlenecks (one to form a subset of an East Asian population, another to form a subset of a West Eurasian population and a third one to reduce heterozygosity in the admixed East Asian-West Eurasian population. It also means that ANE is derived from WHG or EHG that would serve as the ancestral superset from which a subset you’re talking about is derived.
“Why must that population share material with East Asians (beyond signs of more distant common ancestry), when East Asian ancestry is absent in ancient western genomes?”
But Amerindian ancestry is found in all of them. And that is the undifferentiated proto-Eurasian population in question. It just came from America. You would find East Asian ancestry in western Eurasian genomes only is there was an admixture event between fledgling EA and WEu populations. But if they just diverged and went there separate ways from the beginning, then is expectation is unwarranted.
Long, long ago I brought up the Austric hypothesis in this thread. I finally found my source. It’s a work of mass comparison (no regular sound correspondences are mentioned), and short enough that I reproduce all the evidence below. I omit the meanings of reflexes if they’re identical to that of their “reconstructed” ancestor. Austric is taken to include Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Daic (Tai-Kadai), Hmong-Mien, Ainu and – I had forgotten – Nihali.
*ku “I”
Nihali jó
Austroasiatic: Proto-Viet-Muong *kwa “we, I”, Central Nicobar chuu-ö
Hmong-Mien: Biao kəu, Hmong ko
Austronesian: PAN *aku
Daic: Proto-Tai *ku
Ainu *ku
Austronesian and Austroasiatic share a causative marker *pa- / *-ap- and an agentive marker with *m (PAN *mu- / *-um-, PAA *ma- / *-am-. Hmong-Mien doesn’t do prefixes, but may once have had them: *day “die” and *tay “kill” might come from stative *ma-t(r)ay “die” and causative *pa-t(r)ay “kill” – see below.
*qulo “man” (like all the other Proto-Austric forms below, this is called a “prototype” rather than a reconstruction)
Nihali Kolsa, Kalso “men” and the endonym (which must be why Nihali is sometimes confused with the Dravidian Kalto language); kol “woman, wife”
AA: Korku koro “man”, Khmer kur “Bahnar or Sro”
AN: Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *qulun “outsiders, alien people”; the Bintulu & Katingan reflex means “person”
Ainu *kur “man, person”
(m-)kyemu “blood”
AA: Mundari mayam, Khmer jha:m, Mon chim
Hmong-Mien: Yao *dzhyaam, Hmong *ntšheng
Austronesian: “[Proto-]Formosan” *dzamu(‘)
Ainu kem
Pengu “head”
Nihali peng, pyeng
AA: Khmer tpu:ng “above”
AN: PAN *bunguh “head”
Ainu *pa, commented as “(if from earlier *pang)”
*riat(s) “root”
AA: Santali rɛhɛ’d, Mundari re:’d, Khmer ris, Mong ruih, Sre rias, Vietnamese rẽ
AN: PAN *’uRat “blood vessel, vein, sinew, tendon”; the Maloh reflex means “root”
Ainu *rit “root, blood vessel, tendon”
(…of course I’m immediately reminded of PIE *wreh₂d-…)
*-apoy “fire”
Nihali a:po
AA: Brao pa:y, Tampuon pae, Katu mpoih
HM: Ke-cheng fwi “ash”, Yao-lu fui (no meaning given, but apparently “ash” again), Thailand Yao whi “ash”
AN: PAN *Sapuy
Daic: Thai fay, Proto-Kam-Sui *pwai
Ainu *apOy “fire, hearth” > ape, abe, ambe, aboi in various dialects
*langit(s) “sky”
Nihali lēgē “up”
AA: Sora leng-leng “very high, inaccessible”, bəleng “roof”, Juang aling “top”, Khmer lîng “climb, ascend”, Proto-Bahnaric *le:ng “sky”
AN: PAN *langi- “sky”, followed by -ca in Saaroa, -tra in Merina, -t in Puyuma, Tagalog and Malay, and 0 in Polynesian.
Ainu *nis “sky, cloud” > nish “clouds, heavens, air sky”, assuming the first syllable disappeared somehow.
*ma-t(r)ay “die”, *pa-t(r)ay “kill”
Nihali páDa: “kill”
HM: *day “die”, *tay “kill”
AN: Saisiat masay “die”, Paiwan matsay “die” / pa-patsay “kill”, Malay mati “die”, Maori mate “dia”, Hawaiian make “die”
Daic: Proto-Tai *trai “die”
Ainu *day “die”
Many more “word comparisons” are said to exist; these are just the subjectively “most convincing” ones.
The source is a chapter titled The “Greater Austric” hypothesis, occupying pages 17–23 in John D. Bengtson (2008): Linguistic Fossils – Studies in Historical Linguistics and Paleolinguistics, Theophania Publishing. It’s a summary citing “e.g., Benedict (1996, 1975), Bengtson (1992, 1996, 1997a), Bengtson & Blažek (2000), Diffloth (1994), Gjerdman (1926), Hayes (1992, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001), Kosaka (2002), Kuiper (1948), Norquest (1998), Schmidt (1906), Shorto (1976), Sidwell (1998), Vovin (1992)”; I can provide the full citations today and tomorrow.
Oh, I forgot two obvious asterisks.
Back to population genetics…
How does that help? 🙂 How would a heterogeneous population become unmixed by traits that are mostly invisible to natural and sexual selection alike?
That’s how migration works.
No, why? ANE and WHG share a common exclusive ancestor; EHG is either intermediate between them (thus derived directly from the same ancestor) or a mixture of ANE and WHG. (Similarly, the Scandinavian hunter-gatherers have such a position between WHG and EHG.)
Oh. Turns out Vovin now reconstructs (pages 24 and 28 of this presentation on academia.edu) Proto-Japonic *poy “fire”. Comparing that to Proto-Tai *vVy (tone A2) “fire”, along with many other roots of sometimes quite basic vocabulary, he argues for an intense contact relationship between Proto-Japonic and Proto-Tai-K(r)adai or their recent ancestors.
@David
“How would a heterogeneous population become unmixed…”
But why do you assume that it’s admixed? If it’s ancestral to two divergent populations then it will share material with both, but the two populations won’t share material with each other. That’s exactly what we find.
“That’s how migration works.”
Migrations are different. Some case studies of post-1492 migrations of European (e.g., Basque) and African populations to the New World showed no heterozygosity decreases in New World descendant populations. It all depends on how the ancestral population is “sampled” by the migrants. (Y-DNA hg A00 which is 300,000 years old is well and alive in African Americans.) Any New World tribe has alleles similar to East Asians and to West Eurasians. If it migrates out of the New World, it would mirror the overall diversity found in the overall continent. A serial bottleneck is a special case that requires special proof. It was debunked for Eurasian populations (under the out-of-Africa assumption). Why would we keep it for Amerindian populations?
Speaking about Austric, apparently there’s a new big discussion around the Indo-Uralic hypothesis and comparative methodology in general published in the Journal of Indo-European Studies. Dziebel has a link to a free PDF copy of the whole debate. http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org/2016/01/the-indo-uralic-desire-and-the-comparative-method/.
They’ll obviously share a lot of common inheritance with each other. Some of that “shared drift” will be absent in the closest relative of the ancestral population; and that’s not what we find, AFAIK.
And a blog post that starts of mostly reasonable and then plunges into the deep end… oh wow. I’ll have to write a comment there at some point.
David: a blog post that starts of mostly reasonable and then plunges into the deep end…
Not too surprising, but can you share the reference?
David Marjanovic: “And a blog post that starts of mostly reasonable and then plunges into the deep end… oh wow. I’ll have to write a comment there at some point.”
Well, since he disagrees with Indo-Europeanists methodologically, the divergence in the outcomes can be expected to be deep. But his phonetic ideas are pretty clear: no centum-satem languages, voiced aspirates are secondary even within the timeline of Indo-European. I’d be curious to know what you’re going to write. You may be lucky enough to get your comments cleared – due to your credentials – but I left several comments on his site last year and he didn’t clear a single one to date. And I’m his sympathizer.
@m-l, Vladimir linked to Dziebel’s post that David commented on. Long story short: The water word in IE is really *dwegw- and Nostraticists should try to prove cognacy with PU *juka. And then reform the reconstruction of both families without this silly insistence on consistent sound laws.
@Lars: Wow.
Thanks Lars. I had failed to notice the link.
Yes, *dwegw for ‘water’, illustrated by a bunch of words meaning ‘deep, dive, valley’ and more, none of which means ‘water’.
Oh! I didn’t know he had moderation on! In that case I won’t bother, I’ll just post it here. I’ll need to read a few things first, though.
@m-l, I admit I was sort of skimming when I got that far — or rather skipping to the conclusion.
@Lars
“Yes, *dwegw for ‘water’, illustrated by a bunch of words meaning ‘deep, dive, valley’ and more, none of which means ‘water’.”
With all fairness, he starts off with the standard Celtic *dubro- ‘water’ (OIr dobur, Bret dour, Welsh dw(f)r)) to which the words meaning ‘deep’ are immediately related. Among the latter Latv dubra means ‘puddle’. His premise is that semantics needs to overlap and reveal an etymological path but not be literally the same. Otherwise, there won’t be any etymology. Indo-European wed- ‘water’ must have evolved from something and this something is ‘deep’. So, deep > deep water > water, river, wave, etc. Other forms such as Lat aqua ‘water’ look synonymous with wed- ‘water’ but they evolved from another concept, not from the ‘deep’ one.
Vladimir: Sorry, I should have reread (or copied) the list of words, as I forgot the Celtic words at the beginning. I agree that semantics may reveal an etymological path, but it does not mean that it must reveal such a path when the alleged phonological path has to be so convoluted.
It seems to me relevant that the only languages quoted where the word for “water” seems to be related to the one for “deep” are Celtic ones, from countries situated on the edge of an ocean. Every language on earth has a word for “water” even if water is scarce and never deep in the places where the language is spoken.
Marie-Lucie says: ” I agree that semantics may reveal an etymological path, but it does not mean that it must reveal such a path when the alleged phonological path has to be so convoluted.”
I don’t have a good eye for what constitutes a convoluted phonological path vs. just a path. Prehistory is a forest, so every path has a good chance of being convoluted. If it’s systematic, phonetically plausible and explains words’ history, then it makes sense to me. Ringe with whom Dziebel fully agrees argues precisely against the tendency to confuse sound correspondences with simple visual similarity ( t~t, d~d, w~w). The trick with *dwegw- is that it has long been assumed that only Greek splits labiovelars into d/g/b. (Under this rule, Gk hydros ‘water’ and hygros ‘wet’ become easy cognates.) But if Greek simply best preserved a proto-Indo-European law, then we can expect -g- or -b- to show up across Indo-European dialects. Lith dugnas and Celtic dubro fit the bill. And then it pulls with it several other clear cognates. The specialized r/n morphology is found in both ‘deep’ and ‘water’ sets. Now, it’s already become a snowball. d- can be explained because it there’s a poorly understood process whereby d- is lost in some Indo-European languages but not in others. (And Dziebel finds new cognates for the well-established Lith ilgas ~ Lat longus ~ Gk dolixos, namely Toch walke and Slav *velikiji, which makes Lith ilgas, now from *wilgas, more regular.) So once a methodological can of worms is open, then several phonetic regularities and irregularities come under a microscope. Things do get convoluted but this is because it’s objectively a forest.
On the Uralic side, juka is a better candidate for any megalocomparative purposes because it’s uncontroversially proto-Uralic, while *weti- has distributional gaps, so it’s native Uralic status depends on the kind of phylogeny one uses. Uralic voiceless *-k- matches IE voiced *g(w) (just like -t- in *weti- matches IE -d-). Meanings match too. So it all makes sense. j- in juka is of course a problem in the light of *dwegw-/dugw. Dziebel is admitting that it’s an issue but then if one looks at Gk hygros/hydros, h- is not supposed to be there (if *wed- is a proto-Indo-European form), and often Gk h- corresponds to proto-Indo-European *y (Uralic *j) as in English year vs. Gk ho:ra. So there’s a room to speculate here.
Vladimir: Thank you for the explanations. I am not convinced, but I don’t know as much as you do about IE and Uralic.
Ringe with whom Dziebel fully agrees argues precisely against the tendency to confuse sound correspondences with simple visual similarity ( t~t, d~d, w~w).
This is a basic tenet of historical linguistics, going back at least to Grimm’s law.
it has long been assumed that only Greek splits labiovelars into d/g/b. (Under this rule, Gk hydros ‘water’ and hygros ‘wet’ become easy cognates
i find this odd. It is generally accepted that Greek d/t and g/k both go back to labiovelars *gw/*kw , as shown by many examples, but which of them is the result of the change depends on the following vowel. If hydros and hygros have the same origin*gw, what could be the conditioning factor?
Things do get convoluted but this is because it’s objectively a forest.
Well, from what I see, Dziebel makes more of a forest from this than it needs to be because he prefers to ignore well-established sound laws in order to bring things together he feels belong together sematically (same was the case in the “heart/root” discussion). But we know that semantically similar words that even look similar may, nevertheless, not be related (e.g. Lat. habere on one side and German haben, English have on the other side). With the classical method of sound correspondences, etymologies can be checked, and then you can try to account for the forms with e.g. /d/ in some IE languages and something else in other IE languages, keeping in mind that you have some explaining to do, but if you loosen them up like Dziebel does (like “labiovelars, labials, and dentals could alternate already in IE” etc.), then everything is built on the cogency of argumentation based on semantics, and there much more is open to matters of personal taste and judgment. Personally, I don’t find Dziebel’s semantic argumentation e.g. that “heart” and “root” need to be related convincing at all. And if “deep” > “water” is a natural pathway (which I do not doubt), then this development may have happened several times and doesn’t necessarily mean that the IE roots *deubh- and *wed- have to be related.
Sorry, I switched the aspiration – PIE *dheub-.
@Marie-Lucie
“It is generally accepted that Greek d/t and g/k both go back to labiovelars *gw/*kw , as shown by many examples, but which of them is the result of the change depends on the following vowel. If hydros and hygros have the same origin*gw, what could be the conditioning factor?”
The morphology derived from Indo-European *wed- is *weder/*weden-, so -e- follows d-, which is what defines gw > d in Greek. I suppose, hygros must be derived from *hyguros to make things work just like they work in Greek.
Dziebel is admitting that it’s an issue but then if one looks at Gk hygros/hydros, h- is not supposed to be there (if *wed- is a proto-Indo-European form)…
Jesus Christ, can’t people just read a freaking handbook before they start writing about a subject? Ancient Greek /u/ ALWAYS had “rough breathing” in the non-psilotic dialects. Even the name of the letter was originally ὗ.
As for the root of ‘deep’, Balto-Slavic evidence quite clearly points to *dʰeubʰ-, so the Germanic word must be due to the operation of Kluge’s Law in the derived adjective (*dʰeubʰ-nó-), not to PIE *b.
The morphology derived from Indo-European *wed- is *weder/*weden-, so -e- follows d-
In your reconstruction, which is simply incorrect. We have the following correctly reconstructed forms:
nom./acc.sg. *wódr̥
collective *wédōr
original weak stem *wédn-
secondary (analogical) weak stems *udn-, *udr-, *wedr-
The suffix could occur with e-grade only in one of the possible locative forms, *udén(i), cf. Ved. udán (probably analogical, and not attested in Greek).
For what it’s worth, the argument against the possible Proto-Uralic status of *weti has nothing to do with phylogenetic models. It’s attested widely enough to be reconstructible to the bottom node in any case; nobody believes that Samic could have been the earliest group to split off. The point is that we find *different* terms for ‘water’ in two branches, and fairly marginal branches even, which would leave the possibility that there are archaisms here that were able to remain unousted by an Indo-European loanword.
Unfortunately for this theory though, the Khanty term for ‘water’ is a clear innovation, derived from ‘ice’; and recently it has also been proposed that Samic would have a reflex of *weti after all, in the meaning ‘freshly fallen snow’ (e.g. Northern Sami _vahca_). So if we grant that terms for ‘water’ could be replaced language-internally through semantic change after all (something that Dziebel probably will not protest either), then it’s entirely justified to suggest that the PU precedessor of the Samic word for ‘water’ could have rather had a different meaning — and we then have little options left but to assume that, per the majority vote, the original plain word for ‘water’ was indeed *weti.
(It also seems awfully convenient that this word would have been loaned at that precise moment when all nine main Uralic groups had just disintegrated, but were still close enough that a loan acquired by seven of them would have ended up looking entirely native.)
The Greek triple reflex of labiovelars which Dziebel wants to promote to PIE status doesn’t even occur in all Greek dialects. Proto-Greek did dissimilate all labiovelars to velars after /u/ (which is why hugros “wet” can be reconstructed with a labiovelar), but the split of the remaining labiovelars into labials and dentals depending on the following sound does not appear in Aeolic, which simply turn them all into labials. This shows that the labiovelar to labial change must be a diffusion postdating Proto-Greek, never mind PIE.
(Btw, hydros does not mean “water” but a kind of water snake; the Greek for water is hydōr.)
[…Aeolic, which simply turned…]
Thank you TR, for both corrections.
@Piotr
“In your reconstruction, which is simply incorrect.”
Please please correct me. I may be mistaken, but didn’t syllabic resonants alternate with regular resonants in early Indo-European (Sievers?), hence we have Hitt wadar, Gen. wedenas ‘water’.
“In your reconstruction, which is simply incorrect.
“As for the root of ‘deep’, Balto-Slavic evidence quite clearly points to *dʰeubʰ-.”
I would think that it’s *deub- in Balto-Slavic, without the aspiration. Also Lithuanian has a form dugnas that suggested to Dziebel that it’s a “labiovelar play” here, with gw > b in Balto-Slavic as well.
But you do raise a point that I also find unconvincing: how to deal with voiced aspirates in the group of words meaning ‘deep’? Dziebel dismisses voiced aspirates as a combination of a voiced stop + laryngeal but what if there are two voiced aspirates reconstructed in a root?
@TR
“but the split of the remaining labiovelars into labials and dentals depending on the following sound does not appear in Aeolic, which simply turn them all into labials. This shows that the labiovelar to labial change must be a diffusion postdating Proto-Greek, never mind PIE.”
But couldn’t it be both? If it was a typical process starting in Proto-Indo-European times (which Dziebel infers not from Greek evidence but because cognates with g/d/b are found across the whole spectrum of Indo-European languages including satem languages, then it could happen over and over again in different branches.
the labiovelar to labial change
This change is a common one, attested in a variety of language families in the world. I think that labio-uvular to labial is at least as common. What is unusual is the labiovelar to dental change, which would seem to require an intermediate step (perhaps *tw ?). Are there instances of such a change outside of Greek (or IE)?
“The Greek triple reflex of labiovelars which Dziebel wants to promote to PIE status doesn’t even occur in all Greek dialects. ”
Mycenean Greek still has the labiovelars, even.
@Marie-Lucie
“What is unusual is the labiovelar to dental change, which would seem to require an intermediate step (perhaps *tw ?).”
Latin typically (and uniquely among IE languages) turns PIE *dh into f (dh > th > f) as in *dhuHmos > fu:mus and *gwh also into f (as in gwhe:ros > fe:rus, Gk the:ros), so th and f bled into each other at some point in the history of Italic. That’s all I know. But this doesn’t really answer your question about exact parallels to the dentalization of a labiovelar. (From my memory) Dziebel lists some affixal examples such as Slav *penti ‘five’ < IE *penkwe, *ne:drо 'bosom, inner core' next to Gk nephroi 'kidneys' (< *negwh-), *poteti 'sweat' < IE *pekwo-, etc., but nothing word-initial. It looks like he collected plenty of examples of velar ~ labial alternations but much fewer velar ~ dental alternations.
a typical process starting in Proto-Indo-European times
What exactly does that mean, though? A sporadic change which hit a few labiovelars now and then but not all? That doesn’t seem very satisfactory (and like all sporadic changes would be basically unconfirmable).
What is unusual is the labiovelar to dental change, which would seem to require an intermediate step (perhaps *tw ?).
It’s usually assumed that the intermediate step was something like a palatal affricate, which later merged (in most dialects) into the dental series. Arcadian still preserves this intermediate sound, written with a special letter whose phonetic value, alas, is unknown.
You might think it’s a bit weird that the labiovelars should be palatalized/affricated when the regular velars were not, but the extra turbulence caused by the labial occlusion might account for it (cf. the affrication of /t/ before /u/ in Japanese).
@TR
“What exactly does that mean, though?”
Maybe if conditions are right, then labiovelars split. Then the same conditions reemerge (through morphological changes) and the same process is applied again. Dziebel’s examples are from a wide range of Indo-European languages. They either went through the same process independently, or they just inherited the outcomes of a proto-linguistic change. If Greek split its labiovelars relatively late (after the Myc times), then it can’t be proto-Indo-European. But Dziebel’s examples (if correct of course) affect some well-known cognates and the very same forms as the ones that show /p/ in Greek, e.g., Gk epos ‘word’, Skrt vakti ‘says, Lat vox ‘voice’ but Slav *upeti/*vopiti ‘cry out, yell’, *vopli ‘outcry’, vypu ‘Ardea stellaris’, Latv u:pet, u:peju ‘I cry’ (in reference to owls and wild pigeons), upuot ‘cry, call loudly’, upis ‘eagle owl’, Lith upas ‘echo’, OHG ufo, uvo, ONorse ufr ‘owl’, Avest ufyeimi ‘invoco’ (http://kinshipstudies.org/2014/07/23/indo-european-labiovelars-a-new-look/).
There’re some comparisons in that post that are clearly unacceptable but this one is at least intriguing.
@TR
“It’s usually assumed that the intermediate step was something like a palatal affricate, which later merged (in most dialects) into the dental series.”
Is Gk dzoos ‘life’ (< *gwi:wos) an example of this affricatization of a labiovelar? And doesn't it then go to z and not to d?
Gk. ζωός “alive” and its relatives in ζω- show a different development because the initial stop is followed by *y. In Greek, *dy *gy *gʷy all gave ζ. The preform here is *gʷyeh₃-. The same root with the *y vocalized in zero grade, *gʷih₃-, gives βίος “life”, with the labial reflex of the labiovelar.
Maybe if conditions are right, then labiovelars split.
But that begs the question. What are the conditions? I admit to only having browsed Dziebel’s labiovelar post, but without an account of the phonological circumstances under which the labiovelars are supposed to become labials or whatever, the supposed sound changes remain sporadic and so not very convincing.
@TR
“The same root with the *y vocalized in zero grade, *gʷih₃-, gives βίος “life”, with the labial reflex of the labiovelar.”
And interestingly, it gives a labial reflex without the right conditioning factor, namely a rounded vowel.
@TR
“But that begs the question. What are the conditions?”
For Greek, it’s assumed that *gw became g before or after /u/, d before /e/i/ and b before /a/o/. Dziebel mentioned that he assumes the same conditioning factors operated in PIE but paradigm leveling has caused some of those factors to become obscure. Gk βίος “life” instead of expected dios* could be an example of that.
Suppose – just for the sake of the argument – that Hittite had a word /ˈwadr̩/. How could that be written in Cuneiform?
This explains the rather few cases where Indo-Iranian points toward a voiced aspirate while the other branches point at a plain voiced consonant. It fails to explain the cases where all branches point to a voiced aspirate; those must have had voiced aspirates already in PIE, whatever their ultimate origin (on the way to PIE) may be.
Italic as a whole turned word-initial *[bʰ] *[dʰ] *[gʰ] *[gʷʰ] into *[pʰ] *[tʰ] *[kʰ] *[kʰʷ] (like Greek), then into *[f] *[θ] *[x] *[xʷ] (like Greek a thousand years later, except that [kʰʷ] had long disappeared there by then as described in the comments above). Then, it merged *[θ] and *[xʷ] into *[f]: the Latin outcomes are f f h f. The “Sabellic” = “Oscan-Umbrian” = “P-Italic” branch merged *x into *f as well, yielding f f f f for the whole series in the attested languages.
So, rather than /θ/ and /f/ becoming somehow confused, we’re looking at a very simple, unidirectional sound change: [θ] became [f]. No bleeding!
In Balto-Slavic, yes, because the aspiration was lost on the way to Balto-Slavic! However, the lack of the form **dūb- in Balto-Slavic, while *dub- is present, means that Winter’s law didn’t operate, and that means the Proto-Balto-Slavic *b in this root goes back to PIE *bʰ, not to PIE *b.
Here is the letter, attested in a single inscription.
And interestingly, it gives a labial reflex without the right conditioning factor, namely a rounded vowel.
There’s no conditioning factor for the labial reflex in Greek; it’s the elsewhere case. After the conditioned changes to velars and dentals, all the remaining labiovelars became labials. It’s true that before i, there’s a strange asymmetry whereby the voiceless labiovelar went to a dental whereas the voiced and aspirated ones went to labials; I don’t know of a good explanation for this, but I can’t see how paradigm leveling could explain it.
If the idea is that something like this set of conditioned changes already happened in or before PIE, then PIE, like Greek, should not have any remaining labiovelars whatsoever, no?
TR: You might think it’s a bit weird that the labiovelars should be palatalized/affricated when the regular velars were not, but the extra turbulence caused by the labial occlusion might account for it (cf. the affrication of /t/ before /u/ in Japanese).
Isn’t/Wasn’t Japanese /t/ also affricated before /i/ (with a slightly different fricative release)? Surely there is no “labial occlusion” in this case. (If labialization can be interpreted as “occlusion”).
Vladimir: Latin typically (and uniquely among IE languages) turns PIE *dh into f (dh > th > f) as in *dhuHmos > fu:mus and *gwh also into f (as in gwhe:ros > fe:rus, Gk the:ros), so th and f bled into each other at some point in the history of Italic.
I have always been puzzled by the apparently assumption that the Latin/Italic fricative f resulted from the merger of the PIE voiced aspirates *dh and *bh, rather than from the merger of local fricative reflexes of these reconstructed phonemes. Perhaps I am behind the times on this topic: at least Baldi does present this interpretation without comment, along with *gwh (The Foundations of Latin:280-283).
A change “th” (as in English “thing”) to “f” may be unknown at the PIE level, but it has occurred fairly recently and is still occurring in some definitely IE languages: Russian has Fyodor from Greek Theodoros (among many other examples of borrowings from Greek); (socio-)dialectal English has examples like “nuffink” for standard nothing and “muvver” for mother (both of which continue the OE allophonic rule of intervocalic fricative voicing).
Justifying these changes is a problem for the articulatory framework of phonological classes, but from the auditory point of view these fricatives are much closer to each other than the corresponding stops are.
@ marie-lucie: Isn’t/Wasn’t Japanese /t/ also affricated before /i/ (with a slightly different fricative release)?
Sure, but my point is it’s also affricated before /u/, and whatever is phonetically responsible for that (which is not necessarily the same factor as for /i/) might also have played a part in the Greek case.
It could be, though: Māori aspirates p, t, k before i and u, or so I’ve read.
Marie-Lucie:
A change “th” (as in English “thing”) to “f” may be unknown at the PIE level
You’re talking about /θ/, whereas Vladimir is talking about [tʰ] (as an intermediary between PIE /dʰ/ and Latin /f/).
dialectal English has examples like “nuffink” for standard nothing and “muvver” for mother (both of which continue the OE allophonic rule of intervocalic fricative voicing)
They don’t so much continue it as are oblivious to it: in those accents of English, /θ/ > /f/ and /ð/ > /v/, so whatever the voicing rule is before is preserved after the sound-change. (Note that some people pronounce /θ/ in a way that sounds like [f] to other English-speakers but is still distinguishable by them from original /f/, whereas others have a full merger.)
@Piotr
“Suppose – just for the sake of the argument – that Hittite had a word /ˈwadr̩/. How could that be written in Cuneiform?”
wadar, and *wedn- > wadanas. In any case, syllabic resonants seem to be a special case of resonants, hence likely derived from full grade -en/-er or -en/-or.
“In Balto-Slavic, yes, because the aspiration was lost on the way to Balto-Slavic! However, the lack of the form **dūb- in Balto-Slavic, while *dub- is present, means that Winter’s law didn’t operate, and that means the Proto-Balto-Slavic *b in this root goes back to PIE *bʰ, not to PIE *b.”
Yes, this makes sense. So we arrive at *dubh-, not *dhubh-.
“This explains the rather few cases where Indo-Iranian points toward a voiced aspirate while the other branches point at a plain voiced consonant. It fails to explain the cases where all branches point to a voiced aspirate; those must have had voiced aspirates already in PIE, whatever their ultimate origin (on the way to PIE) may be.”
He militates against this by etymologizing IE *bhreH2ter ‘brother’ as *mreH2ter with a sort of “laryngeal throwback” or a Schwebeablaut *mreH2 > breH2ter > bhreH2ter and citing Latv marsa ( *bhrgwh > devoicing + Grassmann’s Law > *prthenos > *parthenos).
Or, he compares Gk βάθρον ‘Grund(lage), Stufe, Sitz, Fußgestell’ (< βαίνω 'go') directly to an isolated Slav *bedro 'thigh' (literally 'foot/leg support') and Lat femur 'thigh' to Lat venio: and Goth qiman 'come', all from the same root *gwen-/*gwem- 'come, go, walk'. Latin has two forms – with and without aspiration. The aspirated one (femur) is secondary and derived from a laryngeal further down the string. The same family of words includes, according to him, Lat hostis (< *gwH2es-), Goth gast and Slav *gosti 'guest' (literally 'the one who comes'), with the same morphology as Gk βάσκω.
The latter set is interesting because, if correct, it shows both voiced aspirates < [voiced stops + laryngeal] and the PIE timing of the laryngeal split (Slav *bedro with a labial just like Gk βάθρον ‘true’ > ‘true friend’ > ‘friend, brother-in-arms’.
The latter one is pretty compelling, unless I’m missing something.
My latest post got mangled pretty badly. I’ll try to recreate it. Sorry.
TR: before i, there’s a strange asymmetry whereby the voiceless labiovelar went to a dental whereas the voiced and aspirated ones went to labials
I hardly know Greek, and not much PIE, but the asymmetry suggests that the changes in labiovelars occurred at different times, separated by periods during which other relevant changes happened, providing different conditionings (and probably different outcomes in different dialects or other varieties).
Asymmetry is not unusual, although it may seem “illogical”. It is quite common for members of what seems like a unitary phonetic class (eg voiceless stops) to undergo the same type of change, not together as a single group, but one after another during a period that can be quite long. For instance, Western Romance weakened the Latin intervocalic voiceless stops, turning them into voiced stops, so for instance the Spanish participle in -ado from Latin -atus, -atum. Spoken Spanish turns the d into a voiced fricative, and some dialects do away with that fricative altogether (but do not do so with the fricative pronunciation of b which could be expected to parallel that of d). French must have started on the same path, similarly weakening all the voiced stops into voiced fricatives, but taking the next step of weakening them to zero except for v (from original Latin p). However, in some colloquial French varieties (mine for instance), (very) careless speech often loses the v, especially in very common words, so for instance Saez ous ça? (= Savez-vous ça?) ‘(Do) you know that?’ or (V)Ous oulez ous asseoir? (= Vous voulez vous asseoir?) ‘(Do) you want to sit down?’. The loss of v (unless continuing to be prevented by spelling and standardized pronunciation) would bring to completion the weakening and loss of all the reflexes of Latin intervocalic stops.
Back to the Greek treatment of PIE labiovelars: could it be that *some* of the labio-velars (here *Kw) go back to earlier sequences of (pre-PIE ??) **K+w or **KVw (where V = vowel)? A front vowel in a possible **Kew could well result in palatalization of **K while still preserving the **w (with potentially later loss of the vowel or its merging with the **w into a long vowel, or yet other possibilities).
This is an accurate version.
“This explains the rather few cases where Indo-Iranian points toward a voiced aspirate while the other branches point at a plain voiced consonant. It fails to explain the cases where all branches point to a voiced aspirate; those must have had voiced aspirates already in PIE, whatever their ultimate origin (on the way to PIE) may be.”
He militates against this by etymologizing IE *bhreH2ter ‘brother’ as *mreH2ter with a sort of “laryngeal throwback” or a Schwebeablaut *mreH2 > breH2ter > bhreH2ter and citing Latv marsa ( *mregwH > *bhrgwh > devoicing + Grassmann’s Law > *prthenos > *parthenos).
Or, he compares Gk βάθρον ‘Grund(lage), Stufe, Sitz, Fußgestell’ (< βαίνω 'go') directly to an isolated Slav *bedro 'thigh' (literally 'foot/leg support') and Lat femur 'thigh' to Lat venio: and Goth qiman 'come', all from the same root *gwen-/*gwem- 'come, go, walk'. Latin has two forms – with and without aspiration. The aspirated one (femur) is secondary and derived from a laryngeal further down the string. The same family of words includes, according to him, Lat hostis (< *gwH2es-), Goth gast and Slav *gosti 'guest' (literally 'the one who comes'), with the same morphology as Gk βάσκω.
The latter set is interesting because, if correct, it shows both voiced aspirates < [voiced stops + laryngeal] and the PIE timing of the laryngeal split (Slav *bedro with a labial just like Gk βάθρον ‘true’ > ‘true friend’ > ‘friend, brother-in-arms’. Only in Germanic we find derivatives of ‘tree’ words meaning ‘true’ and only in Germanic and Balto-Slavic we see the ‘friend’ words.
The latter one is pretty compelling, unless I’m missing something.
JC: You’re talking about /θ/, whereas Vladimir is talking about [tʰ] (as an intermediary between PIE /dʰ/ and Latin /f/).
OK, I should not have given the impression that I think that PIE had /θ/. But I don’t believe that [tʰ] can be a direct intermediary between the PIE and Latin phonemes: there has to be a fricative in between, perhaps in Proto-Italic. This is also Baldi’s interpretation.
nuffink and muvver
Again I may have written too carelessly. Of course the change from interdental to labiodental is independent of the voicing rule (which was operative in OE, but now frozen). As for people being able to differentiate the middle consonants in, say, muffin vs nuffink, it could also be a matter of register: careless vs formal speech in people who have been taught to “speak properly”. See for instance my comment on loss of v in my own French.
i, u in Maori and Japanese
These are the highest vowels in these languages, and the contact of high vowels with adjacent consonants often affects the consonants in question. Traditional Canadian French also has a degree of affrication of dental stops before the high front vowels i, ü. Note that the position of the tongue for high front vowels and for true dentals (not alveolars) is practically the same.
This is not true for u, a back vowel, which however can have more fronted allophones in languages without a rounded front vowel.
Oops, correction: … without a high rounded front vowel phoneme.
David: PIE /dh/ > Latin /f/
It took me a while to write my comment and by the time I posted it you had written yours. Sorry for the duplication!
@m-l: Asymmetry is not unusual
Sure, but it’s nice to find some phonetic grounds for it (e.g. in your example it’s phonetically plausible that different POAs should affect rates of lenition); in this case it’s puzzling that the voiceless unaspirated labiovelar should have been affricated/palatalized/whatever before /i/ but not the voiced one, nor even the aspirated one which would have been voiceless too by that time. But that’s what seems to have happened.
could it be that *some* of the labio-velars (here *Kw) go back to earlier sequences of (pre-PIE ??) **K+w or **KVw (where V = vowel)?
Not sure how that would help us with the Greek case — even if that was the case, Greek fronts all the labiovelars (when the environment is right), not just some, and it doesn’t front any plain velars, some of which would equally well have been palatalized under this scenario. (PIE biphonemic *Kw does occur, and it behaves differently than a single labiovelar phoneme in Greek in that it gives a geminate, as in the “horse” word we discussed upthread.)
@TR
“and it doesn’t front any plain velars.”
In Greek, dhy-, ghy- > s in both initial and medial positions. Aspirated velars get palatalized when followed by a glide but they stay unpalatalized if followed by a corresponding high vowel.
The preform here is *gʷyeh₃-
Mmm… not really. It’s the same as in the rest of IE, *gʷih₃w-ó- ‘living’ and *gʷíh₃w-e/o- ‘to live’. The change *-ih₃- > *-jō is an inner Greek development (parallelled by similar changes in Tocharian and Armenian). It’s known as Francis–Normier’s law, or laryngeal breaking. Not everybody accepts it, but they really should. The ‘life’ root alone would be evidence enough for it.
I just noticed that my reply to Piotr keeps getting corrupted. Maybe it’s because I started to use Greek font.
Let me try again:
“This explains the rather few cases where Indo-Iranian points toward a voiced aspirate while the other branches point at a plain voiced consonant. It fails to explain the cases where all branches point to a voiced aspirate; those must have had voiced aspirates already in PIE, whatever their ultimate origin (on the way to PIE) may be.”
He militates against this by etymologizing IE *bhreH2ter ‘brother’ as *mreH2ter with a sort of “laryngeal throwback” or a Schwebeablaut *mreH2 > breH2ter > bhreH2ter and citing Latv marsa ‘borther’s wife’ ( *bhrgwh > devoicing + Grassmann’s Law > *prthenos > *parthenos).
Or, he compares Gk βάθρον ‘Grund(lage), Stufe, Sitz, Fußgestell’ (< βαίνω 'go') directly to an isolated Slav *bedro 'thigh' (literally 'foot/leg support') and Lat femur 'thigh' to Lat venio: and Goth qiman 'come', all from the same root *gwen-/*gwem- 'come, go, walk'. Latin has two forms – with and without aspiration. The aspirated one (femur) is secondary and derived from a laryngeal further down the string. The same family of words includes, according to him, Lat hostis (< *gwH2es-), Goth gast and Slav *gosti 'guest' (literally 'the one who comes'), with the same morphology as Gk βάσκω.
The latter set is interesting because, if correct, it shows both voiced aspirates < [voiced stops + laryngeal] and the PIE timing of the laryngeal split (Slav *bedro with a labial just like Gk βάθρον gh had been added on. Semantically, “firm as a tree” > ‘true’ > ‘true friend’ > ‘friend, brother-in-arms’. Only in Germanic we find derivatives of ‘tree’ words meaning ‘true’ and only in Germanic and Balto-Slavic we see the ‘friend’ words.
The latter one is pretty compelling, unless I’m missing something.
No, still no luck. It looks odd when I see it posted.
I just noticed that my reply to Piotr keeps getting corrupted.
I think you are really replying to David Marjanović.
But if I may correct another myth,
For Greek, it’s assumed that *gw became g before or after /u/, d before /e/i/ and b before /a/o/
The Greek development of the inherited labiovelars is complex and differs from dialect to dialect, but the normal (expected) Attic reflex of *gʷ before *i and *ī is b, not d (though *gʷj yields z). Therefore, both βίος and ζωός are regular.
@Piotr
Yes, you’re right – I was replying to David. Never mind, chunks of my reply didn’t post, the rest got brought together into often nonsensical strings. But the point was that Dziebel adduces examples of voiced aspirate < [voiced stop + laryngeal] for languages outside of Indo-Iranian.
"Therefore, both βίος and ζωός are regular."
I never said they weren't regular, although I'm not aware of any other b before i/e from a labiovelar. But one would expect a labial outcome of a labiovelar before o/a, not before i. In the case of βίος and ζωός the logic of vowel conditioning seems to be flipped.
@Vladimir: In Greek, dhy-, ghy- > s in both initial and medial positions.
Not just the aspirates — the unaspirated voiceless stops behave the same. It’s actually more complicated than “> s”, with other outcomes like t-, -tt-, -ss- depending on dialectal and other factors. In any case this only happens before [y].
I’m not aware of any other b before i/e from a labiovelar
There are a couple: βιὀς “bow”, βία “force”, with Sanskrit cognates in j-. And for the aspirate there is one probable example, ὄφις “snake” (Skt. áhiḥ).
But one would expect a labial outcome of a labiovelar before o/a, not before i.
As I said above, the labial outcome occurred for all labiovelars existing in Greek at that stage; it’s just that some of them had changed to something else before then. It is puzzling, though, that the voiceless unaspirated labiovelar should have changed in a way that the voiced and voiceless aspirated ones did not.
In the case of βίος and ζωός the logic of vowel conditioning seems to be flipped.
Only on the face of it in the latter case, since ζωός had a *-y-.
@Piotr: I was getting *gʷyeh₃- from LIV and the etymological dictionaries, but it does imply Schwebeablaut (since there are other forms reflecting *gʷeyh₃-); Francis-Normier’s Law is new to me, but it looks a lot like the treatment of *RH in Greek (and Latin) so seems logical enough.
@TR
Thanks.
“There are a couple: βιὀς “bow”, βία “force”, with Sanskrit cognates in j-.”
Aren’t they related to the ‘life’ words?
Probably not: the first is completely unrelated semantically, and the second shows no sign of a laryngeal.
@TR
“Probably not: the first is completely unrelated semantically, and the second shows no sign of a laryngeal.”
Wouldn’t βία “force” come from *gwiH2- because of -a-?
No, that’s just the feminine suffix *-eh2. The -a isn’t part of the root.
Yes, you’re right!
I was getting *gʷyeh₃- from LIV and the etymological dictionaries, but it does imply Schwebeablaut (since there are other forms reflecting *gʷeyh₃-); Francis-Normier’s Law is new to me, but it looks a lot like the treatment of *RH in Greek (and Latin) so seems logical enough.
I have my own (published) opinion about the original full grade of this root — namely, that it never existed. It’s a “neo-root” formed through the reanalysis of an older, more complex structure. Synchronically in PIE, it was just *gʷih₃-. As for laryngeal breaking, there’s a lot of excellent evidence in its favour. Much of it was highlighted and discussed alredy by Jared S. Klein in his 1988 paper about the ‘live’ root. I don’t understand why the consensus on laryngeal breaking in Greek (by *h₂ and *h₃) is not universal yet. In one fell swoop, it solves lots of problems which otherwise have to be handled one by on an ad hoc basis.
… one by one. Sorry
I have my own (published) opinion about the original full grade of this root…
Linking it to the “cow” word, no less! Fascinating stuff.
It looks fine to me all three times. The problem must lurk in your browser.
Wiktionary, for what that’s worth, derives femur from *dhonu “fir”. The semantics of this are acceptable, but is the m regular…?
I’m too tired for more right now. See you tomorrow 🙂
@David
“Wiktionary, for what that’s worth, derives femur from *dhonu “fir”. The semantics of this are acceptable, but is the m regular…?”
the semantic link thigh ~ fir looks odd, to be honest. femur has been a tough word to etymologize, hence people sometimes shove it into whatever set feels possible phonetically. Vasmer related it to Slav *bedro, which fits semantically and onset-wise. The morphology was a challenge, plus the fact it’s an isolated isogloss. -m-, which is a challenge if the ‘fir’ group is used, is well explained by comparing femur to the stem *gwem-/gwen-.
De Vaan mentions a possible connection with Skt. dhanuḥ “bow”, from a PIE *dhen-ur ~ -wen-, the idea apparently being that -m- comes from the -nw- of the oblique forms by assimilation (not too implausible, but there aren’t any Latin parallels). Presumably this is the same root as the “fir” word.
@TR
“De Vaan mentions a possible connection with Skt. dhanuḥ “bow”, from a PIE *dhen-ur ~ -wen-”
I like the fact that it shares heteroclitic morphology with femur, feminis. Semantics is a barrier for me here, too. Plus Slavic *bedro remains unexplained and completely divorced from femur despite their semantic and formal identities.
“The name of the bow is life, but its work is death.”–Heraclitus.
@Rodger
Yes, I love this one. That’s why I thought (above) that Gk bios ‘life’ and bia ‘bow’ might be related until TR convinced me otherwise.
thigh, fir, bow, etc
Not being very well-versed in Indo-European matters, I find the semantic and phonological links quite mind-boggling, but others here know best. I just have a couple of comments.
The shape of the human thigh does not look to me much like a bow, but closer to a gorytos, the kind of quiver carried by Scythian warriors to hold their (rather small) bow and its arrows.
As for “bow” and “fir”, in some languages the word for “bow” is identical or closely related to the one for “yew”, apparently the best wood for bowmaking. Could “yew” have been meant originally, rather than “fir”?
@Vladimir: I like the fact that it shares heteroclitic morphology with femur, feminis.
Sorry, I should have been clearer: Skt. dhanuḥ is not itself an r/n-stem; the idea is that the PIE ancestor of femur was an r/n-stem built on that same root, but such a form is not actually in evidence outside Latin.
Semantically the “bow > thigh” shift doesn’t seem that difficult if it went through “thighbone”; the human femur is very slightly curved and has knobby protuberances at either end, much like an unstrung bow.
@TR
“Sorry, I should have been clearer: Skt. dhanuḥ is not itself an r/n-stem; the idea is that the PIE ancestor of femur was an r/n-stem built on that same root, but such a form is not actually in evidence outside Latin.”
OK. Morphologically danuh looks like hanuh ‘jaw’ (Gk genus, Lith zandas) – also a root that’s not an r/n stem.
dhanu-, not danu-, sorry. -ur in femur can be analogical from iecur ‘liver’. The whole placement of femur into a heteroclitic paradigm can be analogical from iecur, iecinoris, as it’s not clear why Latin would have -u- as an outcome of syllabic R. In iecur -u- is clearly from the labiovelar -kw- (Gk he:par), but in femur there’s no labiovelar.
TR: bow > thighbone > thigh ?
In modern English (and other European languages) the word femur refers to the thighbone, but I find it strange that in the original language (here Latin) a word for a body part would start as a word for the bone that is inside that part, and therefore not normally seen until the body is reduced to a skeleton. Of course the word might have referred to the corresponding animal bone, seen when the animal is butchered, but still, most words for body parts whether animal or human refer to those visible when the body is intact. Bones with long existing names in the respective languages (rather than Latin or Greek borrowings) are those that are just under the skin, such as the skull, the clavicle, the shoulder blade or the ribs.
If femur was analogical on iecur it would surely have taken its oblique stem too, but instead it has a stem femin-, whereas iecur has several alternative stems (iecor-, iecinor-, iocinor-) which do not include **iecin-. The -u- doesn’t seem to be a problem under the *dhen-ur hypothesis. (Two consecutive sonorants like /-wr/ can of course be syllabified in two different ways, [-ur] and [-wr̥], and on the evidence of other languages it seems the second option was preferred, but I think even that would ultimately have given -ur in Latin.)
On further investigation, it turns out there actually is a Vedic r/n-stem dhanur ~ dhanvan- “bow” (alongside a masculine u-stem dhanu-). Which makes the connection look fairly plausible, I think; neither the requisite semantic change nor the phonological change one seem that far-fetched.
@marie-lucie: I take your point, but it’s possible that specific cultural factors were at play in causing the thigh bone to have a special name. I’m thinking of the fact that in Greek sacrificial ritual, the thigh bones (mêria) were the central component of the “god’s portion” of the sacrifice. (See this chapter of a book by Sarah Hitch for lots of details, including Homeric descriptions of the ritual.) Whether something similar was true in Roman ritual, I don’t know, but if so it would be a good reason to have a specific name for the bone, which might later be extended to the living body part.
Thank you TR. That explanation does make sense!
@TR
Good to know that there was in fact a heteroclitic paradigm for Skrt dhanu-. Are there any close cognates (all meaning ‘bow’) to dhanu- outside of Indic? If it’s an isolate, then tying one isolate (femur) to another isolate (dhanu) through a semantic leap leaves some room for doubt.
“whereas iecur has several alternative stems (iecor-, iecinor-, iocinor-) which do not include **iecin-.”
You mean that there was no iecinis** in Latin (as in feminis) because the segment iecin- is present in Gen. iecinoris.
Are there any close cognates (all meaning ‘bow’) to dhanu- outside of Indic?
Avestan has ϑanwarə “bow”; I don’t think there’s anything with that meaning outside Indo-Iranian, but I could be wrong.
You mean that there was no iecinis** in Latin (as in feminis) because the segment iecin- is present in Gen. iecinoris.
Right. The difference in the oblique stem makes analogy with iecur unlikely, I’d say.
@TR
“The difference in the oblique stem makes analogy with iecur unlikely, I’d say.”
Unless it had happened before Latin changed the underlying *iecines (Skrt yaknas) to *iecoris (by analogy with Nom.) to ultimately settle for a blended form *iecinoris.
Wiki puts the Indo-Aryan forms for ‘bow’ in the same group as the words for ‘fir’. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Celtic/tannos
It’s more than natural for a word for ‘bow’ to be derived from the type of tree bows were made of. Wiki also cites femur as part of that broader fir/bow group, but it’s the only one that doesn’t sit well there semantically.
Germanic *dannō(n-) (OHG tanna) must have a more general meaning (something like ‘forest tree’), since it could also refer to pines and oaks, not just firs. Hittite tanau (neuter) refers to some kind of tree, but we don’t know which species. If all these words are related, the most likely common denominator (especially in view of the Germanic o-grade) would be something like an acrostatic neuter, *dʰónu/*dʰénw-, with a heteroclitically extended variant, *dʰén-wr̥/*dʰn̥-wén-.
@Vladimir: Unless it had happened before Latin changed the underlying *iecines (Skrt yaknas) to *iecoris
Yes, that’s a fair point.
Does Gk. θάμνος “thicket” really belong here, as per Wiktionary? Neither Chantraine nor Beekes thinks so, and I can’t see how the phonology would work at all.
Germanic *dannō(n-) (OHG tanna) must have a more general meaning (something like ‘forest tree’), since it could also refer to pines and oaks, not just firs.
This is even true today to a degree; most people use Tanne for any vaguely pyramid-shaped conifer, not only for genus Abies. I always thought that’s due to modern city slickers not knowing their trees, but perhaps it’s a remnant of the older, wider meaning? (In any case, folk botanic taxonomy normally doesn’t map well on the Linnean system.)
Unless it had happened before Latin changed the underlying *iecines (Skrt yaknas) to *iecoris (by analogy with Nom.) to ultimately settle for a blended form *iecinoris.
The original paradigm was probably *h₁jḗkʷr̥, gen. *h₁jékʷn̥-(o)s, but since very few heteroclitics with this kind of “Narten” vocalism survived, there was a lot of levelling out in the daughter languages. In Latin, the ‘liver’ word developed in parallel to iter, itineris ‘way’ (from *h₁éi-tr̥, *h₁i-tén-(o)s), which should have given *īter, itinis but the short vowel was generalised from the weak cases and the r from the nom./acc.sg. Itineris is a compromise between (“regular”) *itinis and (attested) iteris; we also have an analogical nom./acc., itiner. Likewise for ‘liver’: we have both iecoris and iecinoris (for regularly expected *iecinis).
But it’s hard to see anything getting drawn by analogy into the class of r/n-stems, which Latin has almost completely eliminated (these three words are the whole story, plus possibly a very scantily attested aser or assyr “blood”). It’s not like “liver” is such a common word, or close enough in meaning to “thigh”, to make such attraction likely.
Is *h₁éi-tr̥ > iter really regular (I mean, apart from the initial vowel quantity)? Shouldn’t syllabic r̥ give Latin -or, which would then weaken to -ur as in the 3sg. passive ending?
Well, femur, feminis looks like a bona fide old heteroclitic neuter. It preserved the original inflection sligtly better than iecur and iter, but alalogical reshapings are also documented: femen for the nom./acc., femoris for the gen., and femus from the reinterpretation of femoris as an es-stem. (Other heteroclita, like vēr and ūber, had lost their n-forms completely.) I wonder if we have any good evidence showing the outcome of *-nw- in Latin, but since *dw gives /b/ initially and /w/ medially, and *dʰw gives /f/ initially and /b/ medially, *-nw- > -m- is not a priori implausible; femur could then be a reflex of *dʰén-wr̥.
@TR @Piotr
“to make such attraction likely.”
Yes, I agree it’s a bit of a stretch. Not sure if the semantic stretch from fir/bow > thigh is even longer… To bring it back to the beginning: the analogy scenario explains -u- in femur, which otherwise should have been femor**. Piotr, any thoughts on that?
@Piotr
“Other heteroclita, like… ūber, had lost their n-forms completely”
Preserved in su:men ‘pig’s udder”. Same affix in Slav *vymen < *udhmen but not in Sanskrit, Greek or Germanic that only has -dh-. It seems that -m- shows up again. Slavic *bedro doesn't have -m- but has the same *dh as as *udhmen. I wonder if there's something here to explain femur. Can it be from *fedmur? Not sure how this eventually helps us but wanted to throw it in there nevertheless.
Is *h₁éi-tr̥ > iter really regular (I mean, apart from the initial vowel quantity)? Shouldn’t syllabic r̥ give Latin -or, which would then weaken to -ur as in the 3sg. passive ending?
Michael Frotscher has recently devoted a full-length paper to “The fate of PIE final *-r̥ in Vedic and Latin”. His conclusion (for Latin) is: -ur after labials (and labiovelars), -er elsewhere. He proposes these developments predate the RUBL rule, hence ūber < *ūðr̥. He also reconstructs *-(n)to-r as the ancestral form of the Latin passive endings.
fir, pine, oak, etc
In French many people use un sapin “a fir” to refer to other evergreens: a Christmas tree is often called un sapin de Noël as well as un arbre de Noël even if it is a different species. Perhaps the fir is simply more common? Other European tree names have changed their referents since PIE so that the same etymon now refers to different species.
This is the type of thing I was thinking of when suggesting an original “yew” rather than “fir” for a wood name related to the bow. I googled both “yew wood” and “fir wood” and found what appeared to be very professional sites of interest to the wood industry. Yew wood has many qualities which make it ideal for making bows, but fir wood although pretty in large flat vertical panels (subject to little stress) is much less desirable for most wood uses.
marie-lucie: Perhaps the fir is simply more common? Other European tree names have changed their referents since PIE so that the same etymon now refers to different species.
Fir too. The meaning reconstructible for Germanic is “pine tree”. But it’s probably the Germanic reflex of the IE word for oak.
Trees also get new names. Sapin is obviously a young word for it, naming it for its once attractive sap.
@Piotr
“Michael Frotscher has recently devoted a full-length paper to “The fate of PIE final *-r̥ in Vedic and Latin”. His conclusion (for Latin) is: -ur after labials (and labiovelars), -er elsewhere.”
I understand his point. I worry that there are too few (uncontroversial) examples to prove or disprove that the rule applied to labials. Plus what about memor ‘mindful’?
For comparison, Dziebel’s approach leads to such forms as Gk βη̃μα ‘step, kick’ and Avest gāman- n. ‘footstep, gait, pace’ (pulling it from Frisk) as root cognates and morphological parallels to femur/-inis.
“Legs like tree trunks”, and firs & spruces have straight, unbranched trunks.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this conifer word shifted to “yew”, a conifer with vaguely fir-like needles, in Indo-Iranian, explaining how it came to refer to bows there.
In addition to Tanne “fir” (f.), German has an obsolete/poetic word Tann (m.) which can refer to any dark forest; it is more or less confined to the fixed phrase im tiefen Tann.
If μν is some kind of hypercorrectivism for νν…
In addition to Tanne “fir” (f.), German has an obsolete/poetic word Tann (m.) which can refer to any dark forest; it is more or less confined to the fixed phrase im tiefen Tann.
Danmark?
Thanks for the Frotscher reference, Piotr.
@Vladimir: what about memor ‘mindful’?
That never had final *-r̥; it’s apparently from a perfect participle *me-mn-os- (with dissimilatory loss of the -n-).
@David: If μν is some kind of hypercorrectivism for νν…
But how do you get -νν-?
Besides, θάμνος is probably related to θαμά “often”, so the -n- is derivational.
@Trond, we can be dense sometimes, but not dark?
Plus what about memor ‘mindful’?
It doesn’t even have to contain an etymological *r. The most popular etymology is *me-mn-w(o)s-, the perfect active participle of *men-.
For comparison, Dziebel’s approach leads to such forms as Gk βη̃μα ‘step, kick’ and Avest gāman- n. ‘footstep, gait, pace’ (pulling it from Frisk) as root cognates and morphological parallels to femur/-inis.
This is too nonsensical to deserve a formal refutation.
@Piotr
“This is too nonsensical to deserve a formal refutation.”
I would respectfully disagree. Dziebel’s solution is straightforward semantically (hip, thigh is an “organ of walking”), strong morphologically (Greek βη̃μα < *be:mn, with the same heteroclitic ending as femur, -inis), it solves the problem of Slav *bedro 'thigh, hip', too, as Greek has form βάθρον ‘Grund(lage), Stufe, Sitz, Fußgestell’ from the same group of derivatives of PIE *gwem-, gwen- 'to go, walk' and it is plausible phonetically as it shows that voiced aspirates can be derived from voiced stops+laryngeals outside of Indic. So, Greek βη̃μα < *beHmn (hence the vowel length in Greek) and Latin femur < *bHemr, with a Schwebeablaut.
For me the question is whether he can prove that the phonetic developments he postulates are supported by enough evidence.
The less one knows, the easier it is to propose such connections, since inconvenient facts (unknown to the etymologist) and background knowledge (not applicable) don’t spoil the fun. OK, let me refute it formally. βῆμα is Attic-Ionic, but the Doric and Aeolic form is βᾶμα. The corresponding verb (aorist) is ἔβην (Homer) ~ ἔβᾱν (Doric). So the verb root is not *beH-; it’s *gʷah₂-, and βῆμα goes back to *gʷah₂-mn̥. The Greek verb is actually suppletive, since the present βαίνω reflects a different (though possibly related) root, *gʷem-, with the present stem *gʷm̥-jé/ó- (= Latin veniō and Vedic gamyáte).
There is no way to connect *gʷah₂-mn̥ with femur. Schwebeablaut is not even a word that can be applied here. We talk of Schwebeablaut if there is a triconsonantal root in which the vowel may appear in the “wrong” slot between consonants, e.g. *pelh₁- vs. (normal) *pleh₁-. *gʷh₂a- is simply absurd in terms of acceptable IE morpheme structure, but even if it were possible, the vowel would still be coloured by the laryngeal (so we would expect Latin /a/, not /e/), and the onset would not have developed into /f/, since in the lineage of Latin there was no aspiration of stops by a following *h₂ (there are examples to prove it, familiar words with impeccable etymologies). To quote Mr Pope,
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.
@Piotr
“There is no way to connect *gʷah₂-mn̥ with femur.”
According to Dziebel, there is a way, because he postulates that labiovelars got split into dental, labial and velar reflexes in PIE times, hence we can find b- reflexes of labiovelars in, say, Slavic (e.g., *bedro), not just in Greek (bathron). Latin/Italic is already known to have labial reflexes of labiovelars.
” the vowel would still be coloured by the laryngeal (so we would expect Latin /a/, not /e/).”
Yes, I agree this is a problem for him. Unless he postulates that a laryngeal either affects the nearby consonant or affects the vowel depending on some (unspecified) condition. In Greek, it affected the vowel, but not the stop (hence be:ma). In Latin it affected the stop, not the vowel (hence, femur). Lat venio: comes from the same root *gwem-/*gwen- but it didn’t have a laryngeal in it, hence it’s neither fenio-**, nor vanio-**. This is consistent with a “dual nature” (consonantal and vocalic) of a PIE laryngeal.
Regarding laryngeal Schwebeablaut, I think he was influenced by a recent dissertation but I haven’t gone into the details: https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/41760/systempi.pdf?sequence=1. One thing I quickly noticed is that this dissertation (p. 407) treats the problem of Lat barba (instead of expected farba) vs. Germanic (Eng beard) that points to bh- using a Schwebeablaut argument. I’d like to know what you think about it.
Would I get it from some kind of *dʰn-no-? Anyway, I was just guessing. Never mind.
But you live behind, or perhaps in, a forest as impenetrable as iron (īsarnholt) that separates you from the Saxons and the Frisians and temporarily the Slavs.
See also: Brandenburg, not from “fire” or “fortress” but a protective forest – branibor.
I will respectfully try to trace the errors.
That’s always the weakest argument, because we don’t have a theory of semantics; we don’t know how much more probable any particular meaning shifts are than any others. Dziebel has tried to develop such a theory, but so far it’s not working, as he acknowledged himself in this thread (search for “forty”). I might also bring up German klein, which doesn’t mean “clean” but “small”, and German Gebet, which doesn’t mean “bead” but “prayer” – meaning shifts few people would accept if we didn’t have a lot more information.
But *-mn-, without heterocli…sis, is a common suffix. You’d first need to show that βη̃μα really is *be:m-n- rather than *be:-mn-.
The first vowel doesn’t fit, and I can’t figure out how to make it fit.
Which is it, *-m- or *-n-?
That’s backwards. The logic of this is backwards. It’s… embarrassing, actually.
Heteroclitics don’t have a form with syllabic n.
The P-Italic branch ( = Sabellic = Oscan-Umbrian) is. Latin is not.
Why are there remaining labiovelars, then? And what were the conditioning factors that caused the split?
No. There are way too many counterexamples.
Then it’s not the same root.
What is the evidence for this novel hypothesis?
The abstract and the acknowledgments read very strangely. They ring a few crackpot alarms, but also mention a few famous names… in slightly strange contexts…
I’d be interested to know if the thesis was successfully defended and who was on the committee – the thesis doesn’t say, at least not anywhere before the main text, who was on the committee.
OK, so, this is weird. Here’s the beginning of the first paragraph of the main text, on p. 13:
What a thoroughly bizarre thing to write in 2013!!!
The table of contents makes it look like the author thinks no advances in PIE reconstruction have been made since Brugmann…
David: You’d first need to show that βη̃μα really is *be:m-n- rather than *be:-mn-.
That would be bloody difficult, because (1) we have the verb βη̃- ~ βᾶ (but not *!*βη̃μ-); (2) the suffix -μα productively forms deverbal nouns in Greek, and the structure of βη̃μα is as transparent as that of going (= go- + -ing) in English; and (3) there is no neuter suffix -α (heteroclitic or otherwise) with the same function.
Vladimir (Re: the thesis),
Jouna Pyysalo is a young scholar. He thinks he has already done enough reading and thinking to rewrite 100 years of research. I trust he will learn more and grow up.
Footnote 2, page 14:
Translation:
“I found a wonderful proof for all this crackpottery, but these margins are too small to contain it. So I dumped it in my MA thesis, which I never published. This means you can just believe it exists, so I don’t need to repeat it here.”
I’m serious. On p. 495 we find…
Fuck that shit. Publish, or it didn’t happen.
Thought so. 🙂
Speaking of which, somebody should try to come up with a PIE reconstruction that has phonemic tones to account for the surprisingly common accent mismatches between Greek and Vedic. I’d really love to see if that works. Such a reconstruction has not been forthcoming, but at least the suggestion was made by actual accentologists who, if anything, might have gone mad from knowing too much about Balto-Slavic accentology. 😉
I’d think the likelihood of conditioned consonant changes arising in a language with a PIE-style ablaut system is relatively low. Since every consonant is likely to find itself in a variety of different environments within a paradigm — much more so than in a language with more linear morphology — the leveling pressure would be too high; position-specific phonetic effects would probably not get beyond the allophony level, i.e. wouldn’t get phonemicized, except maybe in rare cases. If you look at consonant changes in Semitic languages, you find that the vast majority are unconditioned, because the root-and-template system means that environments vary too much within a paradigm to make conditioned phonemic changes manageable.
We’ve been pals with Miguel for ages, since the golden age of the Cybalist yahoo group. He’s a good example of someone who loves to speculate and explore new vistas, but who’s thoroughly versed in the relevant literature and has a good working of several languages plus real research experience. If he errs, it isn’t because of ignorance, and his ideas are always interesting, whether you accept them at the end of the day or not.
As for the thesis: — Long, long ago “monolaryngeal” theories have been toyed with and abandoned. Oswald Szemerényi was, I think, the last of the Monolaryngeal Mohicans. Rediscovering them now is like trying to reinvent the wheel and failing to understand that it won’t work properly if it’s square. But of course the thesis contains much crazier stuff than that. I’d also be interested to learn who the reviewers were and what they thought of it.
Self-correction:
has a good working knowledge of several languages
theories have been toyed with –> were toyed with
And so to bed (to quote Samuel Pepys).
Yes, I agree this is a problem
You keep saying things like that, but you don’t seem bothered by the problems.
We’ve been pals with Miguel for ages
Who he?
@David, @Piotr
Wow, just wow.. Heavy artillery in action! Let me try and play the devil’s advocate.
“That’s always the weakest argument, because we don’t have a theory of semantics.”
That’s true, but there are some rather logical considerations that make some etymologies plausible, others not. ‘walk’ > ‘hip, thigh’ is plausible because the concepts are related. fir, bow > ‘hip, thigh’ is not plausible because concepts are not related. There could be some cultural reason why ‘fir’ may have become ‘hip, thigh’ but there’s nothing conceptually coherent here.
“You’d first need to show that βη̃μα really is *be:m-n- rather than *be:-mn-.”
But the verbal root is *gwem/*gwen-. It’s well-accepted. Gothic qiman, Lith gemu, Lat venio, etc. (There’s an earlier stage of *gwe- but the verb already had -m- in it.)
“Which is it, *-m- or *-n-?”
Both are well attested.
“Heteroclitics don’t have a form with syllabic n.”
Why? he:par, he:patos (< *yekwntos). See Piotr's comment upstring.
"The P-Italic branch ( = Sabellic = Oscan-Umbrian) is. Latin is not."
v- is a labial and it's a standard outcome of a voiced labiovelar (gw-). f- can result from gwh- (fe:rus 'wild', with Greek the:ros 'beast'). So, yes.
"The first vowel doesn’t fit, and I can’t figure out how to make it fit."
I don't see an issue here, since Slavic does not have voiced aspirates as distinct from voiced stops. So, *bedro < *bHedro, with laryngeal affecting the consonant but then getting lost. So, it's the same as in Lat femur, the only difference being that gw + H yielded f- in Latin. Also, Lat hostis 'guest' correspond to Slav *gosti and Dziebel derives it from the same root *gweH- (the velar reflexs of a PIE labiovelar), so Latin hostis < *gwHestis, while Slav *gosti < *gHosti- < *gwHesti-. Exactly the same as femur and *bedro.
Greek bathron has b without aspiration, but the vowel is colored.
"There are way too many counterexamples."
At this level of methodological divergence, one would need to go through all of them one by one. Remember, Dziebel composes cognate sets differently. That's the root of the issue.
" (2) the suffix -μα productively forms deverbal nouns in Greek, and the structure of βη̃μα is as transparent as that of going (= go- + -ing) in English; and (3) there is no neuter suffix -α (heteroclitic or otherwise) with the same function."
The verbal root is *gwem-/*gwen-: Gothic qiman, Lith gemu. We can deconstruct it further into *gwe-/*gweH2- but a heteroclitic noun based on a verbal root *gwem- would be *gwemn-/*gwemr-.
"But *-mn-, without heterocli…sis, is a common suffix."
I do agree that a heteroclitic paradigm is not fully attested here. But the example of Lat u:ber vs. Slav *udh-men from above shows that it can get diffused between languages. And the suffix men- is fully compatible with the heteroclisis. The paradigm was in a state of dissolution and is most systematically attested only in Hittite.
"That’s backwards. The logic of this is backwards. It’s… embarrassing, actually."
I may have done Dziebel a disservice by simplifying it but the point is that voiced stop+laryngeal = voiced aspirate as well as voiceless stop + laryngeal = voiceless aspirate are attested in Indic. So there's nothing implausible about postulating it for a broader range of IE languages. Aspirates is a regional trait in Indo-European. For instance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic don't have them.
@languagehat
“You keep saying things like that, but you don’t seem bothered by the problems.”
Bothered very much. But both sides have them.
Publish, or it didn’t happen.
Easy for a biologist to say. In historical linguistics, where the old Turks[*] control everything and “the average age of its scholars is deceased”, not being able to publish is not necessarily an indication of crackpottery.
[*] Not meaning actual Turks who speak Turkish, I hasten to add.
Miguel Carrasquer-Vidal, the author of the introduction to Balto-Slavic accentology that I just linked to, and which has been posted here before. (Check out the title picture.) I should add that I don’t suggest he erred in anything (if he did, he did so in areas that are simply beyond me); he isn’t among the people that have suggested phonemic tones for PIE.
@Hat: He -> M. Carrasquer Vidal, author of the PDF at David’s link to B/S accentology.
Reading his other papers on Academia.edu is very instructive as to why so few people publish about the possible prehistory of PIE — it becomes very hard to distinguish between a ‘best’ reconstruction and a just-so story.
If you remember, I expressed a wish a few months back to see what specialists actually thought about working back beyond pre-Pre-PIE — then I remembered Miguel’s name from way back when (on the LINGUIST list, probably) and looked him up.
It’s all very interesting — not crackpottery of the everyone else is wrong persuasion, but slotting neatly into mainstream thought about later stages, and falsifiable in principle — but I find it ultimately unsatisfying because it looks to me like falsification will need new data of a kind we won’t have in the foreseeable future. (Older attested sister languages, breakthroughs in reconstruction of other families to pin down the phonology of ancient loans, that sort of thing).
Vladimir, your defense of Dziebel is spirited, but you keep glossing over the question of just how the putative labiovelar split in PIE is supposed to have worked. The etymology can’t even begin to work without an answer to that.
Not that the other problems aren’t serious enough: for instance, how do you make *gʷem-n- yield βᾶμα / βῆμα (rather than **βέμα?) And what exactly is this strange morpheme *-n-?
Thanks David M for “Balto-Slavic accentuation for dummies”! (But I realized I’m not a dummy, because I read up to p8 and realized I hadn’t memorized what was so well set out at the beginning well enough to grok p8, so I’m going back.)
@TR
“you keep glossing over the question of just how the putative labiovelar split in PIE is supposed to have worked.”
The only thing I understood about it is that it’s supposed to work just like it works in Greek: the following vowel conditions the choice of a velar, dental or labial reflex as in kyklos, telos, polos < *kwel-.
"how do you make *gʷem-n- yield βᾶμα / βῆμα (rather than **βέμα?)"
It's well-accepted that βᾶμα / βῆμα are derived from PIE *gwem-. I think it makes more sense to reconstruct *gweHm- to account for -a- in Gk and for femur and hostis in Latin (no change of vowel grade but aspiration on the consonant).
"And what exactly is this strange morpheme *-n-?"
That's a weak case marker from the heteroclitic paradigm (as in Lat u:ber, Gk outhar, oudatos but Slav *vy(d)men 'udder'). We don't see a complete nominal heteroclitic paradigm attached to the verbal root *gweHm- but we do have an -r- form in *bedro and *femur and an -r- form in bathron. I wonder if it shows a state of nominal morphology predating the formation of the hetetoclitic paradigm.
@Vladimir: The only thing I understood about it is that it’s supposed to work just like it works in Greek: the following vowel conditions the choice of a velar, dental or labial reflex as in kyklos, telos, polos < *kwel-.
…leaving PIE, like Greek, with no labiovelars? (And that is not actually how it works in Greek, as I’ve pointed out; the Greek situation results from three separate changes.)
If this theory was correct — and as I said above, it seems a priori unlikely for a language like PIE — we’d expect to see a significant number of resulting cognate sets whose members (a) were semantically practically identical and (b) showed no formal problems other than the labiovelar alternation. The examples I’ve seen don’t come close to fulfilling these criteria.
It’s well-accepted that βᾶμα / βῆμα are derived from PIE *gwem-.
Not so; see Piotr’s comment above. You can’t get βᾶμα / βῆμα from *gʷem-, but you can very easily get it from *gʷeh₂-.
I think it makes more sense to reconstruct *gweHm-
That would spoil the existing etymologies we have for venio and all the other words from *gʷem-.
That’s a weak case marker from the heteroclitic paradigm
Then what’s it doing in the nominative/accusative of this word, and why only in this word?
This is just like the heart/root case: each new etymology comes at the cost of several never-before-seen sound changes and other ad hoc marvels, as well as leaving previously securely etymologized words orphaned. Dziebel’s procedure doesn’t produce etymologies, it destroys them.
“Just because the world’s biggest fool says it’s raining, doesn’t mean the sun is shining.” (If this is not also a Russian proverb, it certainly should be).
Contrariwise, Russian has proverb “Лучше с умным потерять, чем с дураком найти”, which is something like “It’s better to lose with a wise one then to gain with a stupid one”.
@TR
“leaving PIE, like Greek, with no labiovelars?”
Labiovelars are barely attested in IE languages, including Greek. Only their reflexes are, especially when it concerns gwh.
“And that is not actually how it works in Greek, as I’ve pointed out; the Greek situation results from three separate changes.)”
There’s definitely more complexity to it than I first outlined. This doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been that complex at PIE times.
“it seems a priori unlikely for a language like PIE — we’d expect to see a significant number of resulting cognate sets whose members (a) were semantically practically identical and (b) showed no formal problems other than the labiovelar alternation. The examples I’ve seen don’t come close to fulfilling these criteria.”
I disagree. Semantics, morphology and phonetics form a system: semantic transformations are often accompanied by morphological changes that in turn trigger phonetic changes. And the fact that there’re several phonological issues “targeted” by Dziebel etymologies at the same time is quite expectable considering his methodology is different. It starts at an earlier point in the process and he asks the question: how do we define what belongs in a cognate set in the first place. This is because sound laws depend on the comparanda.
“You can’t get βᾶμα / βῆμα from *gʷem-, but you can very easily get it from *gʷeh₂-.”
But what about Goth qiman, Lith gemu, Avestan gaman? They all have -m- but no vowel grade change. If we assume that the protoform was *gweHm- and that H affected either the consonant or the vowel and that it was lost when not vocalized in those languages, then we can reconstruct *gHem- to explain the Goth, Lith and Avestan forms.
“Then what’s it doing in the nominative/accusative of this word”
The heteroclitic paradigm broke down and the paradigm leveled out. It happened all over IE languages outside of Anatolian.
“as well as leaving previously securely etymologized words orphaned. Dziebel’s procedure doesn’t produce etymologies, it destroys them.”
I see the opposite effect: he actually explains orphaned forms such as Lat femur and Slav *bedro in a very parsimonious way by finding the right cognate set for them (*gwem-/*gwen-) and finding the morphological parallels for them in that very nest.
“each new etymology comes at the cost of several never-before-seen sound changes”
But that’s what comparative method is all about: defining comparanda and deriving sound laws on their basis.
“This is just like the heart/root case”
I didn’t like that one either but I got his logic of bringing them together. It’s just in this particular case the material didn’t yield a convincing case. But I like the methodological principle whereby an etymological path should be “baked” into the cognate set composition from the very beginning, instead of being inferred between two “reconstructed” protoforms. Indo-European linguistics has had enough of etymologies such as daughter=milker. Those are utter fantasies!
Erratum: “reconstruct *gHem- to explain the Goth, Lith and Avestan forms.” > “reconstruct *gwHem-/*gHwem- to explain the Goth, Lith and Avestan forms.
Re Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, “Balto-Slavic accentology ‘for dummies'”:
At the beginning, I am puzzled by: “endings with one syllable cause the stress to shift one syllable to the right”: but why then are there “(acro)static” forms like *péd-ei ‘foot(dative)’? I suppose this is what’s supposed to be covered by Rasmussen’s Law, but he could have spelled it out ‘for dummies’. After all a lot of people know a lot about Slavic who don’t know about Rasmussen’s Law.
Also, does anyone know why the PIE genitive plural is being reconstructed as *-om with no long vowel or laryngeal? … The reason isn’t Hittite because Wikipedia says number isn’t distinguished there in the genitive. For Balto-Slavic, it isn’t the tone since he says the *-m will make the syllable circumflex despite a preceding PIE long vowel or laryngeal.
George asks:
>Also, does anyone know why the PIE genitive plural is being reconstructed as *-om with no long vowel or >laryngeal? … The reason isn’t Hittite because Wikipedia says number isn’t distinguished there in the genitive. >For Balto-Slavic, it isn’t the tone since he says the *-m will make the syllable circumflex despite a preceding PIE >long vowel or laryngeal.
The Old Hittite gen.pl. -an *is* a plural genitive. In later Hittite, its place was taken by -as (the dat pl, as well as gen sg). The ending -an could be from *-om and could be from *-õm. In general, no IE language has maintained the distinction between the thematic and athematic gen.pl., where one would have expected (*-õm vs. *-om). “Hard” evidence for *-om is restricted to Celtic, where the gen.pl. ending is -om, instead of *-um.
Balto-Slavic points to *-õm > Lith. -uN. Slavic *-uN is ambiguous, as it could be both from *-om (with nasal raising) or *-õm (with nasal or circumflex raising, followed by long diphthong shortening). We can safely reconstruct *-õm for Balto-Slavic.
But what about Goth qiman, Lith gemu, Avestan gaman?
You haven’t got it yet? There are TWO DIFFERENT ROOTS, *gʷem- (not *gʷen-, by the way) and *gʷah₂- with very similar meanings, roughly ‘step forward, go, come forth’. Most Indo-Europeanists, if you ask their personal opinion, will agree that they are most probably somehow related, but this relationship must go deeper in time than the last common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, and the details may be impossible to recover bu internal reconstruction. I actually think that there was a third member of this root family, *gʷeu-, but that’s a whole ‘nother story. Anyway, both verbs formed root aorists (Vedic ágan/ágman and ágāt, respectively), so even their “Aktionsart” (lexical aspect) was the same.
In some branches, including Indo-Iranian and Greek, we find them both (in Greek they are furthermore confusible — see below); in others, including Italic and Germanic, there are only reflexes of one of them, usually *gʷem-. For example, Gothic qiman, English come and Lith. gemù are all derived from the simple thematic present *gʷém-e/o- (of late, “dialectal” origin). The original PIE present stems derived from *gʷem- were *gʷm̥-jé/ó- (Lat. veniō, Gk. βαίνω, with a regular reflex of the palatalised nasal) and *gʷm̥-sḱé/ó-, with an iterative shade of meaning (Gk. imperative βάσκε, Ved. gácchati). As for βάσκε, Greek alone does not allow us to decide if the sḱe-present comes from *gʷem- or from *gʷah₂- (their preconsonantal zero-grades are indistinguishable in Greek, both giving βα-), but Vedic shows unambiguously that the vowel comes from a syllabic nasal, not a vocalised laryngeal (the latter would have given Vedic /i/). There is no such doubt concerning the Greek aorist ἔβην, which can only come from *(h₁)é gʷah₂-m, or the verbal noun derived from it, βῆμα < *gʷah₂-mn̥, in which the /m/ is very clearly part of the suffix, not the root. The suffix was a common one, and productively used in Ancient Greek. There are about 3000 (sic!) documented neuter nouns formed in this way.
There’s nothing esoteric or controversial about any of it; it’s all elementary, handbook stuff.
George,
At the beginning, I am puzzled by: “endings with one syllable cause the stress to shift one syllable to the right”: but why then are there “(acro)static” forms like *péd-ei ‘foot(dative)’?
As far as I can understand Miguel’s shorthand description (not sufficient if “for dummies” is what he really means), Rasmussen’s Law (his term for a mechanism proposed by the late Jens E. Rasmussen) is as follows:
(1) At some pre-stage of PIE stress was word-final, i.e. the last suffix containing its own vowel attracted stress.
(2) Some roots contained underlyingly long (or rather tense) vowels.
(3) If the root was unstressed and had a lax vowel, the vowel was deleted (zero grade).
(4) If the root was unstressed and had a tense vowel, the vowel was laxed (but not reduced to zero).
(5) The (ancestors of) *ē and *o were tense vowels; the reflex of their laxed counterpart(s) is *e.
(6) Later on (but still in pre-PIE), stress was retracted to the first full (non-zero-grade) vowel of the word (or remained on the suffix if there was nowhere else to go).
This is why we have the acrostatic patterns with *ē/*e and *o/*e, like *nókʷt-s, gen.sg. *nékʷt-(V)s (rather than *n̥kʷt-és, as in “mobile” roots containing short/lax *e): the genitive ending *-es could not retain the stress because the preceding morpheme was not zero-grade. The strong cases (such as the nom. and acc. sg.) have “tense” vocalism because they have remained stressed since the oldest reconstructible stage.
Also, does anyone know why the PIE genitive plural is being reconstructed as *-om with no long vowel or laryngeal?
He has his private theory about that:
https://www.academia.edu/4273205/PIE_nominal_plurals
Piotr, one minor correction: I don’t recognize the Ablaut pattern *ē/*e.
My view is that there were three long vowels: ā, ī and ū.
In stressed position, they develop to *o, *ē and *ω (the sound that merges with *o everywhere, except in Greek in the neighbourhood of a labial by what is called Cowgill’s law: *nókʷts vs.νυξ).
In pretonic position, only *ā triggers Rasmussen’s law: *pāds, *pādm, *pādás => *póds, *pódm, *pedés > pédes. Long *ī and *ū are simply shortened to *i and *u, and suffer the same fate as the original short vowels. For instance *pūnt- ‘path, bridge’ > NA pónt-, obl. pnt-, *kīrd- ‘heart’ > NA kērd, obl. krd-.
We only have Ablaut *ē/*e when an original *ē *’Cē-CC-me > *Ce-CC-mé).
This means that I have a problem with obl. *nékʷt-, for which I have no good solution, except analogical influence from the *pod- ~ *péd- type after the merger of *ω and *o. Note that the expected ablaut grade *n̥kʷt- is also attested: IEW “schwundstufig: ai. aktā́ `Nacht’ (vielleicht n-Stamm), aktú- m. `Dunkel, Nacht, Licht, Strahl’ (eigentlich `Dämmerung’), vgl. in letzterer Bed. got. ūhtwō (: lat. noctū usw.), aisl. ōtta, ahd.ūhta (uohta), mhd. ūhte (uohte), as. ūtha f., ags. ūth(a) m. `frühe Morgenzeit’, got. ūhteigs `zeitig'”.
A piece went missing:
We only have Ablaut *ē/*e when an original *ē was secondarily destressed, as in the perfect reduplication vowel.
*’Cī-CaC-me > *’Cē-CC-me > *Ce-CC-mé.
@Piotr
“There are TWO DIFFERENT ROOTS, *gʷem- (not *gʷen-, by the way) and *gʷah₂- with very similar meanings, roughly ‘step forward, go, come forth’. Most Indo-Europeanists, if you ask their personal opinion, will agree that they are most probably somehow related…”
Thanks, there were some things I didn’t know. But two roots or one, they are related. And why do you insist on *gwah2- instead of *gweH2-? And -m- is already part of the verbal stem in several core forms, so it could generate a noun with -m- early on. It is quite likely that we can segment *gweH2m- into gweH2- + m + n. How does it impact the etymology of femur and *bedro proposed by Dziebel? In fact, the form *bedro (Greek bathron) likely goes back to the shorter root *gweH2-, while Lat femur to the derived verbal root *gweH2m-. This would even strengthen Dziebel’s etymology as it would show that the conceptual connection ‘go, walk’ > ‘hip, thigh’ was around for a while as it was encoded in two temporally distinct forms of the root.
I can see from Slav *vymen, Lat u:ber ‘udder’, etc. that the *-men suffix could participate in a heteroclitic paradigm. But also femur, as we discussed, could have been incorporated into the class of heteroclitics at a later stage under the influence of iecur.
“The original PIE present stems derived from *gʷem- were *gʷm̥-jé/ó- (Lat. veniō, Gk. βαίνω, with a regular reflex of the palatalised nasal) and *gʷm̥-sḱé/ó-, with an iterative shade of meaning (Gk. imperative βάσκε, Ved. gácchati). As for βάσκε, Greek alone does not allow us to decide if the sḱe-present comes from *gʷem- or from *gʷah₂- (their preconsonantal zero-grades are indistinguishable in Greek, both giving βα-), but Vedic shows unambiguously that the vowel comes from a syllabic nasal, not a vocalised laryngeal (the latter would have given Vedic /i/). ”
That’s a fine analysis. Dziebel connects an isogloss attested as Lat hostis, Slav *gosti-, Goth gast ‘guest’ to the same group (‘guest’ is after all ‘the one who comes’) as velar reflexes of the *gweH2- stem. In the ‘guest’ meaning it’s not attested in Indic. (The laryngeal is responsible for Lat h-). It clearly doesn’t have a syllabic nasal but has the same -s- enlargement as βάσκε, Ved. gácchati, so next to *gʷm̥-sḱé/ó- there must have been *gʷH-sḱé/ó-. It could have given *gwasḱé/ó- early on before the rule H > Vedic *i kicked in.
@Vladimir
Labiovelars are barely attested in IE languages, including Greek.
Many PIE labiovelars live on to this day in English, Spanish and other modern languages. How is this, if PIE changed all its labiovelars into other sounds? I’m puzzled by your willingness to take this hand-wavey idea of Dziebel’s seriously when he doesn’t even lay it out in a coherent, let alone, falsifiable, way.
the fact that there’re several phonological issues “targeted” by Dziebel etymologies at the same time is quite expectable considering his methodology is different
I’ll say. He starts by pulling together some vaguely semantically similar words, then constructs lots of tailor-made Rube Goldberg machinery to make them correspond, not caring if it jams the works of existing etymologies. It’s a very easy game to play, and a complete waste of time.
Michael Weiss has this principle he calls the “Law of Multiple Funninesses”. If there’s one element of your theory that requires an ad hoc explanation, you might really be dealing with a special case. If there are several, you’ve probably got the wrong theory. Each of Dziebel’s etymologies comes with half a dozen funninesses.
Piotr, one minor correction: I don’t recognize the Ablaut pattern *ē/*e.
I know, I gave my own interpretation of Jens’s mechanism. But note that I referred to “the ancestors” of *ē, *e and *o; their actual quality is not that important.
@TR
“Many PIE labiovelars live on to this day in English”
I don’t know anything about this. Eng naked contains a reflex of a PIE labiovelar, not a labiovelar. Eng wolf and four contain a labial reflex of a PIE labiovelar. (You can invoke an analogical explanation for -f- in wolf and four but it would be an ad hoc one.) The labialization of labiovelars is well-attested/reconstructed in the parent languages of English and Spanish and continues into those languages (PIE *gw- > Lat venio: > Spanish venir). Their merger in satem languages is also well-documented. No IE directly preserved /gwh/.
“He starts by pulling together some vaguely semantically similar words….”
They are not “vaguely semantically similar.” They are conceptually related. fir, yew > bow >>>>>>> thigh is indeed a semantically vague link.
Labiovelars are barely attested in IE languages, including Greek.
They’re even very well attested in Greek. Mycenean still has /k_w/ and /g_w/ where later Greek dialects have labials and dentals. So it is quite clear that the labiovelars only changed in the course of Greek language history, not in PIE.
Besides Greek, the labiovelars are attested in Anatolian, Latin, Celtiberian, Irish (in the Ogham inscriptions), and Germanic. I wouldn’t call that “barely attested”.
@Vladimir: “Many PIE labiovelars live on to this day in English”
I don’t know anything about this.
QUeen, QUick, QUell, WHich, WHeel… Are you seriously suggesting that no PIE labiovelars survive as such in any of the daughter languages? That’s insane.
Well, but they are no longer labiovelars; they have shifted to the cluster /kw/ and to /w/ respectively in all but a vanishingly few dialects.
No IE directly preserved /gwh/
Mycenaean preserved it as /kʷʰ/.
JC, true, but most of these shifts do not go back to PIE times.
Fine, but /kw/ is not a labial phoneme and the change /hw/ > /w/ is recent and incomplete. It’s totally crazy to think all the labiovelars were eliminated already in PIE. I doubt that’s what Dziebel thinks anyway, but who knows, since he hasn’t laid it out in any refutable way — it’s just a magic wand he can wave to turn a labiovelar into whatever he wants it to be for a given etymology.
Well, but they are no longer labiovelars; they have shifted to the cluster /kw/ and to /w/ respectively in all but a vanishingly few dialects.
But the use of special graphemes q and ƕ in Gothic suggests that /kʷ/ and /xʷ/ were still perceived as unitary segments.
@John Cowan
“Well, but they are no longer labiovelars; they have shifted to the cluster /kw/ and to /w/ respectively in all but a vanishingly few dialects.”
This has been my impression as well but judging by others’ comments, this seems to be more complicated.
But, all, what should we make of the following example cited (or may be “cooked up,” according to some of you) by Dziebel:
Gk (F)epos ‘word’, Skrt vakti ‘says’, Lat vox ‘voice’ but Slav *upeti/*vopiti ‘cry out, yell’, *vopli ‘outcry’, vypu ‘Ardea stellaris’, Latv u:pet, u:peju ‘I cry’ (in reference to owls and wild pigeons), upuot ‘cry, call loudly’, upis ‘eagle owl’, Lith upas ‘echo’, OHG ufo, uvo, ONorse ufr ‘owl’, Avest ufyeimi ‘invoco’.
Setting aside the fact that it’s not word-initial (hence could be two different affixes, -kw- and -p-) and some forms may appear onomatopoeic (the initial vowel is long in Latvian forms), what’s your take on it? A labiovelar is well established between Lat vox, Skrt vakti but Gk epos. And it’s semantically straightforward. If a labiovelar got labialized in PIE times, then this cognate set becomes a matter of course.
A change from labio-velar to bilabial is quite common in the languages of the world (see “P-Celtic”, for instance), so I don’t see any difficulty with the -p- or -p- derived words in the languages above. What is unusual about the Greek split is that it seems to be three-way (into velar, labial and dental). This is strange if assumed to have happened all at once, right from the beginning as a feature of PIE (which would have affected *PPIE), but not so much if it happened in stages and with different conditioning.
This looks — at first sight, anyway — like one of the better examples, but even here, onomatopoeia could easily be behind the -p- forms, cf. English whoop.
Piotr: But the use of special graphemes q and ƕ in Gothic suggests that /kʷ/ and /xʷ/ were still perceived as unitary segments.
Absolutely.
@m-l: I don’t see any difficulty with the -p- or -p- derived words in the languages above — The difficulty is not in the plausibility of the labiovelar > labial change itself but in the fact that these particular languages don’t (otherwise…) show that change.
@Piotr
“But the use of special graphemes q and ƕ in Gothic suggests that /kʷ/ and /xʷ/ were still perceived as unitary segments.”
Yes, but this doesn’t prevent Seebold to interpret b- in some cases as an outcome of *gwh. And -w- from gwh is completely uncontroversial (Goth snaiws < *snoigwho- 'snow', Greek nipha-).
@marie-lucie
"What is unusual about the Greek split is that it seems to be three-way (into velar, labial and dental)."
Yes, and Dziebel cites parallels in Slavic where *penti- 'five' is from *penkwe-, *poteti 'sweat' is from *pokw- next to *peku 'I bake', *jentra 'liver, intestines', with an intrusive -n- next to *jikra 'calf of leg' (< *he:par 'liver'). In the latter case, the semantic connection between liver and calf of leg is well-established but not straightforward. It's associated with unproblematic phonetics. The connection to *jentra is straightforward semantically but poses a phonetic question.
Erratum: ( Greek he:par ‘liver’, IE *yekwr-.
TR: I see. I should have paid more attention to the Germanic words (since I know a little about that history).
But since all the -p- words cited are about vocal behaviour, or birds and other animals known for a distinctive cry, the origin seems to be onomatopeic. In my experience onomatopeia is often used as an explanation when there is no question of hearing involved, but in this case it would seem justified.
I would guess that the timing of this change was different from the ones that affected all the stops.
@marie-lucie
I suppose if a form is phonetically regular, then it’s beyond the point if it’s onomatopoeic or not. Another one from Dziebel’s site: PIE *leikw– ‘stick, leave behind, leave’: IE *leikwo– ‘leave’ (Skrt rinakti, Gk leipo: ‘I leave’, Lat linquo: ‘I leave, abandon, forsake’, Arm lk’anem ‘to leave’, Goth leiƕan, OHG li:han ‘to lend’, Lith likti ‘to stay’, at-laikas ‘remains’, liekas ‘that which is left over’, OCS ot-le:ku ‘remains’) ~ IE *lep– ‘to stay, to stick, to leave’ (Skrt lepayati ‘applies ointment’, lipyate ‘glues on, sticks’, Gk lipos ‘grease’, Lat lippus ‘having watery eyes’, Toch lip– ‘stay’, Goth aflifnan ‘stay’, bilaibjan ‘leave’, Lith lipti ‘stick’, lipus ‘sticky’, Latv lipinat ‘stick’, laipns ‘friendly’, Slav *lep– ‘stick, form from clay’, *lipkiji ‘sticky’).
He’s not the first one who noticed it. I saw it elsewhere. Again, Greek and Latin clearly point to a labiovelar but -p- recurs across all dialects. Notably, Gothic has both leiƕan and af-lifnan. Just like it has fimf ‘five’ and fidwor ‘four’ (all with clear labial reflexes of labiovelars). Wolf is another Germanic word with -f-from a labiovelar.
Yes, but this doesn’t prevent Seebold to interpret b- in some cases as an outcome of *gwh. And -w- from gwh is completely uncontroversial (Goth snaiws < *snoigwho- 'snow', Greek nipha-).
What’s your point? I wasn’t talking about the reflexes of *gʷʰ. But since you ask, *β (initially), *g(w) (after nasals) and *-w- (elsewhere) all make perfect sense as positionally conditioned reflexes of *ɣʷ, the expected outcome of *gʷʰ by Grimm’s Law (or *kʷ in the context of Verner’s Law). These changes are inner Germanic, not PIE.
Dziebel’s remarks about Slavic, if you cite them faithfully, are amazingly ignorant, like the rest of his musings. For example (just one picked at random), the *t in Slavic *potъ ‘sweat’ is not a reflex of *kʷ but of pre-Slavic *t in *pokto- < *pokʷ-to-, a suffixed noun. The cluster *kt was regularly simplified to *t in Slavic in most contexts. Only before *i did it become *tʲ instead, which is why another similar derivative of PIE *реkʷ-, *pekʷ-ti- ‘oven, stove’, yields Slavic *petʲь. Verbs like Russian поте́ть are relatively recent, productively formed denominals. They don’t come directly from *реkʷ- but from the noun *pok(ʷ)to-.
I suppose if a form is phonetically regular, then it’s beyond the point if it’s onomatopoeic or not
It depends what you mean by “phonetically regular”. Onomatopeia, because if imitates a natural sound, may not always obey regular correspondences.
In any case, your latest examples do suggest a phonemic contrast between kw and p under conditions where Indo-Europeanists would expect only one of them (all kw, or all p ). There may be other conditions: note that *leikw- has a different vowel from *lep-.
If all things were equal (eg no vocalic difference), and if the context was not Indo-European but a language family which had uvulars, I would consider that perhaps the p came from *qw (as is attested in a number of families), but I understand that uvulars have been ruled out for PIE or its descendants.
@Piotr
“Dziebel’s remarks about Slavic, if you cite them faithfully, are amazingly ignorant, like the rest of his musings. For example (just one picked at random), the *t in Slavic *potъ ‘sweat’ is not a reflex of *kʷ but of pre-Slavic *t in *pokto- *t in Slavic, although Slav *anonku/*anuku- ‘grandchild’ next to Lith nepuotis seems to show that Slav -k- corresponds to Lith (and other IE) -p-. In the same set, Slav *netiji- ‘sister’s son’ has -t- as a reflex of what appears to be a labiovelar *kw- also attested in Old Irish necht ‘nephew’. Why postulate morphological kwt > t and pt > t (you still need to itemize it as kwt > kt > tt > t and pt > tt > t), if we can simplify to a phonetic kw > t before a front vowel or a glide?
@marie-lucie
“There may be other conditions: note that *leikw- has a different vowel from *lep-.”
Yes, it’s a good point, although Latv has lipinat ‘stick’, laipns ‘friendly’ and IE *ei often gives /i/. -e- in *lep- is not stable as in some other -e- roots.
“I would consider that perhaps the p came from *qw (as is attested in a number of families), but I understand that uvulars have been ruled out for PIE or its descendants.”
A very interesting observation.
All, I hope you can see my response to Piotr. On my screen it’s mangled again.
Your response to Piotr does not look garbled here.
I prefer not to discuss particular examples as I don’t know enough about the vast field of Indo-European. However, I find an equation of Slav *anonku/*anuku- ‘grandchild’ next to Lith nepuotis (cf Latin nepos, nepotis ‘nephew’) pretty difficult to contemplate (for phonological reasons; semantics might be OK).
@Marie-lucie
“I find an equation of Slav *anonku/*anuku- ‘grandchild’ next to Lith nepuotis (cf Latin nepos, nepotis ‘nephew’) pretty difficult to contemplate.”
They are unquestionably connected (Gk anepsios ‘cousin’ shows the same onset as Slav *anonku/*anuku) and it’s assumed that the protoform was *Hnepo:t ‘grandchild, nephew’, *Hnepti- ‘niece, granddaughter’) (from *Hen- ‘grandparent’, OHG ane, ano ‘grandfather’, ‘grandmother’). Slavic does not have any -p- forms but it has *anonku-/*anuku- ‘grandson’ and *netiji ‘nephew’. It’s currently assumed that *anonku-/*anuku- is a separate formation from *Hen- ‘grandparent’, while *netiji ‘nephew’ comes from *neptiyos. What Dziebel proposed is that *anonku-/*anuku- carries a velar, which is phonetically related to -t- in Slav *netiji (before front vowel) and -p- in anepsios, nepo:s, napat, nefa and other Indo-European reflexes of *Hnepo:t ‘grandchild, nephew’. Even if we interpret -t- in *netiji as identical with the suffix in *nepo:t, napat, he still thinks a form such as Slav *netetijos > *netiji would be preferable to *neptijos.
He add further sizzle to this cognate set by interpreting the well-attested but unetymologized PIE *yenHter ‘husband’s brother’s wife’ (Skrt yatar, Slav *yentra, Lat ianitrices, Greek enater, einateres, Arm niri) as *yenepter, a form morphologically and onset-wise similar to Greek anepsios ‘cousin’ (also to Skrt naptar ‘grandson’), which is otherwise an outlier in the ‘grandchild-nephew’ cognate set. The semantic reasoning is that Proto-Indo-Europeans practiced cross-cousin marriage. He thinks that the onset probably reflects some kind of fossilized prefix with the meaning “co-” (Welsh cyfnither ‘female cousin’ < *kom-nepo:t). If true, this would show that the lack of -p- in Slavic has deep Indo-European roots.
In what IE languages does a reflex of *leikʷ- mean “stick”? It means “leave” in all the languages I know. “Leave” and “stick” aren’t particularly close semantically.
The other root, btw, is *leip- not *lep-, so the formal match is good, but the meanings are basically antonymic.
@TR
“The other root, btw, is *leip- not *lep-, so the formal match is good, but the meanings are basically antonymic.”
OK. Good to know. Both sets contain antonymic/enantiosemic meanings: as in Goth aflifnan ‘stay’, bilaibjan ‘leave’, from one set, and Arm lk’anem ‘to leave’, Lith likti ‘to stay’, from the other. Enantiosemy is attested in other IE roots describing movement in space: Slav *-cin- in roots meaning ‘begin’ and *-kon- in roots meaning ‘end’ are unanimously considered related. I think there’s some kind of pragmatic perspectivism involved here: when a person leaves something behind, from his perspective he “leaves” but the object “stays.”
Gothic bilaibjan is a causative, so the semantic shift there is understandable enough: “cause to stay” > “leave”. The simple verb it’s based on is *bileiban “stay” (asterisked because the infinitive isn’t attested; pret. bilaif, : German bleiben).
m-l: I prefer not to discuss particular examples as I don’t know enough about the vast field of Indo-European. However, I find an equation of Slav *anonku/*anuku- ‘grandchild’ next to Lith nepuotis (cf Latin nepos, nepotis ‘nephew’) pretty difficult to contemplate (for phonological reasons; semantics might be OK)
This forced “equation” (using some funny reconstructions, by the way, and as much an equation as 2+2=7), is all the more absurd as Slavic has a perfectly straightforward cognate of *nép(o)t- ‘nephew, granson’, namely *netьjь ‘nephew’ < *nept-ijo-s (cf. Old Lith. nepuotis ‘grandson’). Its meaning was narrowed down, so a new word was needed to indicate ‘grandson’, and *vъ nuk ъ was co-opted in this function.
Vladimir,
I have a lot of patience and don’t mind explaining every detail to anyone who is genuinely interested in linguistic questions. I think nobody can say I haven’t tried. But my patience is not infinite, and if everything I’m saying falls on deaf ears, I’ll pass. If you prefer to waste your time learning historical linguistics from patent cranks like Mr Dziebel, so be it. I wish you a nice weekend.
…Italian has preserved a lot of them, despite turning /w/ into [v] – it’s harder than in English to say that its labiovelars are clusters.
That alone is not completely convincing; the practice could have been inspired by Latin – which would explain why there’s no letter for /gʷ/. (Admittedly, that sound was rare, limited to /gʷː/ and the cluster /ngʷ/ – both spelled ggw for Greek reasons – so Wulfila might have felt creating a letter for it wasn’t worthwhile, or perhaps he simply overlooked it.)
What is convincing is the ability of these sounds to occur immediately before consonants. “Song” was saggws, [saŋgʷs] – note that w and u were distinguished very consistently, and many other words did end in -us, so there’s no doubt about the fact that sanggws was a single syllable with a single vowel.
More later, it’s ridiculously late! Just one thing:
I can see it, but your response starts in the middle of your quote from Piotr, without a line break. Probably you wrote < somewhere; the software interprets this as the beginning of an HTML tag and doesn’t show it to us, along with anything that follows all the way to the next > (or the next paragraph break). Instead, you need to do what I did in this comment and write < for <, and > for >.
…if that’s even attested, which it’s probably not.
Just because it’s a single syllable doesn’t tell you that it’s [saŋgʷs] and not [saŋgws].
@David Marjanović @Piotr Gąsiorowski @others interested
I am Jouna Pyysalo (PhD, Indo-European Studies) and I noticed your comments, including some dissatisfaction concerning my dissertation.
I am confident that there’s not the slightest reason for that, as I actually chose the successful proposals for sound laws of all four mainstream schools of Indo-European linguistics, the Paleogrammarians, the Neogrammarians, the laryngeal theory and monolaryngealism, completing those into a fully functional form if needed.
As I was aware of what the initial response would be, I gathered a coding team for a research program, now called the PIE Lexicon project, and coded the sound laws of Pyysalo 2013 with foma programming language designed for the purpose (foma is a predicate calculus with definitions ready-made for linguistic usage) in
http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi
As a result of that PIE Lexicon currently (Jan 2016) is capable of generating more than a hundred most ancient Indo-European languages directly from the proto-languages my means of fully digitised sound law scripts with an accuracy rate far above 99%. As the foma language is not only designated to formulate the kind of solutions as the one presented in Pyysalo 2013, but to test their correctness, I have the honour to inform you that that test has been successfully passed.
I’m just with my morning coffee and refreshing myself, but will be back later on to discuss with you further.
Sincerely,
Jouna Pyysalo
Just because it’s a single syllable doesn’t tell you that it’s [saŋgʷs] and not [saŋgws].
Biblical Gothic has waurstw ‘work’, after all, which means that after the loss of the thematic vowel /w/ was not automatically syllabified as /u/. I have the same thing in my mother tongue (mógł, mógłbym, pomysł, jabłko, all with non-syllabic /w/ pronounced in careful styles). But the free occurrence of the Gothic labiovelars in syllable codas (unlike the rest of Germanic) is a strong argument in favour of their monosegmental status.
Piotr
Hey, that was comment #800!
“Nepos” in Latin means “grandson”, not “nephew.”
But if the Albanians can call a sister “motër” anything is possible with relationship words.
“Greetings, generic female relative! Have you heard the one about the sheep with no wool and those horses pulling the wagon?”
Innocent inability to publish is all the more reason to repeat the wonderful proof, at least in outlines, in the published PhD thesis instead of referring to the unpublished MA thesis and leaving it at that.
@David Eddyshaw: I thought it could mean both?
You may be right; indeed, presumably at some point the word must have acquired the sense “nephew” even if it didn’t start out with it.
Only “grandson”, “descendant” and “spendthrift” in Lewis’ Elementary Latin Dictionary, which is admittedly hardly the ne plus ultra of Latin lexicography; similarly only “granddaughter” for neptis.
Indeed you are right. Funky diagram:
http://www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/languages/classical/latin/tchmat/grammar/vocabulary/fam.html
PIE *nepot- (with stress and length somewhere) is often glossed as “young male relative”, I think. I wonder if it might have meant “unfed”, i.e. a child you don’t have to provide for.
How kinship terms are skewed over generations is a study in itself. PIE is supposed to have or have not been an Omaha type society.
In Nigel Barley’s altogether wonderful “The Innocent Anthropologist” he has a section about trying to fathom Dowayo kinship terminology.
There’s one term he can never work out. He asks questions like “how many X do you have?” which elicits the answer “I cannot know.”
It turns out to mean something like “undoubted blood relative for whom the system has no other particular term.”
David E: if the Albanians can call a sister “motër” anything is possible with relationship words.
A woman’s reproductive period, unless reduced deliberately or by chance, is approximately from ages 15 to 45. This means that if her first child is a daughter, who herself starts having babies at 15, and so on, she can be a grandmother at the same time she has her last child, and the age difference between the oldest and the youngest siblings can be greater than the age difference between mother and child. In such large families the older children, especially unmarried daughters, often take over the mother’s responsibilities for some of the younger children (especially if the mother has died). So a child calling their oldest sister “mother” is not inappropriate.
In many languages the term for “maternal aunt” is often the same as the one for “mother”, or a diminutive of it, for similar reasons: the mother is assisted by a younger, unmarried sister who takes over the care of one or more of the children and is therefore like a mother.
nephew, grandson :
These children can be like one’s own children but ‘at one remove’. The Latin grandfather was avus, the uncle avunculus, the “little grandfather’, both men having a close relationship with the children, especially boys, but not the responsibilities of the father. For the same reasons as described earlier, the uncle in particular could be as young or even younger than his nephew(s) (this still happens, with men who marry more than once and have children with the wife of their youth, then more children much later with the wife of their old age).
Of course this could happen with a granddaughter or niece too.
@marie-lucie:
Perfectly plausible scenarios, I agree: the more so if what’s been happening is that a less elaborate system of kinship terminology is being expanded (so, for example, if the Romans at one point actually had no single term for “sibling’s son” one can imagine them pressing “grandson” into service to fill the gap.)
Less plausible to imagine one basic term being altogether ousted by another basic term. In particular, I can’t think of a single other language in which the ordinary word for “sister” seems to be derived from the earlier word for “mother.” Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if some erudite Hattic can.
It doesn’t do to make sweeping assumptions in this area, I agree. (Kusaal has exactly three mutually exclusive basic words for “sibling”, none of which by itself specifies the sex of the person you’re talking about.)
Kusaal has exactly three mutually exclusive basic words for “sibling”, none of which by itself specifies the sex of the person you’re talking about.
What do they cover? Older, younger, and twin?
Older sib of the same sex, younger sib of the same sex, sib (seniority irrelevant) of the opposite sex.
The principle works through the whole system: my mother’s sisters are either my older-mother or my younger-mother, but there’s just one word for “mother’s brother’; my father’s brothers are my older-father or my younger-father, but there’s just one word for “father’s sister.”
Seniority is central to all same-sex family relationships (including co-wives); it is irrelevant to all cross-sex family relationships.
Age (as opposed to seniority) is of no importance and (traditionally at least) most people had little exact idea of their age.
Central to all same-sex sibling relationships, I should say. My mother-in-law is undoubtedly significantly senior to (male) me.
(In fact “my mother-in-law” is the usual properly-polite form of address by a man to an unrelated woman old enough to plausibly have children but not old enough to be called “my mother”)
Is self’s SS twin treated (culturally and linguistically) as older or younger?
Good question. I don’t know. One of many good questions I never thought to ask.
I would guess (from the pervasive general pattern) it would go by birth order; as I say, it’s seniority that matters.
There is another possibility: the word for “afterbirth” is the word for “chief”, the explanation given to me being that a chief leaves the house after his retainers. So I can imagine that the later twin might end up being regarded as senior on that basis, especially as actual *age* is not a consideration. But I’m just guessing, I’m afraid.
How does Mandarin handle this? It has gēge “elder brother”, dìdi “younger brother”, jiějie “elder sister”, mèimei “younger sister”, and no cover terms for these that I know of.
Thread won.
David E: “my mother-in-law” is the usual properly-polite form of address by a man to an unrelated woman old enough to plausibly have children but not old enough to be called “my mother”
In what language/culture? Usually there is such a mythology (in Western cultures) about the supposed antagonism between a man and his wife’s mother that for him to address an unrelated woman as “mother-in-law” would be felt as an insult.
@marie-lucie:
I meant Kusaasi culture (and the very similar surrounding cultures, like the Mossi, Mamprussi and Dagomba.)
In that culture parents-in-law are highly respected; interestingly, siblings-in-law are not – they have a traditional joking relationship, involving horseplay and practical jokes.
At the Kusaasi Fire Festival it is customary to throw eggs at your brother-in-law. (We have much to learn from these ancient cultures.)
Entire ethnic groups (“tribes”) are held to be in this kind of joking relationship with one another (called “playmates” in Ghanaian English locally.)
The fact saved the life of a Ghanaian colleague of mine during a period of interethnic conflict.
Thanks for the precision, David E.
Jouna Pyysalo: four mainstream schools of Indo-European linguistics, the Paleogrammarians, the Neogrammarians, the laryngeal theory and monolaryngealism…
I’m shocked. Are we living on the same planet?
Jouna: I agree that FSA domain languages are the best thing since sliced bread. However, why are there so few words here? “father” in OInd. and Gr. would be great, for example, in demonstrating your version of the monolaryngeal theory.
Oh, I’m sorry I overlooked your comment! It seems it was held up in moderation, or I just got lost in this long thread.
Those aren’t “four mainstream schools”. They’re successive stages of the mainstream. All living people who do some kind of research on Indo-European, except you and apparently German Dziebel (perhaps also a few people in Russia, but certainly not all of them), accept at least two laryngeals as far as I’m aware. Among those, there might be a few people left who postulate four, but everyone else seems to think there were exactly three.
Your thesis started from the assumption (unexplained beyond the citation of your unavailable MA thesis) that there was exactly one laryngeal. So you took Brugmann’s prelaryngeal reconstruction, added one laryngeal, and looked what happened. In doing so, you seem to have assumed that not only the hypothesis that there was more than one laryngeal was wrong, but also that all other research of the last more than 100 years was wrong. Why did you start from ancient Brugmann and reinvented the square wheel? Why didn’t you start from the LIV and the NIV and looked what would happen if you redistributed the laryngeals in a current reconstruction?
That’s good. However, this test for accuracy is not a test for parsimony: it does not test whether some of your sound laws are redundant with each other. Perhaps several of them could be made altogether superfluous by assuming two more phonemes – this test doesn’t tell.
And now I have to ask you to substantiate the hypothesis that there was only one laryngeal. Obviously I’m not asking you to reproduce your whole MA thesis here, but surely you can explain why this is the most parsimonious explanation of the evidence?
And the Anatolian languages, I meant to add but forgot.
Oh. Here is a review of the thesis… by Juha Janhunen. Can someone tell me what it says?
There can be no doubt about Juha Janhunen’s competence, qualifications and published output as a historical linguist, He has done great work on Uralic, Tungusic and Mongolic. But he has never worked on Indo-European. Why was he chosen as a reviewer? Is there a shortage of Indo-Europeanists?
Google Translate gives a more or less comprehensible rendering of the review, which however doesn’t seem to be that informative about the details of the dissertation:
The University of Helsinki were inspected
November 22, 2013 Jouna Pyysalo
in the field of indoeuropeistiikan
dissertation, a short called
System PIE. Few of the dissertation has already been
before the public examination aroused so much
attention – and even emotions
– Like this work. Already pre-inspectors
were mutually disagree
the importance of the work, and also the Faculty of reading
showed surprising
Via twists and turns, so needed, as well as
an additional pre-shipment inspection Opinion
that the double Faculty treatment
before the work got
weight permit. The end result impartiality
In order to ensure opponent
was invited to ennakkotarkastajista
an independent expert,
the world-famous philologist
Lyle Campbell Hawaiilta.
Although the allegation area is very
an exclusive audience at the public examination
was extraordinarily rich.
The reason for the dissertation to obtain
regard is that it contains
new interpretations of the axioms of meetings
the old truths. Indoeuropeistiikka
that is, comparative Indo-European
language research is
area, which evolved essentially in Germany
During the 1800s, but
has since spread to all
major universities, including
Helsinki, where it has not been
never had a permanent representation.
Key objective of the industry is always
was the Indo-European language family
a common language within the
Position of the tongue reconstruction work.
The Common Position of the language implies that,
that it spoke of a uniform population
(strain speaking Community), who lived in a relatively
clear-cut area (the first home).
Here the question is asked
has since become part of our comparative
Language Studies general
the theoretical basis that allows explained
other language communities,
inter alia, Uralic (Finno-)
Background languages.
Over time indoeuropeistiikka
has been divided schools of thought.
Each school has a set of
well-established tenets of which
waiver requires academic
courage. The actual schools of thought
However, competition is not
could no longer talk about for decades,
because in almost all European
and North American universities
is a position of power received a single
School, which aksioomapohja
known as laryngaaliteoria
(laryngeal theory, LT). Laryngaaliteorian
According to the Indo-European
Position of the language consonant
included a series of “laryngeal”
ie in practice a variety of “h
phonemes “. These will be deemed
be able to explain, among other things, part of the
Position of the language paradigmatic vokaalivaihteluista
that is, the so-called
ablaut phenomenon.
Laryngaaliteorian initiator
is generally regarded as the Swiss
Ferdinand de Saussurea, which already
in 1879 presented a model ablautvaihteluiden
describe the individual
Additional segments. Only
1900s of stabilized comprises
sitys that these additional segments
were “laryngeal”, and they began to
mark h letter alanumerosarjalla
(h1
H2
, H3
etc.). Astonishment
was large, while at the same time, the Decoded
Indo-European muinaiskielessä
heetissä really could be
indicating a “laryngeal” classified
h-sound. This was considered by many
in sufficient proof of the whole laryngaaliteorian
accuracy.
It was felt that laryngaaliteoria
was correctly “predicted” heetin language
laryngeal. This is not actually
found, because heetin represents the laryngeal
one laryngaaliteorian “laryngeal”
– Remember the “laryngeal”
does not have any heetissäkään
trace, so their existence
remains empirically verifioimattomaksi
a hypothesis. Laryngaaliteoriassa is actually
question the idea of error,
because it confused two
levels: on the one hand the comparison of languages
based on the position of the tongue reconstruction of
level (the so-called. external reconstruction)
and on the other hand the primitive language,
contained in the gradation
level modeling (ie. internal
reconstruction). Laryngaaliteoriaa
can be good will be considered as one
as a possible model for the primitive language,
the sound system of prehistory
and explaining gradation,
but it shall in no case
is not the only possible model,
and its accuracy can not be
Evidence of an external prove.
The problem is Laryngaaliteorian
inter alia, that “laryngeal”
episodes contain are so very
“Unnatural”. On this basis,
postulated reconstructions
has become abstract codes,
who could not act as an ordinary natural language sound system.
Science Theoretically laryngaaliteorian
the main weakness
is its strength. It is known that
the stronger the theory is that at
DESCRIPTION less the value it has. Indoeuropeistiikka
is the passage of time
developed other strong
models, which allow the comparison of languages
will be very easy: they
include various
root expansion models. These
models have been applied to a loan word research,
and means
up to Uralic languages have been
“Discover” a whole bunch of new Indo-European
“Loanwords”.
The only problem is that “finding
of “these methods is too
easy. For this reason, as well as indoeuropeistiikassa
that indouralilaisissa
comparisons have long been
the need to return to common sense linguistics:
weaker methods
and more natural reconstructions.
That objective is now going to Jouna
Pyysalo to implement. His
a role model in particular, 1800s
the great German philologist
August Schleicher, but he manages
quite sovereignly in the industry
Studies later produced.
Pyysalo task is not grateful,
because even if he is not the first
laryngaaliteorian Critic
he is currently its kind in transmission
Just about the only one – so strong is laryngaaliteorian
position in the international field
the academic community.
We can only imagine how
crushing the dominant school of thought
Judgment Pyysalo heretics
the research will be.
Pyysalo has ensured my back
connecting the dissertation work
much larger whole:
new Indo-European
Position of the language kokonaisrekonstruktioon,
which is already partially available
online.
Pyysalo alternative laryngaaliteorialle
is a return to the language
comparison-based method for the bottom
that is, the traditional komparativistiikkaan.
By this method,
at least in principle, can be avoided
the risk of mixing levels
and unnatural solutions which
related laryngaaliteoriaan. When
additional “laryngeal” produced by
biases reconstructions are eliminated,
can also be found
brand new and even more natural
Indo-European – and why
Also indouralilaisia - etymologies.
This aims to Pyysalo etymological
corpus, which is, in fact,
be broad in scope research program.
Pyysalo new reconstruction model
allows comprise
less the whole Indo-European
word-of-material re-Language municipality
the different branches of angles comprises
sin. Each branch of the language can be related
Position of the language, a set of äännelakeja,
which are also tietokonemallinnettavissa.
Just ready Pyysalo model
can not yet be considered. This is due to
partly to the fact that he is his message
the passage forced in some places
unnecessarily polemical exacerbate
interpretations. Emphasizing
regular äännevastaavuuksien
and the importance of äännelakien
He comes in vain to belittle
operating äännelakeja forces,
which include, inter alia,
analogue. He also did not always take
a plausible account of the internal
information that the structure of individual languages
given their history (internal
reconstruction microscopy). Perhaps
the worst flaw is the fact that
although Pyysalo reconstructs the parent language
a single laryngeal –
the one that has been preserved heetissä – he
give this whole laryngeal
Four different representation of (* ah, ha *,
* aH, * Ha), whose role in the sound system
remains ultimately unclear.
The problems of work in the formulation
also drew attention to the public defense
opponent, but fortunately,
they are remedied, in part,
even fairly simple notation
change. Exceptional scale and
an ambitious mission statement
Due to Pyysalo dissertation works
In any case, new opening
both the Finnish and international
indoeuropeistiikassa.
There have Indoeuropeistiikasta
often debated. You could almost
to say that never in the past,
as the current degree system
appropriate master’s and doctoral level
a subject indoeuropeistiikka
(Indo-European Studies) has been
There are the University of Helsinki
only since 2011. Prior to this,
Area was bundled in South Asia
subject-based research (indologian)
which, in turn, previously
went Sanskrit and comparative
Language Studies at. For historical
reasons indoeuropeistiikka
associated with many other countries, specifically Sanskrit and Indian
linguistic research, but
understanding the language of the municipal entity
to all the other branches
are just as important.
The central message Pyysalo
dissertation is that comparative
language study is an exact science,
So really natural science,
which is the subject of human language
evolution and variations in time and
location. It is good to realize that
language development is governed by very
the laws of the same type as those
we feel the living nature. Many of biology concepts and principles
– For example, taxonomy,
expansion, differentiation, adaptation,
family trees – are also languages
world. Exact sciences
it is necessary to periodically check the
well-established truths,
but when disagreements concerning
exact in question, they should always
There are also exact solutions.
Remains to be seen how quickly
Pyysalo solutions are gaining ground
competition between schools of thought.
The author is a philologist, who served as
Representative of the Faculty Jouna Pyysalo
dissertation.
Juha Janhunen, the reviewer, was an/the outside member of the dissertation committee, if I understand correctly.
He’s also on the permanent staff of the newly created Indoeuropeistics department.
Congratulations, Dr. Pyysalo, you created your own job.
BTW, the “one laryngeal” is two phonemes, made to line up with long vs. short vowels, voiced vs. voiceless obstruents and syllabic vs. nonsyllabic resonants.
“Always two there are; a master, an apprentice.”
For Pyysalo’s defense committee, Lyle Campbell was the ‘opponent’, a concept unknown to me. (Do they use diabolos for Classics and Biblical Studies?)
I think you may be reading too much into the Yodaesque style of Google Translate’s version.
Mind you
He comes in vain to belittle
operating äännelakeja forces,
which include, inter alia,
analogue
is Kalevala-stuff. Stirring.
If I understand rightly, Pyysalo admits only one laryngeal, but this laryngeal occurs under four different forms? And he has discovered a way of generating all possible descendants of PIE roots with 100% accuracy?
I am also surprised to find Lyle Campbell among the external examiners. He started in Finno-Ugric, later branching into Uto-Aztecan, but to my knowledge he is not particularly expert about Indo-European. He also has the reputation of being methodologically extremely exacting, especially about semantics. On the other hand, perhaps he does speak Finnish well enough to participate in a thesis defence.
This dictionary gives the word in question as also meaning “(academic) examiner (person performing the oral examination of a dissertation in a thesis defense)”.
Reading on a few pages, I’ve found how this was accomplished:
by simply projecting every feature two or more descendant languages have all the way back to the protolanguage.
Thus, on p. 28, Vedic pūrṇá-, Gothic full- and Old East Slavic “pŭlnŭ-” (…where the second ŭ isn’t synchronically part of the stem, but an ending, not followed by further endings…), all meaning “full”, are used to reconstruct PIE *pulno- with the same meaning. Latin plēn- is nowhere mentioned. The current mainstream reconstruction is *pl̩h₁-n-, which not only accounts for all four of the quoted attested forms (and more), but is also a completely unremarkable zero-grade: e-grade *pelh₁-, o-grade *polh₁-, 0-grade *pl̩h₁-. A form **pul- could only be a zero-grade of a root that would be **pewl- in the e-grade…
Consequently, the thesis postulates lots of synonymous stems that are very similar to each other. P. 29 distinguishes *ghso- from *ghdho-, both meaning “earth”. P. 30 tops that by distinguishing *teḱs- from *teḱt-, the latter being attested only in three forms of a single Greek word and nowhere else in all of IE; the required “two independent witnesses” are reached by counting “Gr.” and “LinB.” as independent… In both cases the mainstream, more parsimoniously, assumes a single stem with a consonant cluster; it took 100 years of research to figure out how these clusters developed regularly, but ignoring all of that now is not a defensible option.
…plus the sound laws that *l̩ always becomes *ul in Germanic, that *l̩ becomes *ul in Balto-Slavic behind a labial consonant (IIRC; by default it becomes *il instead), that *l̩h₁ specifically becomes ūr in Sanskrit (as a special case of the fact that *l becomes Proto-Indo-Iranian *r by default), and that *h₁n behind a consonant becomes ēn in Latin. These apply of course elsewhere and were not specially devised for this one example.
David, thank you. Very shallow reconstructions. How does he get away with them?
Who was it who talked about easy, obvious solutions that are also wrong?
Re: Google translation. Wow! It reads as a dystopian common language of the Ecumene.
>*l̩h₁ specifically becomes ūr in Sanskrit
Only I think after a labial (I don’t know what laryngeal this had, but cf. Skt dīrgha- ‘long’ = Avestan darəxa-, Slavic *dŭlgŭ, Greek δολιχός), and aside from pūrayati ‘he completes’ which I suspect is newly formed in Sanskrit, I think only before a consonant (so Skt purā with short u = Avestan para ‘formerly’ and should come from *prH-).
I don’t really comment on blogs (I am a little shy by nature and not always competent) but I read a lot of them. But I just have to say this. I like this site very much but some of the recent comments in response to “THE INDO-EUROPEAN CONTROVERSY: AN INTERVIEW” strike me as confrontational and unreasonably harsh. Piotr and David are especially harsh toward Vladimir and Jouna. Vladimir seems to be a very polite and curious person who likes to learn new things and Jouna published a dissertation that neither Piotr nor David have read in its entirety. I would like to say that our lives are too short to haze each other over the computer. I propose that we grant people who we disagree with with respectful silence and those who we admire with poised applause. There are many very intelligent people reading and commenting on this blog. I think we can do better than lose patience among intelligent people.
Hi @ all,
Thank you for your over-abundant interest already! I’m a bit busy at the moment like we all, but I’ll do my best to respond and correct some misconceptions in the days – and as it seems – weeks to come as there are already great many issues to comment, and others will no doubt emerge.
First of all, I’d like to appreciate Zhanara Dayrbekova’s moderating comments:
1. Although I am used to harsh language with regard to this topic, my experience is also that in academic circles the best results are obtained with some politeness, the heavy load of cursing also pointing to lack of self-confidence from the party falling to that trap.
2. Indeed, it would be a good idea to read my dissertation – and study PIE Lexicon – first, because many misunderstandings could be immediately avoided. To illustrate my point, here a few responses to the above commentary (and please do not take this as offence, I simply comment):
Piotr Gąsiorowski, quoting ” four mainstream schools of Indo-European linguistics, the Paleogrammarians, the Neogrammarians, the laryngeal theory and monolaryngealism…” comments I’m shocked. Are we living on the same planet?” It is unknown to me why planet is drawn into this, because I said this because that is exactly what I did. Thus, in the chapter 3 of my dissertation, dedicated to the issue of the “syllabic (re)sonants/sonorants, I highlight the “Paleogrammarian” solution predating the Neogrammarian theory, in which the “svarabhakti” vowels are considered originals because backed by the principle of postulation (or “Fick’s rule), as being the comparative solution nobody has taken as the general solution of the issue.
With regard to this David Marjanović says: “Reading on a few pages, I’ve found how this was accomplished:”
by simply projecting every feature two or more descendant languages have all the way back to the protolanguage.
Thus, on p. 28, Vedic pūrṇá-, Gothic full- and Old East Slavic “pŭlnŭ-” (…where the second ŭ isn’t synchronically part of the stem, but an ending, not followed by further endings…), all meaning “full”, are used to reconstruct PIE *pulno- with the same meaning. Latin plēn- is nowhere mentioned. The current mainstream reconstruction is *pl̩h₁-n-, which not only accounts for all four of the quoted attested forms (and more), but is also a completely unremarkable zero-grade: e-grade *pelh₁-, o-grade *polh₁-, 0-grade *pl̩h₁-. A form **pul- could only be a zero-grade of a root that would be **pewl- in the e-grade…
Indeed this is the case, because this is how the comparative method works: “Durch zweier Zeugen Mund wird alle Wahrheit kund” (August Fick).
With regard to LT *pl̩h₁- this certainly does not account for all forms: As you can see from the identity of Gr. α = RV. a’ (with hiatus):
Gr. πίμ·πλα- (pr.) ‘füllen’ (GEW1:537-8,)
RV. prá’- (ao.) ‘füllen,anfüllen’ (WbRV.886, práas [conj.2sg])
RV. kakia·prá’- (a.) ‘den Leibgurt füllend’ (WbRV.309, kaksiapráam)
(for a more detailed discussion, see §3.1.4. from p. 186 onwards).
The point of the dissertation is to solve and remove all this kind of problems with a single stroke in a constructive manner instead of pretending that they do not exist.
—–
Then some corrections related to the official procedure of the handling of my dissertation as there is quite a lot of confusion and misstatements, apparently related to the unawareness of the participants with regard to the Finnish system:
1. As correctly mentioned by Piotr Gąsiorowski “There can be no doubt about Juha Janhunen’s competence, qualifications and published output as a historical linguist”, but Juha was not a reviewer, but Faculty’s official supervisor of the procedure, required by the rules of University of Helsinki. Juha has been my most trusted academic adviser for years, and he specifically wanted to take the job because nobody was equally experienced and also because – as he once put it – he prefers “real science”.
Our cooperation still continues as Juha is the Principal Investigator of the PIE Lexicon Project as you can see from the PIE Lexicon project staff description here:
http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi/about.html
As far as I am aware of all the participants of the official procedure are quite satisfied – and why wouldn’t they be? The foma programming language, is not only used to formulate sound laws, but also to test their correctness both individually and as a system, and PIE Lexicon has successfully passed the test beyond the wildest expectations of everyone.
2. David Marjanović says: “He’s also on the permanent staff of the newly created Indoeuropeistics department. Congratulations, Dr. Pyysalo, you created your own job.”
Indo-European linguistics – and the department – has a long history in Finland, far from being newly created. Only to go two generations back, during the days of Prof. Pentti Aalto it was called something like “Comparative IE linguistics and Sanskrit” while under his successor Prof. Asko Parpola the priority was switched into Sanskrit and comparative IE linguistics.
http://www.helsinki.fi/indoeuropeistiikka/oppiaine/index.html
After recent administrational changes the two studies were separated, an issue I naturally had nothing to do with. The admins are just as crazy everywhere in the university world…
My daughter is a little ill, so I cannot write any longer now, but will be back to respond and discuss other matter during the days to come (as it was this that originally took me here).
Sincerely,
Jouna Pyysalo
Zhanara Dayrbekova: some of the recent comments in response to “THE INDO-EUROPEAN CONTROVERSY: AN INTERVIEW” strike me as confrontational and unreasonably harsh
After German Dziebel left and Vladimir decided to step in and cover his base, Piotr and the other linguists here have been very patient, no doubt because Vladimir is a polite and easy-going fellow. But weeks and months pass, wrong is wrong, and one has to be allowed to say so. Those of us who (like you and me) are “not always competent” but appreciate the chance to learn from the best have yet to be treated harshly.
For Jouna Pyysalo, it’s another matter altogether. He’s set out to revolutionize the reconstruction of PIE. It’s an extraordinarily bold project that deserves extraordinary scrutiny and an extraordinarily thorough defence. My guess is he won’t get far with his antithesis, but I suspect (from Juha Janhunen’s interest) it may be motivated by irregularities in the borrowing mechanism between PIE and PU that may be well worth sorting out and working into the mainstream IE synthesis. If he’s really getting engaged here in this thread, we can look forward to be drawling over our computers for weeks to come. Joy!
Sorry, yes! The dangers of late-night commenting.
Ah, it seems that way: he’s soft-spoken and doesn’t throw insults around, unlike me. I’m hardly getting the impression that he likes to learn new things, however. He puts one of Dziebel’s half-baked ideas out there, has it shot down, and then puts it out there again as if nothing had happened, see femur above.
I haven’t lost my patience. That doesn’t stop me from saying what I think. 🙂
I’m reading it right now. So far, it’s not getting any better as I read on. In addition to simple methodological problems like the one shown above, over and over again there are sentences that simply don’t mean anything or that get elementary terminology wrong. Tell me if you’d like examples.
In the meantime, here’s what Ringe (2006: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic; pages 18–20 – probably available on Google Books) had to say about the consonant clusters that have led Dr. Pyysalo to reconstruct a profusion of stems that sound similar and mean the same:
This is a parsimonious solution to a lot of problems at once, isn’t it?
Dr. Pyysalo’s thesis doesn’t argue with it. It doesn’t even try to argue with it. It doesn’t even mention it! Research from the last hundred years is only cited as a source for inspirational quotes; often a sentence or two from 1970 are quoted as if they described the current state of the field and nothing had happened since then. It’s frankly embarrassing to watch; it’s a basic mistake that creationists often make, but that I really wouldn’t have expected from a scientist.
Oh, that would be fascinating. I’ll read the rest of the thesis to see if there’s anything about this!
Crossing fingers. But your reading of the dissertation so far is not promising.
@ All interested and @ minus273 who wrote:
“Jouna: I agree that FSA domain languages are the best thing since sliced bread. However, why are there so few words here? “father” in OInd. and Gr. would be great, for example, in demonstrating your version of the monolaryngeal theory.”
If this refers to PIE Lexicon @ http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi the explanation is simple: We initially post only (Old) Anatolian correspondences, because this is the most important data of all at the moment. In this manner we identify all the roots which have a match in Hittite, Palaic, Cuneiform Luwian and/or Hieroglyphic Luwian.
After this phase the etymologies without Anatolian support – often ambiguous with regard to the segmental laryngeal are posted.
Accidentally I discussed yesterday with a person about the reconstruction of the PIE “father” word, also explaining multiple key features of PIE Lexicon in the process.
In order to explain you PIE Lexicon functionality as well I will copy paste yesterday’s discussion below (having only changed the name of the person in question and deleted some personal info that emerged in the discussion):
Note that it’s an extract from a live chat, due to which all was not consistently replied, but I think that as “N.N.” understood my instructions and was capable of following those you can do that as well.
Here it is:
——
Jouna Pyysalo I understand, I started coding myself only after my thesis a couple of years ago. I knew that as the things stand in Indo-European linguistics there would be no reception for anything but the orthodox laryngeal theory in the journals so I simply forgot that and went on to prove the thesis and set forth a research program coding it all.
N.N. Nice. Btw what would you have instead of laryngeals? Can’t find the bloody paper on line
Jouna Pyysalo We deploy only one laryngeal, in a fully phonetically specified form, a glottal fricative with voiceless and voiced variety.
N.N. How do you do the inter-consonantal one in Greek or the colouring?
Jouna Pyysalo The phoneme inventory is specified on PIE Lexicon desktop: http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi
The novelty is that the former schwa of the Neogrammarians is reinterpreted as vowel PIE *ɑ, and not identified with the laryngeal “h2” at all, but both the laryngeal PIE *h/ɦ and the vowel *ɑ are reconstructed to the proto-language. Thus, instead of Neogr. *pəter- or LT *ph2ter- a prototype PIE *pɑhter- is reconstructed.
N.N. How do you get the other two? e and o in Greek from CHC?
Jouna Pyysalo Specify with examples, I do not follow… Not your fault, simply don’t understand the question being very short.
N.N. The syllabic *h₁, *h₂, *h₃ end up as e, a and o in Greek according to the standard theory, right? So you get a because you have no syllabic *h₂ but a vowel *ɑ. I was wondering how you get the other two vowels e and o? Or do you have a schwa or e in both cases just plus colouring in words where I would have *h₃?
Jouna Pyysalo Aa, now I think I know what you mean, if mistaken please pass further instructions. Gr. ε always stands for *e and Gr. ο always for PIE *o.
N.N. So a CHC is a in Latin or i in Sanskrit, but in Greek it splits, for Ch₁C e, for Ch₂C a and for Ch₃C o. So does that mean you have a PIE o were we so far had Ch₃C?
Jouna Pyysalo No, just a moment, let’s be very precise and go to the details. First of all, open this link, the PIE Lexicon full data page: http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi/?alpha=ALL
I follow the IE languages in very specific details. To begin with, I disagree with de Saussure’s ablaut analysis, which according to him was of the form *ei : i as eA : A, because the PIE ablaut has three, not just two quantities, zero, normal and the long grade.
In other words, the proper ablaut formula for ‘e-vocalism’ in connection with the “laryngeal” (or *A) is of the form *ēA : eA : A. Similarly, for the ‘o-vocalism’ the correct ablaut schema is *ōA : oA : A. Or, if we put both together, there is a single ablaut pattern PIE *ēɑ : eɑ : ɑ : oɑ : ōɑ (where I’ve replaced de Saussure’s *A, i.e. the Neogrammarian schwa, with *ɑ.
N.N. Okay, what do you do with case where you have the H between two consonants? All ɑ?
Jouna Pyysalo Now, what is attested in Indo-European languages (and I mean all of them) in the examples belonging to this type is a five-term quantitative ablaut in which the languages preserving the distinctions of quantity and quality imply five distinct ablaut grades as you can see if you now Ctrl+F the entry PIE √tɑh- √dɑɦ- (vb.) ‘geben, schenken’ in the PIE Lexicon full data page.
1) de Saussure’s compensatory lengthening never took place, but the outcome of *eA = PIE *eɑ is the common Indo-European /a/. Similarly *oA always resulted in the common Indo-European /o/ (except for Indo-Iranian open syllable where a long /a:/ resulted, and languages turning /o/ into /a/.
2) PIE *ɑ was always accompanied with PIE *H = *h/ɦ, i.e. the two always and only appeared in *hɑ ɑh ɦɑ ɑɦ, the vowel *ɑ being the cause of the syllabicity and the colouring.
N.N. Yes, you have √dɑɦ- instead of *deh₃-. How does gift looki in your reconstruction? I’d have *dh₃-ti-
3) PIE *ɦ, the voiced glottal fricative is the cause of voice of surrounding stop(s). Thus, if there is an alternation of voice T : D, the presence of D (media) implies PIE *ɦ.
Jouna Pyysalo No, PIE *dɑɦ- instead of LT *dh₃- and PIE *deɑɦ·to- for Lat. datum and PIE *doɑɦ·to- for Gr. δοτό- (no compensatory lengthening, see my comment above).
N.N. Okay, got that. How do you get Vedic díti-?
Jouna Pyysalo Compensatory lengthening takes only place in the Indo-Iranian open syllable. Thus ODor. δόϝεν- = RV. dāván- ‹- PIE *PIE *dóɑhu̯en- etc.
Jouna Pyysalo Vedic diti- from PIE *dɑɦti- –› dɑti- –› PIIr. *dəti- –› Ved. diti- unless there was another collided root PIE *ɦɑdi- + ti- –› *ɦdi·ti- –› Ved. diti- (vedic i is ambiguous, either *ə = *ɑ or *i).
Jouna Pyysalo The rules for PIE *ɑ are identical with those of Saussure *A = Neogr. ə…
N.N. Ah ok. So a bit like a schwa indogermanicum but without the schwa?
Jouna Pyysalo Now, as you seem to have the PIE Lexicon site open with this data, click any reconstruction in blue. This opens you the computer-generated derivation of that word, so that if you, for instance press the reconstruction of Fal. doui- on its left side (i.e. PIE *doɑɦu̯i-) you should see a chain of sound laws beginning with a line looking like this: 1. PIE *doɑɦu̯i-PIE *ɑ → Ø Loss of *ɑ RLossofA → *doɦu̯i- (Pyysalo 2013: 2.2.4). Confirm me when you’ve done this and I’ll explain you it all (my daughter is already sleeping so I’ve time for this).
Jouna Pyysalo N.N. Yes, exactly so. PIE *ɑ is the phonetic interpretation of Neogr. *ə = Saussure *A. Most rules are identical with a couple of tiny changes I’ll explain you soon after you’ve followed the instructions of my previous comment. Let me know when you’re there.
N.N. Done. If you don’t mind me asking: how did you split the syllables because some of these forms look like they have 4 morae or more
Jouna Pyysalo Excellent. Let’s start with me teaching you how to read the PIE Lexicon first. Now the first line has 1. has the following columns (a) PIE *doɑɦu̯i- (b) PIE *ɑ → Ø (c) Loss of *ɑ (d) RLossofA → *doɦu̯i- and (e) (Pyysalo 2013: 2.2.4).
N.N. That makes sense that way it stands there. It’s really easy to read. Well done! 🙂
Jouna Pyysalo The column (a) is the reconstruction itself, dropped there by the computer as you can see. The column (b) is the rule applied expressed in the comparative notation. The column (c) is the column (b) expressed in understandable English for those who might not understand the comparative notation and the column (d) is the same rule again, this time telling the name of the digital rule used and expressing the outcome like this: RLossofA → *doɦu̯i-. Finally, In column (e) is a reference to my dissertation (given if the rule is non-trivial one), which you can find from the topmost left corner of PIE Lexicon site: http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi
Jouna Pyysalo And it continues like this: The output of the column (d) of the first line = PIE *doɦu̯i- is dropped to the line 2, which should look like this: 2. doɦu̯i-PIE *ɦ → Ø Loss of segmental *ɦ RLossofH1 → *dou̯i- (Pyysalo 2013: 2.1.4). The columns are exactly identical to those in the line above, due to which the outcome of the column (d) = PIE *dou̯i- is again dropped to the line 3. which looks like this: 3. dou̯i-*u̯ → u Orthographic change of *u̯ into u ROrthogrW2u → Fal. doui-. And – as you can see, there is the Faliscan form that was sought to be proven/generated – which was done by the computer.
So what happens there is this: When the code reader – proceeding from up to down reaches the reconstruction PIE *doɑɦu̯i- and reads from its right side the abbreviation “Fal.” (for Faliscan) it opens the diachronically arranged Faliscan sound law script (all scripts can be found from the right bottom of the site by means of pressing the button “Select rule set”) and then choosing the language you like. If you look for Dal. you should find this: http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi/?showrule=14
N.N. It’s written quite well, so I got most of that right away. Which is nice since sometimes you have to read thing three times before they make sense. Or after listening to a certain scholar (who is brilliant, most of the time) after an hour going: wait, what was he talking about?
Jouna Pyysalo Thank you, N.N., that is very much the point 🙂 I went through a hellish life to learn the 100+ IE languages to get it all right so I also took care that it would be easy and understandable so that no one else has to suffer the same 🙂
David, in Balto-Slavic one normally gets *il, not *ul, also after labial consonants. The fact that only “Proto-East-Slavic” *pŭlnŭ is cited, not the actually reconstructed Proto-Slavic *pĭlnŭ and Lithuanian pìlnas (note the accent, betraying the presence of a laryngeal in the root) only shows that the author picks his cherries and feels free to ignore the rest of the evidence.
Both Janhunen and Campbell are great linguists, familiar with the methods of general historical linguistics. But they are not experts in this particular field, which requires a lot of background technical knowledge, not just about the principles.
One my comment on the thesis is still in moderation. Here, let me just say thay I agree with David on how numerous and fundamental the errors (both factual and methodological) are. One would think that before trying to revolutionise a discipline one should at least address its current state. The list of the “four mainstream schools” can actually make a specialist stop reading further. For clarity, the laryngeal theory is not “a mainstream school of Indo-European linguistics”, but simply the part of of Indo-Europpean phonology and morphophonology which describes the history of the laryngeal phonemens and their place in the sound inventory of PIE. One could distinguish several “schools” of IE linguistics depending on the local preferences of some major centres of IE studies (e.g. “the Leiden school”, “the Harvard school”, etc.). The modern version of the laryngeal theory, which owes little to Møller’s Indo-Semitic speculation (except the misleading though time-honoured term “laryngeal”) is accepted by all those “schools”, and with good reason. “monolaryngalism” was never part of the mainstream. Some linguists (especially Szemerényi) thought it was a reasonable compromise between the new view of PIE phonology and the Brugmannian model. They were wrong. Today, only some “long-rangers” accept it, mainly because they have been brought up on outdated literature.
If anyone thinks I’m being harsh, here’s a comment by the Finnish linguist Petri Kallio (2015: 369), with which I agree:
I personally think that the most recent attempt to revive monolaryngealism (Pyysalo 2013) has already demonstrated what a bad idea it is.
I have read a good part of the thesis, but since it’s about 500 pages long and riddled with errors of every kind, don’t expect me to present a detailed review here.
I would like to say that our lives are too short to haze each other over the computer. I propose that we grant people who we disagree with with respectful silence and those who we admire with poised applause.
While I appreciate civility and don’t approve of “hazing,” I strongly disagree with your advocacy of “respectful silence.” There is far too much nonsense in the world, and it has to be combated where possible. Do you think people should also be silent about deniers of global warming? It’s true that incorrect linguistic theories don’t do as much damage, but (to quote Trond Engen) wrong is wrong, and one has to be allowed to say so.
@David
“He puts one of Dziebel’s half-baked ideas out there, has it shot down, and then puts it out there again as if nothing had happened, see femur above.”
You think you shot it down, but I did not find the attack compelling. More like scrambling to find a problem with it at all costs, exaggerating the difficulties (many cognate sets have them, nobody questions their overall reliability) and providing an alternative *dhenw- that simply doesn’t work. And one doesn’t have to be a professional linguist to see it. It’s a tradition vs. innovation situation.
“But weeks and months pass, wrong is wrong, and one has to be allowed to say so. Those of us who (like you and me) are “not always competent” but appreciate the chance to learn from the best have yet to be treated harshly.”
The “best” are those who can learn, not those who teach all the time. There needs to be a dialogue. Piotr bypassed a couple of direct questions, although he did correct a couple of mistakes that I made.
Here is another question for Indo-Europeanists: earth :
a) there are … cognate pairs in which Sanskrit sibilants correspond to Greek -τ- or -θ-, e.g. Skt ŕ̥kṣas = Gk ἄρκτος /árktos/ ‘bear’, Skt kṣam- = Gk χθον- /kʰtʰon-/ ‘earth’ (cf. Mayrhofer 1982 ). ….The discovery of Hittite and Tocharian provided new evidence … (for TK clusters). … whereas ‘earth’ had been reconstructed as ‘*ǵʰþem-’, the Hittite nominative and accusative singular tēkan instead suggested *dʰ(e)ǵʰem- (cf. Schindler 1967a ).
b) These new data eventually led Schindler to the following solution …
1. The surface realization of thorn clusters was actually *KTs (thus *h2ŕ̥ḱtsos ‘bear’, … locative *ǵʰdʰsém ‘on the ground’).
2. Underlyingly, however, these clusters were */TK/.
hence rules including
3. …. b. metathesis, by which the dorsal was shifted from final position in the cluster to cluster-initial position : so */TK/ > /KT/
As might be expected, these rules gave rise to baroque alternations within paradigms, and the alternations tended to be removed by leveling and other kinds of reanalysis. … In some daughters the stem-shape of the locative … was generalized (cf. e.g. Gk χθών /khthǫ́ːn/, Skt acc. kṣā́am); … Anatolian and Tocharian generalized T(V)K- (cf. e.g. Hitt. dagān ‘on the ground’, Toch. A tkaṃ ‘earth’).
So, if the original root of ‘earth’ was *T(V)K, does this root exist and have a meaning outside of ‘earth’? (apart from the homophonous one meaning ‘make’ etc).
@m-l, I think you misunderstood: T and K are cover symbols for “dental” and “velar” respectively, not specific phonemes. “Earth” and “make” aren’t homophonous — in the first word both stops are voiced aspirates, in the second both are voiceless.
TR, thank you. I quite understood that T and K were cover symbols, but since I was focused on “earth” (for my own reasons) I did not pay as much attention to the difference with the “make” root. But my question still stands: does the “earth” root exist independently?
So, if the original root of ‘earth’ was *T(V)K, does this root exist and have a meaning outside of ‘earth’? (apart from the homophonous one meaning ‘make’ etc).
Hittite, which preserved a clear reflex of the nom.sg. (= acc.sg.) *d(ʰ)éǵʰōm shows the original structure of the ‘earth’ word beyond reasonable doubt. We can only speak of a “root” if there is a family of words evidently containing the same morpheme, of if there are other compelling reasons to believe that we are dealing with a derivative. ‘Earth’ looks complex, but is not analysable. Some people believe that it may be related to the root *dʰéiǵʰ- ‘kneed, shape’ (as in English dough, Latin fingō ‘form’, Greek τεῖχος ‘wall’), but if so, the relationship must be old enough to defy standard internal reconstruction. But then, we cannot expect to be able to analyse everything in therms of roots and affixes. There is a frequently cited dictum by Jerzy Kuryłowicz (The inflectional categories of Indo-European, 1964: 58), “One cannot reconstruct ad infinitum. We must be satisfied with the reconstruction of stages bordering the historical reality.”
“One cannot reconstruct ad infinitum. We must be satisfied with the reconstruction of stages bordering the historical reality.”
A vitally important maxim which too many people ignore because of their (understandable) craving to know more than can be known.
On “thorny problem” and on my academic background to explain my attitudes:
I’ve spent more than 20 years in writing a next-generation etymological dictionary, a project which made the revision of both the PIE phoneme inventory and the IE sound law system necessary: It’s obligatory to have a verified “alphabets” of PIE and truly functioning sound laws to compile such a work, now almost ready except for the PIE accent/tone system which turned out to require several years at least (if ever to be solved by me), something I no longer could afford.
I began as a classical philologist, making a double MA, one MA in Ancient Greek another in IE linguistics. The first MA allowed me to learn the most ancient IE languages in a very thorough manner one by one, a process still ongoing, as there are still new morphemes to me and as the comparative analysis and the IE etymology is not ready yet. How I did this was that always when a new stem I wrote this down to my etymological dictionary now with some 5,000 A3 pages etymologically arranged in a manner you can see in PIE Lexicon website.
During this process I became very familiar with the Indo-European vocabulary and its mutual relationships, and as related to that, here some comments related to some examples involving “thorn” (or an alternative explanation)
1. Phryg. γδαν μα ‘Earth Mother’ is a Satem language. As matching with Gr. χθών these two items do not belong to Hitt. dagan-, HLu. dagmi- Toch. A tkaṃ ‘earth’ etc.
2. Gr. τίκτω is not isolate, but preferably belongs to the reduplicated stem appearing in OInd. títikṣa- (vb.) ‘bear, endure’ (KEWA 1:500, títikṣate), also attested in OInd. titikṣā- (f.) ‘patience’. The two items suggest a root PIE *tiK- with extensions in *·s- and *·t- identically as with Skt tákṣā : Gk τέκτων (I avoid here the cumbersome *téḱts with both referring to Occam’s razor).
3. Gr. ἄρκτο- (m.) ‘Bär’ (f.) ‘Bärin’ (GEW 1:141-2) is not necessarily identical with Hitt. ḫartaka- (c.) (ein Raubtier, ‘Bär’ = Sum. AZ (?)) (HEG I:188-9, ḫar-tág-ga-aš, ḫar-ták-kán), because there is a shorter Hellenic variant Gr. ἄρκο- (m.f.) ‘Bär, Bärin, Ursa Major, Norden’ (GEW 1:141-2). From the corresponding base both Gr. ἄρκτο- and RV. ŕ̥kṣa- (m.) ‘der Bär’ (m.pl.) ‘des Sternbild des grossen B.’ (WbRV. 277): LAv. arša- (m.) ‘Bär’ (AIWb. 203) can be derived (again, however, extensions *·t and *·s are required.
J.
p.s. Concerning the type of language and expressions used towards each other, I occurred me that if we all behaved nicely that would help Steve a lot relieving him of much effort of moderation, so whatever the conditions you’ve my word I’ll be polite all the way.
Thanks Piotr and LH. I asked a question, I did not try to supply an answer.
@ Marie-Lucie
“So, if the original root of ‘earth’ was *T(V)K, does this root exist and have a meaning outside of ‘earth’? (apart from the homophonous one meaning ‘make’ etc).”
I’m very afraid of the wrath of Piotr and I’m not an Indo-Europeanist, so please disregard if this is not what you were asking for, but Dziebel cites Dutch Indo-Europeanist Speirs (The Proto-Indo-European Labiovelars, 1978) who argued that the valid cognate set should also include PIE *bhudh- ‘bottom’ (attested in Skrt budhna-, Greek puthmen, Latin fundus ( *bhodh- > *bhudh-). Two labiovelars in a root make the assumption of a metathesis (in Greek khtho:n and khthamalos, Skrt ksam) unnecessary. If gwh Slavic *zebm > *zemm- > *zem- as a simplification of a cluster containing two labials; Lat humus < *hobmus or *hofmus).
Vladimir: Sorry, I fail to see “labio-velars” in *bhudh or in khthon or ksam.
@Marie-Lucie
“Vladimir: Sorry, I fail to see “labio-velars” in *bhudh or in khthon or ksam.”
I checked my post from a different browser and it did indeed come out garbled and incomplete. (I can only imagine what my other posts looked like to you and others!) Let me try again.
What was missing in my previous post is the following:
“From Speirs and Dziebel’s perspective, the semantics is perfect, the morphology of the two sets is compatible (the -m- suffix is shared). Forms such as Hittite te:kan show a dental before a front vowel, which is an environment consistent with a labiovelar. The bh- forms meaning ‘bottom’ derive from *gwh in an environment of a back vowel (*gwhedh > *bhodh- > *bhudh-). Two labiovelars in a root make the assumption of a metathesis (in Greek khtho:n and khthamalos, Skrt ksam) unnecessary. If gwh Slavic *zebm > *zemm- > *zem- as a simplification of a cluster containing two labials; Lat humus < *hobmus or *hofmus).
So the underlying form (using Schindler's language above) would be *gwhegwh-, which yields surface forms such as T(V)K, K(V)T, P(V)T, T(V)P depending on the environment (front vs. back vowel, labial vs. alveolar resonant, etc.)
On the flip side, the metathesis postulated in Schindler's analysis is an irregular phonetic process. The loss of dh- in Lat humus, Slav *zem- or Toch B kam is unmotivated and unique (comp. Toch A tcace:r, B ckace:r as outcomes of a similar consonant cluster derived from PIE *dhugH2ter 'daughter'). Finally, there's no etymology for 'earth'. It's another form that's just frozen in time semantically but frantically going through multiple phonetic irregularities.
There’s usually not much of a moderation queue here. The anti-spam software has an ill-conceived habit of withholding comments with multiple links. Hat usually just approves commenters on first visit, but he has on rare occasions withdrawn his approval, and then for not following a clear request to stop with something, like loud bigotry. Or being unteachable.
Forms such as Hittite te:kan show a dental before a front vowel, which is an environment consistent with a labiovelar
In Greek yes, but in Hittite too?
Two labiovelars in a root make the assumption of a metathesis (in Greek khtho:n and khthamalos, Skrt ksam) unnecessary
But here the Greek forms have dentals before /o/ and /a/, not before front vowels. (I don’t know enough to comment on the Sanskrit form).
In general, I think that “metathesis” in many if not most cases has to do with preferred phonotactics that allow some sequences but not others, and adapt unusual sequences accordingly.
@Marie-Lucie
“In Greek yes, but in Hittite too?”
It’s the PIE level conditioning, according to Speirs and Dziebel. Under this scenario, Hittite won’t be the language that preserved the original form of the ‘earth’ root. It preserved just one out of 2-3 possible (and attested) surface manifestations of an underlying form with two labiovelars.
“But here the Greek forms have dentals before /o/ and /a/, not before front vowels.”
I guess *gwhegwhemH- would be a protoform for khthamalos that went through a stage of *khthemalos (the last -a- < *eH2, them assimilation of -e- to the following a), *gwhegwheH3-n- for khtho:n (o < *eH3).
"In general, I think that “metathesis” in many if not most cases has to do with preferred phonotactics that allow some sequences but not others, and adapt unusual sequences accordingly."
I'm not aware of those rules for Indo-European languages. There're other examples of a putative metathesis (Lith kepu 'bake', Gk arto-kopos 'baker' instead of expected peku** and arto-pokos** < *pekw-), which Speirs started interpreting as PIE *kwekw- faithfully preserved in Lat coquo.
As usual, there’s an added fee in the form of an ad hoc explanation of the -u- of *bhudh-. But we’ve gotten used to that.
@Jouna on the “thorny problem”:
Anatolian is in a sister group relationship to the rest of Indo-European. Within that “rest” Tocharian is an outlier, with all the other IE languages being more closely related to one another than they are to Tocharian or Anatolian.
The original PIE paradigm of ‘earth’ was as follows:
nom./acc.sg. *d(ʰ)éǵʰōm (we don’t know for sure if the initial was aspirated)
gen.sg. *dʰǵʰm-és
loc.sg. *dʰǵʰém(i)
After the separation of Anatolian, the ancestor of the remaining languages innovated by changing the accentual pattern of the word, from “amphikinetic” to “hysterokinetic”, in which the accent is on the final part of the stem in the strong cases and on the inflectional ending in the weak cases. The genitive and the locative remained the same, but the nom./acc.sg. changed to *dʰǵʰṓm, probably influenced by the locative (delocatival nominatives are common in words which often occur in the locative, as ‘earth’ obviously did). This is the source of Tocharian A tkaṃ, B keṃ.
After the separation of Tocharian, the ancestor of all the modern IE languages underwent the “thorny” metathesis, as a result of which the nom./acc.sg. became *ǵʰdzʰṓm. However, before nasals, whether syllabic or non-syllabic, we have cluster simplification rather than metathesis, so that the gen.sg. became *ǵʰm-és (no “thorny” effect). This is why the Vedic genitive is jmas, why Greek χαμ-αί ‘on the ground’ has no theta, and why Latin homo and Old English guma ‘man, earthling’ show just a reflex of ǵʰ. All this was sorted out decades ago.
As for *teḱ- ‘make, fashion’, it had a reduplicated present stem with 3sg. *ti-téḱ-ti, 3pl. *té-tḱ-n̥ti. The latter form was affected by metathesis in the common ancestor of the extant IE languages, and became 3pl. *téḱts-n̥ti. The relationship between the two forms became non-trasparent, and since the new 3pl. looked like the plural of a “Narten” verb with acrostatic accent, a matching analogical singular, *tḗḱts-ti replaced the old form (hence Vedic tā́ṣṭi, tákṣati. Greek also preserves the thematic reduplicated present from the same root, *tí-tḱ-e/o- > *tí-ḱts-e/o- > Gk. τίκτω. The neo-root teḱts- was used to form the widespread agent noun *téḱts-ōn ‘carpenter’, the instrument noun *téḱts-(t)lo- ‘adze’, etc. I “discovered” all these relationship myself years ago only to realise, a little later, that Schindler had already been there.
There’s nothing problematic about the ‘bear’ word. Anatolian, as usual, has the unmethasises *tḱ sequence, and other IE languages (I men, those that have preserved the word) have forms that go back to *ḱts.
Thank you, Piotr.
“metathesis” in many if not most cases has to do with preferred phonotactics that allow some sequences but not others
Right, and it’s worth pointing out that in this case there’s corroborating evidence for the “thorn” metathesis in the fact that several IE languages (including Greek and Latin) allow KT clusters, but disallow TK clusters.
indeed!
One cannot reconstruct ad infinitum”. Yes. This is Wisdom.
I reached the bottom allowed by the data in 2013.
Knowing how it would be – nothing – I gathered a team and set forth a research program with a “zig-zag” agenda.
PIE Lexicon Pilot 1.1 was about doing what we’ve done now, coming back from the “bottom” to up by means of proving the revisions suggested in my dissertation.
In PIE Lexicon Pilot 1.2 – with the deadline set to 31.3.2016 – we no longer concern about proving anything but about coding the first-ever exact family language tree in existence by means of common sound laws of the subgroups and individual languages. This phase will continue as far as we’ve reached the “bottom”, i.e. the phase where there are no longer anything but open research problem remaining – all which we’ll publish right after.
In PIE Lexicon Pilot 1.3. – to follow the completion (or near so) of the previous phase – we again turn the direction, in this time by means of changing the direction of the reconstruction from PIE to IE to its opposite, from IE to PIE (i.e. from zig-zag to zag-zig). This phase, to begin in April this year, is outlined in my dissertation (§ 5.1.4 from p. 475 on: For those not yet with a free pdf copy, please visit this page and obtain one: https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/41760)
In that chapter the decision method of Indo-European etymology of August Schleicher is defined with precision and – as I’ve learned from the language technology people – there’s an equivalent of that for language technology already in existence, so what we’ll do is a replica of my dissertation, but this time by means of the digitised predicate calculus: In other words the process of obtaining the PIE reconstructions will no longer be depending on my decisions, either in a form that I’ve accepted an etymology of an author – or presented one of my own, if there is none available, but all these suggestions – as well as all others not mentioned in my dissertation or in PIE Lexicon – will be tested by means of the very fundament of the study, viz. the data itself + the principle of postulation a.k.a “Fick’s Rule” in a computerised form.
In practice (and informally between us) this means that the computer will generate all possible proto-forms of every single Indo-European form that I chose to call the “maximal disjunction”. Once these have been generated I code a function that compares all these disjunctions to each other in order to find potential matches between the items. And if a (formal) match is found, the code reader is programmed to report that for the editors (naturally excluding the impossibilities in the process).
After this phase another turn of the direction of the coding, now from Zag-Zig to Zig-Zag follows, but more on that in a later comment.
@ Trond,
Thank you for your clarification:
“There’s usually not much of a moderation queue here. The anti-spam software has an ill-conceived habit of withholding comments with multiple links. Hat usually just approves commenters on first visit, but he has on rare occasions withdrawn his approval, and then for not following a clear request to stop with something, like loud bigotry. Or being unteachable.”
My concern here was twofold:
On the one hand I very much appreciate what Zhanara Dayrbekova said, because the internet apparently summons the worst sides of all of us to the surface. Aware of this, I try to avoid that as I do in work these days.
On the other hand, I was worried for the delay because I – as everything seems also be possible in the internet – imagined that Mr LanguageHat – or Steve – would be wasting his time to moderation, which is actually not necessary or needed at all.
Also, we Finns are reputed for our “strong language” (read: credible cursing) all over the world despite the fact that no one understands the content – and very good so 😉
Thanks, Trond, Zhanara and Steve,
Jouna
@Piotr
“After the separation of Tocharian, the ancestor of all the modern IE languages underwent the “thorny” metathesis, as a result of which the nom./acc.sg. became *ǵʰdzʰṓm. However, before nasals, whether syllabic or non-syllabic, we have cluster simplification rather than metathesis.”
That’s the thorny methodological moment: a) Toch is already attesting the form kem- (Toch B) that shows “cluster simplification”; b) Tocharian is not averse to what looks like a metathesis (Toch A kantu, B kantwo ‘tongue’ next to Lat lingua, Goth tuggo); b) cluster simplification before nasals is postulated but is not verified. Why would Tm simplify to -m-? What are some of the other examples for this change in Latin, Greek, Slavic, Germanic?; c) metathesis is postulated by not verified.
@TR
“there’s corroborating evidence for the “thorn” metathesis in the fact that several IE languages (including Greek and Latin) allow KT clusters, but disallow TK clusters.”
Why would a TK cluster suddenly get disallowed in post-Tocharian times? Tocharian and Hittite seems to be fine with them? Slavic doesn’t have it (AFAIK), although it’s form for ‘earth’ is “simplified’ (*zem-). Again, it’s an ad hoc assumption. Plus a constraint like that is compatible with a two-laryngeal reconstruction. Also, in the *pekw-/*kwep- example above there’s no cluster but ostensibly there’s a “metathesis.”
Erratum: “two-laryngeal reconstruction” > “two-labiovelar reconstruction.”
@Vladimir: Why would a TK cluster suddenly get disallowed in post-Tocharian times? — I don’t know, but the fact, it was. At least, it’s undeniably disallowed in Greek and Latin, and probably in other branches (though I don’t know exactly which ones off the top of my head).
Is there anything that ISN’T compatible with a labiovelar reconstruction under this theory? If anything at all can be derived from a labiovelar, why not reconstruct all PIE stops as labiovelars and have done with it?
cluster simplification before nasals is postulated but is not verified. Why would Tm simplify to -m-?
It’s TKN- > to KN-, actually.
Slavic doesn’t have it (AFAIK), although it’s form for ‘earth’ is “simplified’ (*zem-)
This is simply the normal Slavic development of *ǵʰdzʰ, just as the normal reflex of *tḱ > *ḱts is Slavic *s, as in *teḱts- > *tes-: OCS tesati ‘hew, cut’, *tesъ ‘rough-hewn timber’. The Baltic reflexes or these clusters are ž and š (cf. Lith. tašýti from the iterative *toḱts-éje/o-).
@Piotr
“It’s TKN- > to KN-, actually.”
I thought you meant the opposite: “the ancestor of all the modern IE languages underwent the ‘thorny’ metathesis, as a result of which the nom./acc.sg. became *ǵʰdzʰṓm. However, before nasals, whether syllabic or non-syllabic, we have cluster simplification rather than metathesis, so that the gen.sg. became *ǵʰm-és (no “thorny” effect).” I read it to mean: KTN (specifically M) > *KN (specifically M). So, to make it clear, if we use the more familiar Slavic material (I understand we’re talking about pre-Slavic times but just for the sake of the argument), *g’dem- > *zem or dg’em > *zem-?
@TR
“Is there anything that ISN’T compatible with a labiovelar reconstruction under this theory? If anything at all can be derived from a labiovelar, why not reconstruct all PIE stops as labiovelars and have done with it?”
It’s a very fair point and I don’t know the answer. I guess the IE corpus would need to be revisited under this theory to see what’s most plausible and then see what’s left. Typologically speaking there are languages spoken around IE (North Caucasian) that have a rich labialized consonant inventory, so who knows.
This theory does “target” the most well-established, core, basic IE material. *deru-/*doru- ‘tree, oak” and *gwelH2- ‘acorn’ is brought together as *gweH-, with two affixes -l- and -r-. (Or even three if Green dendron is interpreted not as dissimilation from *derdron but evidence for *den- acorn because it doesn’t have a reflex of PIE *gwel- ‘acorn’ but instead Old Irish has daur ‘oak’ and derucc ‘acorn’.
I thought you meant the opposite: “the ancestor of all the modern IE languages underwent the ‘thorny’ metathesis, as a result of which the nom./acc.sg. became *ǵʰdzʰṓm. However, before nasals, whether syllabic or non-syllabic, we have cluster simplification rather than metathesis, so that the gen.sg. became *ǵʰm-és (no “thorny” effect).” I read it to mean: KTN (specifically M) > *KN (specifically M).
No, sorry for not being precise enough. This cluster simplification preceded the metathesis, bleeding it.
So, to make it clear, if we use the more familiar Slavic material (I understand we’re talking about pre-Slavic times but just for the sake of the argument), *g’dem- > *zem or dg’em > *zem-?
In Balto-Slavic, we have a noun derived from the PIE locative *dʰǵʰémi > *ǵʰdzʰemi > BSl. *źemi- (hence the e-grade). This has nothing to do with the cluster reduction before nasals. You can see the latter in the following forms:
(1) gen.sg. *dʰǵʰm-és > *ǵʰm-és (Ved. jmás);
(2) the allative (a denominal adverb) *dʰǵʰm̥-h₂ái > *ǵʰm̥h₂ái ‘onto the ground’ > Gk. χαμαί, Lat. humī ‘on the ground’, hence the back-fromed thematic noun humus;
(3) the ‘earthling’ word (IMO with the Hoffman suffix), *dʰǵʰm̥-h₃on- > *ǵʰm̥h₃on- > PGmc. *ɣuman- (OE guma), Lat. homo.
They all lost the initial *dʰ before it had a chance to metathesise.
Exception: Gk. χθαμαλός ‘low, ground-level’, but the χθ here may well be analogical (after χθών). The related Latin adjective, humilis shows the expected non-“thorny” outcome.
Back-fromed –> back-formed, of course.
@Piotr
Thanks for all the explanations. I bet I saw a passage about the behavior of a thorn cluster in Slavic *tesati but now I can’t find it. Did you edit your post? I’m getting paranoid as my own post @TR got mixed up again.
@TR
Trying again:
“This theory does “target” the most well-established, core, basic IE material. *deru-/*doru- ‘tree, oak” and *gwelH2- ‘acorn’ are brought together as *gweH-, with two affixes -l- and -r-. (Or even three if Greek dendron is interpreted not as dissimilation from *derdron but evidence for *den- acorn.) Greek balanos ‘acorn’ presupposes zero-grade *gwH2-l-, while Greek *doru ‘tree, oak’ presupposes zero-grade *gwH3-r-. Interestingly, Pyysalo (ppp. 278-279) also reconstructs PIE *gweHl- (with his monolaryngealist notation) and argues that -l- is an affix. Dziebel cites Celtic as providing distributional evidence for bringing *deru-/*doru- ‘tree, oak” and *gwelH2- ‘acorn’ : Celtic strangely doesn’t have a reflex of PIE *gwel- ‘acorn’ but instead Old Irish has daur ‘oak’ and derucc ‘acorn’, both from PIE *gweH-, with the acorn form having an -r- affix and not an -l- affix, as other IE languages.
I bet I saw a passage about the behavior of a thorn cluster in Slavic *tesati but now I can’t find it.
http://languagehat.com/the-indo-european-controversy-an-interview/#comment-2231373
@Piotr
Got it, thanks. I can also see a connection between the postulated phonetic developments in this form and in the ‘earth’ form. Мy question is why could not Slav *tes- continue PIE *tek’- directly and regularly? Why do we need to postulate a metathesis from a reduplicated *te-tek’-ti > *té-tḱ-nti with subsequent cluster simplification, if a direct route is available? What am I missing?
What am I missing?
Meaning. *teḱ- by itself is an aoristic root meaning ‘beget, give rise to, bring into the world’. Even the thematic reduplicated present in Greek retains this meaning. Hence also *teḱ-es- ‘child, progeny’ (Gk. τέκος n.). It was only the athematic reduplicated present, the one reshaped into *tḗḱts-ti, *téḱts-n̥ti that developed the specific meaning ‘form by cutting, chisel, craft’ (etc.), describing what carpenters do. It is also from this reformed root that the occupational term ‘carpenter’ is derived (Gk. τέκτων, Ved. tákṣaṇ-, Av. tašan-).
@Piotr
“In Balto-Slavic, we have a noun derived from the PIE locative *dʰǵʰémi > *ǵʰdzʰemi > BSl. *źemi- (hence the e-grade).”
This analysis suggests that Slav *ź- continues IE *dh and not IE *g’h, as it is the case in so many other forms.
“*dʰǵʰm̥-h₂ái > *ǵʰm̥h₂ái ‘onto the ground’ > Gk. *dʰǵʰm̥-h₂ái > *ǵʰm̥h₂ái ‘onto the ground’ > Gk. χαμαί, Lat. humī ‘on the ground’,
Here’ Greek χ- and Lat h- continue IE *g’h (which is normal) and not *dh-. So it’s cluster simplification in Greek and Latin (simply put, *dg > g) but it’s a metathesis + cluster simplification + d > z (*dg > gd > z) in Slavic?
@Piotr
“Meaning. *teḱ- by itself is an aoristic root meaning ‘beget, give rise to, bring into the world’.”
What makes you think it’s the same root as the carpenter words? You put a palatalization sign over -k- but Skrt has takman ‘Abkommling’ without a satem -s-. Frisk says about Greek tikto: “Als Verb isoliert.”
Is it possible that Schindler just lumped two unrelated roots together? On the other hand, there’s a whole host of roots *tek-, *tuk-, *tep- meaning ‘strike, carve, etc.’
This analysis suggests that Slav *ź- continues IE *dh and not IE *g’h, as it is the case in so many other forms.
It’s Slavic *z- from Balto-Slavic *ź. In Balto-Slavic *ǵʰdzʰ and *ǵʰ merged, which simply means that Baltic and Slavic are useless in telling them apart. But there are other branches in which you can see the difference.
So it’s cluster simplification in Greek and Latin (simply put, *dg > g) but it’s a metathesis + cluster simplification + d > z (*dg > gd > z) in Slavic?
More or less. But note that we are not talking of the same words. The e-grade in Slavic *zemja or Lith. žemė rules out cluster simplification. But the ‘human, person’ word is represented in Baltic, e.g. Old Lithuanian žmuõ, and here cluster simplification did take place (not that you can see it in Baltic, but the word has external cognates).
Is it possible that Schindler just lumped two unrelated roots together? On the other hand, there’s a whole host of roots *tek-, *tuk-, *tep- meaning ‘strike, carve, etc.’
Is there? I’m aware of *tep ‘strike’, but not the other two. And *tep is strictly Balto-Slavic, with no external cognates, and it can’t produce anything like Skt. tā́ṣṭi, tákṣati by any stretch of the imagination. *tḗḱts-ti doesn’t mean simply ‘cut’ or ‘strike’ but ‘fashion/create/form by cutting, hewing or chiselling’. The semantic link with ‘bring into being’ is strong. It’s just the technical shade of the word that is characteristic. The alternative would be to posit the root *tetḱ- to account for this special meaning, but it’s a strange shape for a PIE root, and the repeated *t still strongly suggests reduplication. LIV indeed lists it as a separate root, but explains its origin in footnotes.
@Piotr
I included a link to Vasmer in my earlier response but the response disappeared.
“Is there?”
Слав *tukati ‘weave’, *tknonti ‘poke’, Latv tukstet ‘strike, pummel’, Gk tukos ‘hammer’, tukidzo ‘grinding stones’, OIr toll (< *tukslo-) 'hollow', OHG duhen 'press'.
I doubt the semantic link because the verb with the meaning 'bring forth, beget' is Greek-only. It's metaphorical extension has a financial meaning 'yield'. Outside of Greek, it's clear cognates such as Skrt takman (Gk teknon) means 'child' and it's not palatalized. Just something to think about. We can pronounce them related but it feels forced. (Just like another pair of IE roots *g'en- 'procreate' and *g'en- 'know'.)
cluster simplification before nasals — that’s tautosyllabic nasal since *ti-tk-n̥ti doesn’t show it, right?
I never considered that the epenthetic sibilant would assimilate to the surrounding stops — Ringe just writes TsK — but it obviously would. But does that really include aspiration like in *ǵʰdzʰ- — or is that just a symbolic presentation of something that would have become a ‘plain’ voiced affricate as soon as the metathesis happened? (Or, with Ringe, a cluster like /dʰs/ — but presumably that would have had a [z] in practice).
And do we know what happened with zero grades of TeK roots where the stops had different manners of articulation — unvoiced with voiced aspirate, plain voiced with anything else?
@ Piotr
Your response on January 24, 2016 at 3:27 pm (tagged @Jouna on the “thorny problem”) sounds puzzling: I understand what you aim at, but considerable irregularity would be required by your suggestions.
I support a highly conservative tradition, according to which the sound laws have no exceptions. I therefore see the Pokorny-entry IEW 414-416 as an early and a very tentative root into which everything with an identical meaning and some common phonemes have been poured together.
Consequently I do not think that it is helpful to try to invent sound laws to bind them together as these rules would yield inconsistencies elsewhere without being motivated in the first place…
But does that really include aspiration like in *ǵʰdzʰ- — or is that just a symbolic presentation of something that would have become a ‘plain’ voiced affricate as soon as the metathesis happened? (Or, with Ringe, a cluster like /dʰs/ — but presumably that would have had a [z] in practice).
Aspiration must have been there, since *ǵʰdzʰ- patterns with other similar clusters in Indo-Iranian (the devoicing to kṣ, as in Vedic, is late and not even shared by all modern Indo-Aryan langauges (some of them are more conservative than Vedic in this respect!). Note that e.g. *-bʰs- produced something like *-bʰzʰ- by Bartholomae’s Law. The sequence became Vedic -ps-, but note *bápsati ‘they devour’ < *bʰe-bʰs-n̥ti, with deaspiration of the initial stop by Grassmann’s Law.
And do we know what happened with zero grades of TeK roots where the stops had different manners of articulation — unvoiced with voiced aspirate, plain voiced with anything else?
We can guess what would have happened, but it’s difficult to prove anything because naturally the examples are pretty rare. *dǵʰ and *dʰǵʰ would presumably have given the same outcome, and since Hittite does not distinguish between *d- and *dʰ-, we cannot really be sure which of them we have in the ‘earth’ word. *dg and *tǵʰ (or *dʰḱ) are ruled out by the IE root-structure constraints. One potential example of initial *dḱ-) is *dḱm̥t-ó-m ‘100’, but here we have cluster reduction before a nasal (which may be very old, perhaps datable back to the time when the *m was not yet treated as syllabic). *-dḱomt- and the dual *-dḱm̥tíh₁ occur only in compounds (decadic numerals), and the *d seems to have been lost early, causing the compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. Anyway, there is no reason why *dḱ- should not have assimilated to *tḱ-. Medial *dḱ appears in reduplicated derivatives of *deḱ- ‘observe, follow (rules, advice, etc.)’, but there’s always a following suffix which leads to segmental losses: *dí-dḱ-sḱe/o- > *dít.sḱe/o- (Lat. discō ‘learn’). LIV derives it from the reduplicated desiderative, together with Skt. dīkṣate, but I find the sḱe-present analysis simpler and more convincing. We also have the perfect participle *de-dḱ-wot/s-(?) > Ved. dāśvāṁs-, which suggests that cluster simplification could happen before other consonants as well, not just nasals, leading to compensatory lengthening if preceded by a vowel (but there is too little evidence to make sure).
P.S. “Aspiration” should of course be understood in a broad sense, including breathy voice.
@Piotr, thanks.
I always forget that Cʰ probably means breathy-voiced, and I was trying to figure out how to put aspiration on a voiced sibilant. I don’t doubt that it occurs in some languages, but somehow *ǵʰdʰzʰ- with breathy voice seems much more likely in a system that still had only one sibilant phoneme .
And I messed up the possible assimilations, as you noted. Really only *deǵʰ-, *dʰeǵ-, *deḱ- and *teǵ- that are possible, and since there’s a constraint against two plain voiced consonants ‘together’ the clusters would almost have to assimilate to *dʰǵʰ- and *tḱ- / *ǵʰdʰzʰ- and *ḱts-.
(As I understand it, one theory about the constraint against *teǵʰ- and dʰeḱ- is that they already assimilated to *dʰeǵʰ- in all grades, not just zero grade).
What about place assimilation? Did the dental cause plain velars and labiovelars to become palatals in the cluster?
What about place assimilation? Did the dental cause plain velars and labiovelars to become palatals in the cluster?
No. We have good examples of TK-metathesis involving *dʰgʷʰ, in which the labiovelar remains labiovelar (Gk. φθ). The showcase example is the famous poetic collocation ‘imperishable fame’, Gk. κλέος ἄφθιτον : Ved. ákṣiti śrávaḥ (*ń̥-dʰgʷʰito/i-). There are a few roots of the shape *dʰegʷʰ(X)- whose zero grade has Gk. φθ and Ved. kṣ (and sometimes Prakrit. (g)gh or (j)jh, preserving the breathy voice).
We know next to nothing about the development of TP, since examples are scarce and involve complicating factors.
The examples of Skt. kṣ can be traced to PIE *s (instead of a dental/thorn). Thus, in addition of the examples in my dissertation there are several matches such as
1. RV. kṣiṇ- (pr.) ‘vernichten’ (WbRV. 367, kṣiṇánti [3pl]) : Gr. ψίνο-(vb.) ‘Blüten/Früchte abfallen lassen, verlieren’ (GEW 2:1138, ψίνεσθαι [inf.])
2. RV. á·kṣiti- (a.) ‘unvergänglich’ (WbRV. 7), AV. kṣití- (f.) ‘Untergang, das Dahinschwinden, Vergehen’ (WbRV. 368) : Gr. ψίσι- (f.) ‘ἀπώλεια’ (GEW 2:1138).
As this kind of correspondences contain a common PIE *s there is hardly any reason to complicate the matter as was done in the historical theories.
Piotr: *dʰgʷʰ, in which the labiovelar remains labiovelar (Gk. φθ)
So *dʰgʷʰ > *pʰtʰ > φθ ? What was the intermediate stage between *dʰgʷʰ and *pʰtʰ ? I would guess *pʰgʷʰ through labial assimilation, but since I don’t know Greek or PIE I want to doublecheck.
I am asking because it reminds me of *tkʷ > pkʷ in a language I am concerned about.
@Jouna
“Gr. τίκτω is not isolate, but preferably belongs to the reduplicated stem appearing in OInd. títikṣa- (vb.) ‘bear, endure’ (KEWA 1:500, títikṣate), also attested in OInd. titikṣā- (f.) ‘patience’. The two items suggest a root PIE *tiK- with extensions in *·s- and *·t- identically as with Skt tákṣā : Gk τέκτων (I avoid here the cumbersome *téḱts with both referring to Occam’s razor).”
In a conversation with Piotr above I wasn’t convinced by Schindler’s connection between Gr. τίκτω and the forms such as Gk τέκτων. And Schindler’s whole explanation of thorn clusters seems to rest on this dubious semantic link. Frisk lists τίκτω as an isolated verb, so again unrelated to Gk τέκτων, etc. Could you clarify your position? Do you think that Gr. τίκτω is unrelated to τέκτων, etc., but instead related to OInd. títikṣa- (vb.) ‘bear, endure’ (KEWA 1:500, títikṣate), also attested in OInd. titikṣā- (f.) ‘patience’? If this is your position how do you explain Skrt takman ‘offspring’ as well as Germanic words such as OEng. thegan ‘follower, boy’. The meaning ‘bear, endure’ doesn’t seems to be associated with the root *tek- that has only ‘procreative’ meanings.
So *dʰgʷʰ > *pʰtʰ > φθ ? What was the intermediate stage between *dʰgʷʰ and *pʰtʰ ? I would guess *pʰgʷʰ through labial assimilation, but since I don’t know Greek or PIE I want to doublecheck.
More probably something like *dzʰgʷʰ metathesised to *gʷʰdzʰ in the “crown group” of IE. In the lineage of Greek, the affricate was deaffricated, yielding *gʷʰdʰ > kʷʰtʰ (with “plain” aspiration replacing breathy voice) > pʰtʰ. In Indo-Iranian, it gave *gʰžʰ (with the RUKI treatment of the fricative) > Ved. kṣ (but with voiced reflexes in other Indo-Aryan languages and in Iranian *ɣž).
Thanks Piotr. The *tkw > pkw I was quoting is (fortunately for me) a lot simpler! (and provably so).
@Jouna
As this kind of correspondences contain a common PIE *s there is hardly any reason to complicate the matter as was done in the historical theories.
I see. So instead of the “mainstream” Greek forms with φθ you prefer a dialectal (Cretan) variant because it suits you better. Fine, but how do you explain the φθ?. And I’m sure you have some ingenious idea how to explain away the Prakrit forms with a voiced aspirated reflex of the initial cluster, like jhijjaï = Ved. kṣīyate.
@Piotr
“More probably something like *dzʰgʷʰ metathesised to *gʷʰdzʰ in the “crown group” of IE.”
How do we arrive at an affricate from PIE *dh-?
How do we arrive at an affricate from PIE *dh-?
TK > TsK > KTs
That’s what “thorny” metathesis is all about (as analysed by Merlingen and Schindler). See David’s long quotation from Ringe above.
@Vladimir, I don’t have Frisk handy, but “als Verb isoliert” should just mean that there are no other verbs from this root in Greek, not that there are no other words. I doubt Frisk thinks it’s unrelated to τέκτων.
I’m probably wrong, though. Checking Chantraine and Beekes it looks like neither of them connect τίκτω with τέκτων, after all.
The connection was elucidated in the early 1990s independently by Schindler, Rix, and possibly others. That was long after Chantraine’s death. Beekes is well aware of it all. In his Etymological Dictionary of Greek says, in the etymological note to the entry for τίκτω, he says:
ETYM Belongs to the old root *teḱ- ‘to produce’, which appears in reduplicated form in *te-tḱ- (Skt. 3sg. tā́ṣṭi ‘fashions’, 3Pl. tákṣati, etc.). Apparently, Greek is the only language that kept the root in its simple form.
Sorry for my messy editing. Ignore the first “says”.
Thanks, that explains it. Chantraine and Frick don’t draw the connection because it wasn’t known at the time, Beekes doesn’t explicitly do so because of (sadly characteristic) carelessness.
@TR
“I’m probably wrong, though. Checking Chantraine and Beekes it looks like neither of them connect τίκτω with τέκτων, after all.”
Thanks for checking. Usually, Frisk gives an etymology. So, he would have mentioned the family of words around tekto:n but he did not. Just wrote that it was isolated.
@Piotr
” Apparently, Greek is the only language that kept the root in its simple form.”
Not only that but tikto: does have a metaphorical meaning in Greek, which is about “financial yield”, so nothing close to “carving.” And it has clear non-carving derivatives in other languages such as Skrt takman.
Whatever the truth is it proves the point that semantics and cognate set composition are critical for reconstruction.
“That’s what “thorny” metathesis is all about (as analysed by Merlingen and Schindler). See David’s long quotation from Ringe above.”
Yes, yes, sorry. Sibilant epenthesis is another independent process that’s required by this theory. So, to summarize, it’s epenthesis, afficatization, metathesis and cluster simplification.
@Piotr:
Gr. φθίο- (pr.A.) ‘vernichten’ (P.) ‘zugrunde gehen’ (GEW 2:1015. φθίω) to HLu. guza- (vb.) ‘carve, engrave’ (CHLu. 6.11.2, [(CAPERE-SCALPRUM)REL-]z[a?]-tà)
Vladimir Diakoff says (January 25, 2016 at 10:18 am)
“Do you think that Gr. τίκτω is unrelated to τέκτων, etc., but instead related to OInd. títikṣa- (vb.) ‘bear, endure’ (KEWA 1:500, títikṣate), also attested in OInd. titikṣā- (f.) ‘patience’?”
– Yes.
“If this is your position how do you explain Skrt takman ‘offspring’ as well as Germanic words such as OEng. thegan ‘follower, boy’. The meaning ‘bear, endure’ doesn’t seems to be associated with the root *tek- that has only ‘procreative’ meanings.”
– There are two separate roots: PIE *tik- (implied by Gr. √τίκ·τ- = Skt. √tik·ṣ-) and *tek- in Gr. ἐπί·τεκ- (f.) ‘der Niederkunft, der Geburt nahe’ (GEW 1:543-4), OSorb. tok- (m.) ‘Balz’ (REW 3:114), etc.
The connection between Gr. τίκτω and the PIE oot underlying Gr. τέκτων doesn’t seem too convincing to me, and this root ended with palatovelar (e.g. in gAv. taša- (pr.) ‘schnitzen, gestalten, schaffen’ (AIWb. 644-5, tašō [2sg]), if this answers to your query (I’m not sure whether I understood that correctly).
If a rule TK > TsK > KTs is accepted how does one explain that it does not take effect in examples like:
RV. átka- (m.) ‘Gewand, Hülle, Schleier’ (WbRV. 30)
LAv. aδka- (m.) ‘Oberkleid, Mantel’ (AIWb 61)
The sound laws are supposed to function universally.
@Jouna,
I have no idea what you are trying to say. Perhaps I didn’t ask my question clearly enough, so let me try again:
Greek words in φθ- often have dialectal variants with initial ψ. They are clearly variants, not different words with different etymologies. We even have φθ- > ψ- as a modern development: φθείρ ‘louse’ has become Modern Greek ψείρα.
So, to stick to our example, we have φθίω, φθίνω ‘perish, destroy, decay’; φθίσις ‘consumption, destruction, decay’; φθινάς, -άδος ‘wasting’. We also have the byforms (Cretan) ψίνω, ψίνομαι; ψίσις; ψινάς, -άδος, with the same meaning. Cf. such exact correspondences as Cretan ψίνοντος = φθίνοντος (gen.sg. of the present participle). The ψ-forms can be easily explained as early instances of the change that has produced Mod.Gk. ψείρα. If, however, in your opinion the ψ comes from something like *kʷs, what exactly is the origin of φθ-?
These words have cognates in Vedic, for example the verbs kṣināti ‘destroy, corrupt’ and the related adjective kṣīṇá- ‘wasted, worn away, waning, thin’. Now in Middle Indo-Aryan and several modern languages the initial cluster is reflected as a voiced aspirated jh-, eg. Prakrit jhīṇa-, Sindhi jhīṇo, Nepali jhinu, Panjabi jhīṇā, Hindi jhīnā. What’s your explanation for the fact that we find such voiced aspirated reflexes for words whose Greek cognates have φθ-? Note that we also find them in words which contain the zero-grade of *dʰegʷʰ- ‘burn’ (cf Gk. τέφρα ‘ashes’), such as Ved. kṣāyati : Pali jhāyati ‘burn’, both from the “essive/fientive” *dʰgʷʰ-eh₁-.
The sound laws are supposed to function universally.
This is not true. Sound laws are regular, but not always perfectly regular. They are not mechanical physical processes. But even assuming Neogrammarian regularity, a word will only have undergone a given change if it happened to be in the right language at the right time (when the change was an active phonetic process). The metathesis of TK took place in the common ancestor of the modern IE languages (after the separation of Anatolian and Tocharian). Please demonstrate that your examples date back to that period. If you can’t they aren’t valid counterexamples.
We know next to nothing about the development of TP, since examples are scarce and involve complicating factors.
I can imagine. Just curious, are there any examples of TK where the outcome is detectably different from that of TK´?
Just curious, are there any examples of TK where the outcome is detectably different from that of TK´?
Avestan is supposed to distinguish them as *tḱ > š (as in šaēitī ‘dwell’) vs. *tk > xš (as in xšaθra- ‘dominion’).
@Piotr
“Note that we also find them in words which contain the zero-grade of *dʰegʷʰ- ‘burn’ (cf Gk. τέφρα ‘ashes’), such as Ved. kṣāyati : Pali jhāyati ‘burn’, both from the “essive/fientive” *dʰgʷʰ-eh₁-.”
Why can’t it be a root with two labiovelars, namely *gwhegwh-? Doesn’t Pali jhāyati have two velars in it? Recall that Slav cognates are *zegu, *-gaga that also show two velars easily derived from labiovelars. This would make sibilant epenthesis unnecessary and simplify the whole process for several cognate sets.
@Jouna
Thanks for your explanation. We agree on the lack of a connection between tikto: and tekto:n.
The sound laws are supposed to function universally.
If that were the case, all languages would end up the same.
Sound laws (patterns of sound changes) occur depending not only on the particular language but on specific conditions within the language, which may be very general (eg “between vowels”) or limited to unusual environments. Once a given law has applied everywhere the conditions allowed within a language, these conditions may be expanded so that the law applies more generally, or they may disappear once fulfilled. New conditions may then arise as a result of these changes, or because of other, unrelated changes. The new conditions may be a repeat of the old ones, and in such cases the law may apply anew, or not, or a brand new law may now apply. There are examples of all those cases and more in the attested history of languages.
m-l: By universally is meant not ‘in all languages’ or ‘at all times’ but ‘to all words’, in other words Ausnahmslosigkeit ‘exceptionlessness’. But that’s only true when a sound-change is fully consummated, which may never happen. It may stall out, or even reverse itself in most words.
Piotr quoting Kurylowicz: “One cannot reconstruct ad infinitum. We must be satisfied with the reconstruction of stages bordering the historical reality.”
LH: – A vitally important maxim which too many people ignore because of their (understandable) craving to know more than can be known.
I agree, but I am one of those people with the craving to know more! I am working in a field (“Penutian”, in Western North America) in which dozens of people have repeated that nothing could be learned, there were no regular correspondences, and so on. Nothing but negativity: basically “all or nothing”, no possibilities of getting to intermediate stages, for instance. Fortunately, I was not aware of this when I started my work, and by the time I learned of the negativity I had a number of consistent and systematic positive results and continue to find more (and to correct earlier errors). Proceeding one step at a time, I don’t expect to find “everything”, but I have already found a lot more than “nothing”.
JC, I agree! That is more or less what I was trying to say.
JC, I agree! That is more or less what I was trying to say.
Piotr: earth
Apologies: I just realized I was making a mistake in asking about “TK” in relation to the word for ‘earth’. I shouldn’t even have mentioned this sequence as a possible root alternant, since you said that “TK” in this case results from the metathesis of “*KT”.
@marie-lucie
“Nothing but negativity: basically “all or nothing.”
Hmm, sounds familiar. This string has made me feel like a Penutianist in Indo-European linguistics. And I’m loving it.
In case anyone’s wondering, I’m still reading this thread, but haven’t had time to write. I’m aware I still owe several people answers. For now, just so much:
For the record, that’s what the Moscow School Nostraticists (at least tacitly) assume.
Sibilant epenthesis is already known to happen in clusters of two coronal consonants, as I briefly mentioned. The extension from TT to TK is really not surprising.
A testable prediction can be derived from this hypothesis: if we ever find out what happened to TP clusters, we’ll find /s/ epenthesis in them as well.
Why do you cite one root in zero-grade and another in e-grade in the same sentence?
Both of these examples are Indo-Iranian. We can presumably reconstruct a Proto-Indo-Iranian word *ádʰka- from them, but we can go no further unless and until you provide potential cognates from other IE branches. PII is already known to have whole layers of regional loanwords that the rest of IE lacks, so it wouldn’t be surprising if this *ádʰka- turned out to be one of those.
Because that would be the only PIE root with two identical consonants. All other things that look like such have turned out to be reduplications.
…No?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_consonant
Slavic z doesn’t come from labiovelars, though; it comes from palatovelars.
Well, there’s reconstruction by the comparative method, and there’s internal reconstruction.
Internal reconstruction can certainly be done ad infinitum, but because it’s only constrained on one side, it has way too many degrees of freedom on the other side. Internal reconstruction beyond “stages bordering the historical reality” of either an attested language or a comparatively reconstructed protolanguage is useless in science.
Comparative reconstruction can be done as far down the tree as you can see the tree. Just no further.
They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. To be opposed by an orthodoxy is no guarantee of being right, nor even of being wrong in an interesting way.
Perhaps I gave the wrong impression!
Yes, obviously I did. Bozo the Clown indeed!
Let me just say that I would absolutely not become a disciple of German Dziebel. The tried and true comparative method, developed over more than two centuries, has not reached the end of its usefulness, whether in IE or other language groups.
@David
Good try. But no cigar. Let me try to respond (perhaps, sometimes in David Marjanovic’s style of writing what I think without thinking what I write, not for antagonistic purposes but to illustrate to David what his style is like):
“Doesn’t Pali jhāyati have two velars in it?
…No?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_consonant”
OK, to be more exact – both j and h are or go back within Indo-Iranian to velar consonants, no? I don’t know Pali, of course, but in Skrt j corresponds to z in Avestan, g in Latin and Greek, zh in Lithuanian, etc.
“Slavic z doesn’t come from labiovelars, though; it comes from palatovelars.”
If you knew Slavic forms, you would have guessed that z in *zegu is zh (and not z), which comes from a labiovelar. And tephra shows the right front vowel conditioning to suspect a labiovelar in Greek.
“Sibilant epenthesis is already known to happen in clusters of two coronal consonants.”
Judging by what is “known” about tikto: and tekto:n, etc. may I request some examples, so I can check the “etymological path” proposed?
“Because that would be the only PIE root with two identical consonants.”
I can easily cite a few more. E.g., IE *pekwo- ‘bake’ may need to be reconstructed as *kwekwo- to avoid several irregular metatheses (Lith kepu) and assimilations (Lat coquo).
“To be opposed by an orthodoxy is no guarantee of being right, nor even of being wrong in an interesting way.”
Marie-Lucie must have heard it many times.
“They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
If you’ve run out of linguistic arguments, then of course you can always resort to fables.
@Marie-lucie
“Let me just say that I would absolutely not become a disciple of German Dziebel.”
I honestly don’t understand people’s negative obsession with Dziebel in this string. I can’t blame him for trying to find alternatives to the convoluted analyses such as Schindler’s account of the origin of “thorn clusters” or to simplistic etymologies such as *dhenw- ‘fir’ > femur ‘thigh’. One needs to have a very specific subjective mindset to be happy with those. It’s not about comparative method at all. It’s about culture and consensus around science.
In Pali as in Sanskrit, jh means a single phoneme, namely a breathy-voiced palatal (or similar) affricate. So if you’re including palatals as “velars”, it’s one velar, not two.
Meanwhile, I pronounce English /k g ŋ/ at the back end of the hard palate, but still do as I was told and call them “velar” even though the velum is the soft palate. I recall being trained at one point through listening exercises to call anything articulated against the soft palate “uvular”. I think this is standard practice, at least in the United States, but I don’t know where it comes from. However the professor articulated “velar” fricatives as in Russian or Spanish too far back, which if you picked up on and called them “uvular”, you could be graded down.
@ George Gibbard
Thanks. Is Pali jh historically from *K, or from *T? The Pali form came from Piotr’s “Ved. kṣāyati : Pali jhāyati ‘burn’, both from the “essive/fientive” *dʰgʷʰ-eh₁-.” If the Pali form has only one root consonant, then what was Piotr’s point in likening it to Ved ksayati, with two root consonants? It’s not a loaded question, I’m just trying to understand the details.
The initial stop in “cube” for me has the closure farther forward than “keen”, and the latter isn’t really farther forward than “cool”. All are released against the hard palate. If you go a little bit farther back and use the soft palate, I think what happens is that the acoustic characteristics of the burst are quite different (due precisely to the softness and mobility of the palate there) even if the formants aren’t much different.
Vladimir: evidently a Proto-Indo-Aryan cluster has become a single consonant in Pali, which generally simplifies complex onsets (and reduces consonant clusters to Cː or NC). So my guess is Proto-Indo-Aryan *gʰẓāyati > Sanskrit kṣāyati and independently > Pali jhāyati.
@Vladimir
Pali does not come from Vedic. They both come from Proto-Indic, which is not the same thing as Vedic, just as Proto-Slavic is not Old Church Slavonic, and Proto-Germanic is not Gothic. In Middle and Modern Indo-Aryan languages many old clusters, preserved in Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, were simplified. *kṣ is one of them: we generally find Pali kh (aspirated velar) corresponding to Vedic *kṣ. In some words, however, we find gh or jh instead (-ggh-, -jjh- between vowels), and — surprise, surprise — in such cases there is external (Greek, Iranian, other) evidence of a voiced cluster. That’s because the voicing contrast between Proto-Indo-Iranian *kš, *ćš on the one hand, and *gž, *ʒ́ž on the other, neutralised in the Vedic dialect, survived in some related varieties of Indo-Aryan.
@George Gibbard
“So my guess is Proto-Indo-Aryan *gʰẓāyati > Sanskrit kṣāyati and independently > Pali jhāyati.”
I understand that the cluster got simplified, but which consonant from the underlying T-K root is a phonetic antecedent of Pali jh, a T or a K consonant? Also, could it be that jhāyati is from *jehāyati instead? I’m thinking about Pali dhita ‘daughter’, which (AFAIK) is from *duhita.
I assume there are no cognate forms that would make *jehāyati a good candidate for an ancestor. For the other question, assuming a language showed *ts > t͡s (which would be treated phonologically as taking up one timing slot rather than two), would you say the ancestral sound was *t or *s?
To make it explicit, when a cluster is reanalyzed as a single segment, the result may be different from both ancestral segments.
@Piotr, @George
Ok, after having weighed everything that I’ve learned so far, this is where my unschooled and unbiased thinking is taking me. There’s a broad set of forms that attest to *K- (Balto-Slav *z’em-, Gk khamai, Lat humus, Pali jha:yati (a different set but the same phonetics), Toch kem, Skrt jmas) and then there are three forms with a two-consonant cluster: Gk khtho:n, Skrt ksam and Toch A tkam. Finally, there’s Hitt tek:an, which is a form with two consonants separated by a front vowel. Now, -s- in Skrt ksam is undoubtedly a devoiced correlate of Balto-Slavic *z’ and Skrt j- in jmas. I can’t see how it can be parsimoniously derived from a dental. It’s derived from a velar. k- in ksam is also a velar. So, *gzem < *ggem must be the protoform. This cluster got devoiced in Skrt but Pali shows that Proto-Indo-Aryan had it voiced. A dental is attested in Gk khtho:n, Toch tkam and Hitt te:kan. About Greek we know that th can come from *gwh if followed by a front vowel (khtho:n < *khtheH2n). Tocharian *tk wouldn't give Toch B *k (Toch B cka:cer 'daughter' maintains the cluster, albeit with a palatalized but still existing dental), so kem must be from *kkem. Hittite is the only one that's left with a dental in the onset. My conclusion is that Hittite must have allowed the dentalization of a velar before /e/ and this velar by logic must be a labiovelar.
Challenge, grill, marjanovize me. Call me unteachable. Blame Dziebel. But a good counterargument will be more effective.
But a good counterargument will be more effective.
No, it won’t be. Believe me; I’ve tried.
A small self-correction. I wrote: *kš, *ćš on the one hand, and *gž, *ʒ́ž on the other
I forgot to mark “aspiration” (breathy voice) in the latter pair, but that’s what they are in practically all reconstructible cases.
Just the most urgent bits:
Oh, I’m absolutely not blaming him for trying.
I’m blaming him for proposng solutions that simply don’t work: for throwing out well-known sound changes by the dozens and postulating new correspondences which 1) tend to fall apart when looked at in detail and 2) completely fail to explain the sound correspondences seen in the vast majority of the material.
I’m blaming him for acting as if he knew how probable each semantic change is. We can all agree some are more probable than others, but we can’t actually put numbers to it (though people are trying right now), and we can’t really declare anything impossible in this department. As I mentioned earlier, really strange changes in meaning are known to happen: English clean corresponds with German klein, which means “small” (perhaps the meaning in Proto-West-Germanic was “neat” or something; who knows), English bead corresponds with German Gebet “prayer”. In this latter case the change is documented within the written history of English: “prayer” > “prayer on the rosary” > “bead which symbolizes such a prayer” > “any bead”. Should I explain what’s up with the ge- prefix, or do you know that?
It’s not directly derived from a dental plosive; it’s derived from a dental affricate. *gzem < *gdzem < *dzgem < *dgem is the protoform.
No, eH2 would give a: in Proto-Greek, which would remain as such in Doric but become e: in Ionic and Attic.
Either that, or *dg was simplified to *g much earlier than the loss of the *-u- from “daughter”.
Are you trying to base a whole new sound law on a single example?
Also, you don’t mean “by logic”; you only mean “by analogy to Greek”. That’s good enough, but it’s not the same thing. The development [ke] > [kʲe] > [ce] > [t͡ɕe] > [te] is easy to imagine, even though I don’t think it happened in this case (or anywhere else in Hittite); each one of its steps is attested somewhere in the world.
@Piotr
“No, eH2 would give a: in Proto-Greek”
Sorry, I meant eH3. For khthamalos it would be -emalos < *emH2los.
"Are you trying to base a whole new sound law on a single example?"
No, I realize that it has to work across many or all examples. We're just talking about one of them at the moment. But we also need to go from the material to a reconstruction and sound law formulation, not from an assumption of what a correspondence should look like to the material.
"Also, you don’t mean “by logic”; you only mean “by analogy to Greek”."
Yes, correct.
"gzem < *gdzem < *dzgem < *dgem is the protoform."
Well, this exactly where I disagree. There's a very simple, regular and natural correspondence between Slavic *z (Balto-Slavic *z'), Gk kh, Lat h and Skrt j that works for me. No affricates, no metatheses. And if it's a cluster simplification it's only because two identical or similar consonants came into contact.
Vladimir: I honestly don’t understand people’s negative obsession with Dziebel in this string. I can’t blame him for trying to find alternatives to the convoluted analyses …. or to simplistic etymologies …
I don’t know enough about all the details of Indo-European evolution to evaluate difficult analyses, but my opposition to Dziebel is based on something else: unlike traditional comparativists for whom form (morphology and phonology) is paramount, he starts from meaning and the assembling of “cognate sets” related through meaning before trying to find sound laws to apply to them, picking them here and there from earlier linguists’ findings.
Form by definition is something concrete: we analyze words according to their component morphemes, and we relate sounds to each other according to their physical characteristics. These features of words may become modified by change, but the changes occur across the board in words sharing the same formal conditions (in a given language at a given time).
Meaning on the other hand is amorphous, and meaning change is unpredictable: words which are definitely cognate according to their form may end up with quite different meanings (see for instance “bead” cited above by David). Sometimes the evolution of these meanings can be traced to some general principle, but unlike sound laws, general semantic principles do not apply across the board: derivatives of the same root may evolve in quite different semantic directions while their sounds evolve in the same manner as in words with the same phonological structure.
Unlike most sound change, the evolution of meaning is also very much influenced by social conditions and events in the life of a speaking community. The linguist’s view of meaning is also very much influenced by their own personality, background and experiences, which may skew their interpretation into specific directions and away from others.
My own personality includes thinking in images, so here is a metaphor: the comparative method relies on structure, the hard “skeleton” of language, but relying on meaning first is like looking for the skeleton in an amoeba.
@Marie-Lucie
“unlike traditional comparativists for whom form (morphology and phonology) is paramount, he starts from meaning and the assembling of “cognate sets” related through meaning before trying to find sound laws to apply to them, picking them here and there from earlier linguists’ findings.”
Yes and no.
Yes, because Dziebel’s primary background is in comparative historical semantics of kinship terms (he has the largest global database) and the comparative historical semantics of kinship terms has been a 150 year field in anthropology and ethnolinguistics and is a very formalized (often mathematical) subfield. He brought in a lot of linguistic knowledge (grammar, morphology) into that historical typology but also exported some learnings from it into historical linguistics.
No, because he treats morphology very seriously (his proposal to derive *bhreHter ‘brother’ from *mer- involves an observation that in Latvian martiya ‘brother’s wife’ has the same morphology as Lat fratria ‘same’). Even in what I personally consider a failed etymology, namely the one that connected ‘heart’ and ‘root’ forms he followed a morphological clue, namely the suffixal identity between Slav *srudice ‘heart’ (otherwise isolated morphologically in its set) and Lat radix ‘root’. The example of femur and Slav *bedro again follows morphological clues such as the co-occurrence of be:ma and bathron in the *gweH2- set. I think it’d be fair to say that he takes forms holistically but treats semantics as part of a formal exercise.
@David
“really strange changes in meaning are known to happen.”
Dziebel won’t deny it, I think. He himself suggests a connection between Slav *popelu ‘ashes’ and IE *kwekwlo- ‘wheel, circle’ (Lith kaklas ‘neck’) on the basis of an underlying cultural practice of slash-and-burned agriculture, the rotation of millstones (Lat pollen ‘finely milled flour’) and associated cyclicity in rituals and beliefs (Gk telos is just as much an “end” as “ashes” are). But he clearly differentiates between “cultural” semantics and “conceptual” semantics. ‘walk, come, step’ > ‘thigh’ and ‘walk, come, step’ > ‘guest’ would be linked conceptually, while ‘wheel, cycle’ > ‘ashes’ culturally. Conceptual semantics is more universal and objective, while cultural semantics is more unique. In cases of the absence of written sources (which is 99% of world linguistic history and 90% of world languages) the reliance on cultural semantics is dangerous. But in any case, a semantic path needs to be described and validated. The path between Gk tikto: ‘give birth’ and tekto:n ‘carpenter’ has not been validated. Historical linguists tend to downplay semantics as a formal discipline, but the downside is that becomes an “anything goes” practice that’s not scrutinized as much as the phonetics is.
“I’m blaming him for proposng solutions that simply don’t work: for throwing out well-known sound changes by the dozens and postulating new correspondences which 1) tend to fall apart when looked at in detail and 2) completely fail to explain the sound correspondences seen in the vast majority of the material.”
Judging by this statement, the formal side of things in Indo-European linguistics is just as subject to subjective viewpoints as semantics. For me, Schindler’s analysis of the ‘earth’ set simply doesn’t work because it requires multiple irregular processes most of them unattested and ignores very simple and well-established sound correspondences. Same for ‘yew, fir, bow’ > ‘thigh’ (nw > m is not a typical phonetic development, semantics is fuzzy and a proposed path is unique, Slav *bedro remains unexplained). The analysis I provided draws both on the existing practice of comparative work – I hope – and on Dziebel’s more holistic and bottom-up methodology of working from the material to the sound law and then back from phonetic hypotheses to the larger material.
David: To be opposed by an orthodoxy is no guarantee of being right, nor even of being wrong in an interesting way.”
In my case, the “orthodoxy” in question has the attitude (which I have cited several times here over the last few years): “A language family is either obvious (with plenty of regular sound correspondences), or it is forever unknowable” (or words to that effect). Transposed into terms familiar to more Hatters, that would mean: “We have securely identified Romance, Germanic, Slavic and a few other families, and there are indeed tantalizing similarities between the words of those established families, but they must be due to massive borrowing between unrelated languages. The IE group proposed by Mr Jones and a few other dreamers must remain forever an unprovable hypothesis.”
Vladimir: Dziebel’s primary background is in comparative historical semantics of kinship terms (he has the largest global database) and the comparative historical semantics of kinship terms has been a 150 year field in anthropology and ethnolinguistics and is a very formalized (often mathematical) subfield
I don’t doubt this, but kinship terms are a peculiar semantic field, linked to social structures related to the nature of human genetic relationships (or their social equivalents). That this particular field is highly formalized does not mean that most areas of semantics are similarly able to be formalized.
@Marie-Luice
“I don’t doubt this, but kinship terms are a peculiar semantic field, linked to social structures related to the nature of human genetic relationships (or their social equivalents). That this particular field is highly formalized does not mean that most areas of semantics are similarly able to be formalized.”
As Dziebel explains in one of his early Russian-language publications, when other specialists on kinship (anthropologist Rodney Needham, ethnolinguist Indo-Europeanist Paul Friedrich, etc.) looked at Indo-European kinship term reconstructions, they were surprised to find how little one could infer from those reconstructions about the semantic structures and transformations that they were used to seeing in ethnographically attested kinship systems. But the forms in question were complex in morphology, hence relatively recent, but still poorly etymologized. Paul Friedrich mocked Szemerenyi’s book on Indo-European kinship terms for its etymological absurdities (brother < carrier of fire, etc.) Dziebel took on the task of figuring out if the problem might lie in the way reconstructions are conducted using some diachronic universals of kinship semantic change as an initial guiding stick. A breakthrough happened when he saw that IE *mer- (as in Lat maritus 'husband') can be linked to IE *bhreH2ter 'brother', which is a semantically recognizable pattern, the kind Needham specifically was looking for.) At the same time, he realized that the task needs to be taken outside of the kinship terms per se into a broader vocabulary because the principles of cognate set composition are arbitrary and some sound laws may not be properly formulated (voiced aspirate in Gk fra:ter, Lat frater looked secondary, while textbooks said it was PIE). Numerals and body part names also showed the same lack of good etymologies and typologically validated changes in the structure of those lexico-semantic fields, although cross-cultural evidence shows that these classes are also highly semantically patterned. (And some semantic patterns such as merging of certain body part concepts into one, etc. are very similar to the ones found between kinship terms.) I think that's how it started. So, a specialist in kinship terms began redefining the building blocks of linguistic kinship, too.
What’s irregular about these processes? They’re regular in applying to all known examples.
Which ones are unattested?
Which well-established sound correspondences are ignored?
nw > m doesn’t happen in languages you or I are familiar with. But there are languages where it has happened… there are even some where it has happened across an intervening vowel!
The semantics are not immediately compelling, yes. They are, however, clearly possible: I mentioned “legs like tree trunks” long ago.
Perhaps *bedro simply belongs elsewhere. I don’t know. Piotr?
@Marie-Lucie
“In my case, the “orthodoxy” in question has the attitude (which I have cited several times here over the last few years): “A language family is either obvious (with plenty of regular sound correspondences), or it is forever unknowable” (or words to that effect). Transposed into terms familiar to more Hatters, that would mean: “We have securely identified Romance, Germanic, Slavic and a few other families, and there are indeed tantalizing similarities between the words of those established families, but they must be due to massive borrowing between unrelated languages. The IE group proposed by Mr Jones and a few other dreamers must remain forever an unprovable hypothesis.””
I love the analogy. It’s hilarious and I suppose uncannily true. So in IE linguistics scholars such as Marcantonio who denies the reality of IE and Uralic families are marginalized (“cranks” as Piotr would put it), while in Amerindian linguistics Jones is a crank.
@David
“What’s irregular about these processes? They’re regular in applying to all known examples.”
A metathesis is an irregular process by definition. S-epenthesis is an ad hoc hypothesis introduced to explain -s-. The simple correspondence between j in jmas, z in zem-, x- in khamai, h- in humus is replaced with afficativization of a dental after a metathesis. Postulated post-metathetical clusters in Balto-Slavic are not attested but inferred.
All in a desperate attempt to “please” Hittite evidence for the root *te:k-. But why? Hittite is not PIE, it can just as easily be derived. Russian monolaryngealists take Hittite at face value, too, mistakenly as we all, except for Jouna, agree here.
“Perhaps *bedro simply belongs elsewhere.”
It doesn’t have obvious cognates. No etymology. That’s a problem for a well-research family such as IE. But on the other hand, same semantic slot as femur, same onset, Vasmer and others linked the two but couldn’t explain the morphology or the etymology. Dziebel’s solution explains it by referencing Gk bathron and be:ma. A phonetic hypothesis is borne out of this analysis: aspiration on voiced stops is a derived feature. Same situation as fra:ter, frater next to mari:tus.
A metathesis is an irregular process by definition.
A surprisingly ignorant statement for someone familiar with the Slavic languages and historical linguistics. Liquid metathesis in Slavic is as Neogrammatically regular as they make ’em.
So in IE linguistics scholars such as Marcantonio who denies the reality of IE and Uralic families are marginalized (“cranks” as Piotr would put it)
Funny you should mention Angela Marcantonio. I once took part in an Indo-European conference where she presented a paper debunking “the myth of Grimm’s Law”. She discovered a number of counterexamples to it. For example, she told the audience that Latin pater should correspond to Germanic *faþer while in reality Old English has /-d-/ and High German has /-t-/ in this word. Aha! Where’s your Grimm’s Law, orthodox linguists?
I’m not making this up. People (including some eminent Indo-Europeanists) stared in disbelief. A couple of questions were asked after the presentation (like “Professor Marcantonio, have you heard of Verner’s Law?”). She didn’t quite understand the questions and we didn’t quite understand the answers. She had apparently convinced herself that Verner’s Law was a kind of arbitrary circular trick — a form of illegitimate cheating (ditto for the High German shift). Arguing with her about the chronological order of sound changes and outgroup evidence was like discussing ERV insertions as phylogenetic markers with creationists.
It’s OK to contest established scholarship — that’s what innovative research is always about — but for cricket’s sake, LEARN SOMETHING FIRST!
So what other words are there where *mr has become *bhr? This didn’t happen in the root *mer- “die”, after all.
Have you noticed how many PIE kinship terms end in *-h₂tēr? Maybe this started in one kinship term and was then added to most others as a suffix. Suffixes specific to kinship terms exist elsewhere, too.
There’s even a hypothesis on how this may have happened: The “father” word, *ph₂tēr, is transparently an agent noun (*-tēr) from the verb root *peh₂-, “protect” (in the zero-grade). Once the primary meaning had shifted from “protector” to “father”, the word was reinterpreted (reanalyzed, folk-etymologized) as papa + a novel suffix -h₂tḗr. This suffix was then added to mama, yielding *ma-h₂tḗr, and then to other roots: *dʰug- > *dʰug-h₂tḗr, *bʰréH- or *bʰráH- > *bʰrá-h₂tēr, and so on. The obvious problem with this idea is the asymmetry between the zero-grade in *ph₂tḗr and the e-grade in *mah₂tḗr.
How does it look secondary??? It’s there in every single branch that distinguishes *bʰ from *b: Indic (preserved as such), Greek (devoiced as always), Germanic (PGmc. *b rather than **p), Italic (Latin f rather than b), Armenian (b rather than p).
For pretty good reasons. Here’s a review by a Uralist.
…just… no. Many cases of metathesis are irregular, but metathesis often happens as a regular sound change. Since Slavic and TK clusters have been mentioned, let me bring up Serbocroatian, where kt clusters have across the board become tk (“who” is tko), and vs has become sv (“all”, plural, is sve).
No. As mentioned, it’s already known to have happened to *TT clusters; there’s really no surprise in finding it in *TK clusters as well.
You know all those Latin verbs like patior, past participle passus, or cedo, past participle cessus? That’s pat+tus and ced+tus, where *t-t and *d-t both became *tst, which was regularly simplified to ss in Latin (…actually all over Germanic + Italo-Celtic).
But what about the other forms of the same nouns in the Sanskrit and Greek paradigms?
(BTW, not that it matters here, but the shift from aspirates to fricatives in Greek only happened in Roman times. There’s a Pilipphus mentioned somewhere on a wall in Pompeii, evidently written by someone who couldn’t remember where the aspiration belonged and put it on the already “stronger” plosive; the first Filippus shows up over a hundred years later.)
So why is it *bedro and not *bodro? Bathron points to Proto-Greek *a, and bēma, Doric bāma as mentioned above, points to Proto-Greek *ā – neither of these corresponds to Proto-Slavic *e.
…
I’m still staring in disbelief.
Vladimir: in Amerindian linguistics Jones is a crank.
I did not say that – I meant someone who reasoned as Jones did, specifically in the context of the Penutian group (postulated by Edward Sapir, who was not always right but had a more grandiose vision than most). This group is not currently accepted in reference works such as the Smithsonian Institution volumes (Handbook of North American Indians series), Lyle Campbell’s book on Amerindian historical linguistics, or Marianne Mithun’s encyclopedic work on The languages of Native North America.
In this at least controversial field my contribution has been to chip away little by little at the problems presented by the group, getting a clearer picture as I go on. In any research, wrong results lead to contradictions and dead-ends, correct results lead to greater clarity and new avenues for further research, validating and building on already obtained results. But you can’t get any results if you declare right away that it is impossible to do so.
@Piotr
“A surprisingly ignorant statement for someone familiar with the Slavic languages and historical linguistics. Liquid metathesis in Slavic is as Neogrammatically regular as they make ‘em.”
Let me just quote from Hock (p. 111): “Dissimilation and metathesis are ordinarily irregular and sporadic processes. However…some of the most ‘shining examples of regularity’ come from this class of notoriously irregular changes.”
We are both right. You are right about liquid metathesis in Slavic (or -Cr- > -rC- in Armenian and an independent -Cr- > -rC- metathesis in Ossetian). But Slavic, Armenian and Ossetian also provides a good model of what a regular metathesis looks like – it’s pervasive, easily detected and occurring in a single branch. I’m right about the general category to which metathesis belongs – it’s an irregular process. In the case of the ‘earth’ set, there’s nothing even remotely regular about the dg > gd metathesis and it comes in combination with cluster simplification, which makes any proof of the metathesis inaccessible by definition. So, unless there’s sufficient evidence to postulate metathesis as a regular process, it should be considered irregular and hence less likely to occur than a regular alternative based on sound change. Double so, if it’s accompanied by another irregular process.
@David
“So what other words are there where *mr has become *bhr? This didn’t happen in the root *mer- “die”, after all.”
It’s a very natural phonetic change. Root mer- stayed mer- but cluster mr- changed to br-.) There are plenty of examples for the mr > br and ml > bl change in Greek (mrotos > brotos, brakhus *bromH2- > fromH2-; 2) Slav *merg’- ‘freeze’ next to Lat fri:go: ‘I freeze’ (Gk ‘rigo is typically cited as a sole cognate of Lat fri:go, so it’s not as clear to me).
“It’s there in every single branch that distinguishes *bʰ from *b: Indic (preserved as such), Greek (devoiced as always), Germanic (PGmc. *b rather than **p), Italic (Latin f rather than b), Armenian (b rather than p).”
“mer- is also very widely attested with a broader range of meanings (Gk meirax, etc.).
“You know all those Latin verbs like patior, past participle passus, or cedo, past participle cessus?”
Yes, they all got palatalized/assibilated. Why exactly do we need to postulate epenthetic -s- there? And how is it relevant to the thorn cluster? In the case of ksam, -s- is just a devoiced palatalized consonant -j- attested in jmas.
“So why is it *bedro and not *bodro? Bathron points to Proto-Greek *a, and bēma, Doric bāma as mentioned above, points to Proto-Greek *ā – neither of these corresponds to Proto-Slavic *e.”
*bedro and Lat femur have the same onset. In Latin a laryngeal aspirated the front consonant but didn’t color the vowel. In Greek it colored the vowel but didn’t aspirate the consonant. In Slavic, the Latin situation happened but we know that Balto-Slavic didn’t preserve any aspiration on voiced consonants, so *beHdro > *bHedro > *bhedro > *bedro. eH > He is a Scheweablaut-kind of change.
“For pretty good reasons. Here’s a review by a Uralist.”
I know, I read about her. I just saw an irony in the way national linguistic traditions have evolved. In Amerindian linguistics extreme splitters feel at home, while in Indo-European and Uralic studies they are fringe. And another irony is that in both cases their detractors feel that they are in the right.
@Marie-Lucie
“I did not say that – I meant someone who reasoned as Jones did, specifically in the context of the Penutian group (postulated by Edward Sapir, who was not always right but had a more grandiose vision than most).”
I understood you very well. I was just trying to capture the irony. It speaks to an earlier irony that I derived from another comment of yours, namely that in Indo-European studies everything that’s to be discovered has been discovered, while in Penutian studies there’s nothing to discover.
Vladimir:
In Amerindian linguistics extreme splitters feel at home, while in Indo-European and Uralic studies they are fringe.
I think that in Amerindian linguistics very few people have had more than rudimentary training in historical linguistics, so “splitting” is the default attitude, followed by its opposite (represented by Greenberg and Ruhlen).
an earlier irony that I derived from another comment of yours, namely that in Indo-European studies everything that’s to be discovered has been discovered, while in Penutian studies there’s nothing to discover.
Did I say that, or is it your irony? In IE studies there has been so much done, with dozens if not hundreds of linguists plugging away at it for more than 200 years, that even though not everyone agrees on the details there is still a solid core that is part of the baggage if not the creed of all linguists concerned. As soon as I started getting interested in Penutian (not having an opinion for or against it) I felt that there was everything to discover, in spite of many people claiming that it was useless to try.
I can think of two examples of nw > m in languages that are probably familiar to people here: sammitch from sandwich, and “mir” from “wir” in some varieties of German (the nasality is supposed to come from preceding verb endings). I don’t understand how it’s atypical for a sound change.
@David
Re: Slav *bedro & Gk bathron.
Dziebel found a similar situation (vocalism is different) in Lat barba, Slav *borda ‘beard’, OPruss bordus ‘beard, chin’, Germ. *bardaz ‘beard’, for which he found a good morphological correlate in Gk barathron. Gk barathron is part of a productive IE verbal root based family of words presently reconstructed as *gwer-: Lith gerti, geriu ‘drink’, gurklys ‘throat, crop, craw’, OPruss gurcle ‘throat’, Skrt girati, grnaati ‘he devours’, garas ‘potion’, Arm keri ‘I ate’, Gk bora ‘fodder’, bibro:sko ‘I eat, devour’, barathron ‘gulf, pit, muzzle’, Lat vora:re ‘I devour’ , Slav *zreti ‘devour’, *gordlo ‘throat’. So one of IE terms for ‘beard, chin’ is derived from a notion that beard is something that grows on the front side of the neck near the area where food is consumed. The semantic link is natural, the morphology is matched, a verbal root is found, an etymology for ‘beard’ is provided (for the first time in 200 years!), the secondary nature of aspiration on voiced consonants (for the ‘beard’ group suggested by Germanic *bardaz < *bhordh-) as well as the PIE age of the labiovelar split are confirmed by yet another example.
The always difficult Lat b- in barba (expected farba** under the current paradigm of IE historical phonology) is explained as a reflex of gw- that stayed unaspirated in a situation when a laryngeal colored a neighboring vowel. If this word followed the femur path, we would have expected ferba** but since it's the vowel that picked up the laryngeal trace b- stayed unaspirated just like b- in Gk barathron.
@Marie-Lucie
“Did I say that, or is it your irony?”
No, felt there was an irony.
“I felt that there was everything to discover, in spite of many people claiming that it was useless to try.”
Yes, this is my irony: in Penutian studies there was everything to discover, in Indo-European studies everything seems to have been discovered, hence I feel people think that it’s useless to try.
“In IE studies there has been so much done, with dozens if not hundreds of linguists plugging away at it for more than 200 years.”
Yes, but there’re so many more languages and so many written sources that I sometimes feel 200 years maybe a drop in the bucket. Plus effective breakthroughs are made by individuals, not collectively. Groups either follow individuals, or try to shoot them down. You may not get too many followers but your breakthroughs are real. As far as I could see from reading your works and knowing nothing about Penutian languages. 🙂
@David
Slav *gordlo ‘throat’ (*borda ‘beard’) is another morphological parallel (-d- affix) to the morphology of the ‘beard’ set. Dziebel seems to have overlooked it.
pater should correspond to Germanic *faþer
This talk being given in Modern English, I suppose?
@Piotr
“For example, she told the audience that Latin pater should correspond to Germanic *faþer while in reality Old English has /-d-/ and High German has /-t-/ in this word. Aha! Where’s your Grimm’s Law, orthodox linguists?”
I’m very surprised that she said this. But truth be told, the relative chronology between Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law hasn’t been decided, AFAIK.
Here’s a review by a Uralist
Okay, read the review. But it’s not inconsistent to disbelieve in Uralic and to believe in some connection between the Uralic languages and others: that’s just as much as to say that Uralic is polyphyletic. You can disbelieve (as Luobbal Sámmol Sámmol Ánte aka Ante Aikio does) in the Hungarian–Ob-Ugric node without rejecting the Uralic node.
@Piotr
“So, to stick to our example, we have φθίω, φθίνω ‘perish, destroy, decay’; φθίσις ‘consumption, destruction, decay’; φθινάς, -άδος ‘wasting’. We also have the byforms (Cretan) ψίνω, ψίνομαι; ψίσις; ψινάς, -άδος, with the same meaning. Cf. such exact correspondences as Cretan ψίνοντος = φθίνοντος (gen.sg. of the present participle). The ψ-forms can be easily explained as early instances of the change that has produced Mod.Gk. ψείρα. If, however, in your opinion the ψ comes from something like *kʷs, what exactly is the origin of φθ-?
These words have cognates in Vedic, for example the verbs kṣināti ‘destroy, corrupt’ and the related adjective kṣīṇá- ‘wasted, worn away, waning, thin’. Now in Middle Indo-Aryan and several modern languages the initial cluster is reflected as a voiced aspirated jh-, eg. Prakrit jhīṇa-, Sindhi jhīṇo, Nepali jhinu, Panjabi jhīṇā, Hindi jhīnā. What’s your explanation for the fact that we find such voiced aspirated reflexes for words whose Greek cognates have φθ-?”
Skrt kṣināti ‘destroy, corrupt’, Prakrit jhīṇa-, Gk φθίω, φθίνω ‘perish, destroy, decay’ should be compared to Slav *kaz- *cez- ‘spoil, destroy, punish, disappear’ (Polish kazić ‘corrupt, spoil’), Lith kežė́ti ‘become sour’ which again support the equation Skrt -s- in a ‘thorn” cluster = Balto-Slav *z = IE *K and also points to a two-labiovelar reconstruction *gwhegwhn- on the strength of the Greek forms.
@Piotr
Another famous Greek cluster misinterpreted as a metathesis from *dhegh-, namely ikhthus ‘fish’ (Arm jukn, Lith zuvis, OPruss suckis) can be compared instead to Slav *zaba ‘toad’ (< *gwhebhwa), OPruss gebawa ( < *gebwa), OSaxon quappa 'kind of fish, eelpout, burbot'. Lith zuvis < *zubvis, ikhthus < *ikhtheus. In view of OPruss -ck-, Arm -k- doesn't correspond to -v- in zuvis or -u- in ikhthus but comes from a PIE voiced (labio)velar. So, again, PIE *gwhegwh-. -w- in OPruss gebawa is the same as -v- in zuvis and -u- in ikhthus.
Piotr: My own encounter with Marcantonio was when she came to address our MA class on historical linguistics. She discussed, among other things, how utterly absurd and implausible it was that conventional IE postulated an otherwise unattested change of *kw to p.
There was a Romanian in the audience.
But I’m sure she debunked the myth or Romanian being descended from Latin.
About Marcantonio: I did not know about this person, but how did she get known as a historical linguist? One more sign of the (overall) sorry state of the field as viewed by “mainstream” linguists. We don’t get no respect! Is she actually teaching that garbage?
She started as a student of Finno-Ugric, and then at some point found that denialism was a good way to further one’s academic career. Controversy sells well. Also outside of the academia lots of people find it attractive. For example, there are Hungarian nationalists who love the news that there is really no Uralic family, because it squares well with their idea that Hungarian is descended from Sumerian and related to Etruscan/Turkish/Hunnish (underline your preferred relationship). The same goes for Hindutva sympathisers and Indo-European. Dr. Marcantonio has a tenured position at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she teaches this course (Finno-Ugric Linguistics). Tests will be based on the required reading: A. Marcantonio: The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics (the book reviewed by Ante Aikio, see David’s link). To be fair, I have to say that the book was quite favourably reviewed by Edward Vajda (Canadian Journal of Linguistics 48, 2003), who dismissed the central claims of the book, to be sure, but found the author’s questioning attitude salutary. In this case I tend to agree more with Aikio (who is an actual Uralicist) than I do with Vajda.
P.S. http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/Vajda.review.pdf
From Vajda’s review: “These include such as words for ‘two’, ‘eye’, ‘tongue’, ‘nest’, and several dozen
others, which – despite the impossibility of reconstructing their precise proto-forms…”
I wonder why it’s proved impossible to reconstruct the protoforms.
“These include T.-R. Viitso (1996), A. Künnap (2000), and R. Taagepera (2000), all of whom argue that areal rather
than genetic factors are the prime historical motivations behind the observed similarities among the
Uralic subbranches. These and other dissenting Uralicists seem to be arguing that Uralic itself should
at best be regarded as a sort of “language mesh” in the sense defined by Fortescue (1998) when
entertaining the possibility of some sort of ancient affinity involving Uralic, Eskimo-Aleut, and
several Northeast Asian groups.”
So, it’s not just Marcantonio who questions Uralic unity. It’s just sad to hear. Well, that’s the reality of a historical science I suppose. Nearly everything can be questioned.
“Tests will be based on the required reading: A. Marcantonio: The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics.”
This is not good. I fully support alternative ways of thinking but students need to learn the fundamentals first.
” there are Hungarian nationalists”
I read that European nationalism and the formation of nation-states in Europe influenced the development of Indo-European historical linguistics and imparted proto-Indo-European with modern significance. Then came a Nostratic idea and “Nostratic” is derived from noster ‘our’. Nostratic languages were spoken by “our people.”
Maybe “lumping” (whether Uralic or Hungo-Sumerian) is always associated with some kind of national consciousness. In the U.S. the opposite happened: Europeans colonized Indians and wanted to deny their right to the land, so they split them into a myriad of small, unrelated families.
Europeans colonized Indians and wanted to deny their right to the land, so they split them into a myriad of small, unrelated families.
Your reasoning here is exactly opposite to that of Hindu nationalists: “The British imperialists wanted to deny the peoples of India their claim to autochthony since the dawn of time, so they invented the Indo-European family and the Indo-Aryan migration theory.”
Europeans colonized Indians and wanted to deny their right to the land, so they split them into a myriad of small, unrelated families.
I doubt that the same individual Europeans denied Indians their right to the land and split their languages into a myriad of unrelated families! In fact, for quite a long time people interested in Indian languages (such as Jefferson) thought that there were commonalities among them, an important one of which was pronominal incorporation (= affixation of personal endings rather than use of separate words for pronouns).
A major, comprehensive survey of North American languages undertaken in the mid-19th C identified about 60 different language families or isolates, and this number is still approximately the same “conservative” estimate. The identified families are obvious ones with considerable cognate vocabulary and very similar morphosyntax, such as exist for instance between French, Italian and Spanish, whose resemblances are obvious to the average person, untrained in linguistics. Later attempts to classify these low-level or first-order families into larger groups, such as Sapir’s six “phyla”, have not fared as well. The “Penutian phylum” is one that has disappeared from reference works as I mentioned, but it is my considered opinion that rumours of its death have been exaggerated.
@Vladimir
Slav *merg’- ‘freeze’ next to Lat fri:go: ‘I freeze’ (Gk ‘rigo is typically cited as a sole cognate of Lat fri:go, so it’s not as clear to me).
This came up earlier in the thread. Lat frīgus : Gk ῥῖγος : possibly Slov srėž ‘frost’ seem to point to *sr-. It’s not certain because there seems to be no other evidence for the reflex of *sr- in Latin (unless I’m overlooking something); but we know that *mr- gave Lat br-, not fr- (as in brevis < *mreg̑ʰwis, Avest mərəzu-), which should rule out the etymology you propose.
@Vladimir, cont.
…not to mention that PIE *mreg̑ʰwis itself should have gone to *bhr-, by the rule you give, but it didn’t.
In Latin a laryngeal aspirated the front consonant but didn’t color the vowel.
You mean, except when it did:
The always difficult Lat b- in barba (expected farba** under the current paradigm of IE historical phonology) is explained as a reflex of gw- that stayed unaspirated in a situation when a laryngeal colored a neighboring vowel.
Every single one of these new “sound laws” behaves this way, as if the Neogrammarians had never existed.
Another famous Greek cluster misinterpreted as a metathesis from *dhegh-, namely ikhthus ‘fish’ … So, again, PIE *gwhegwh-.
I thought that root was supposed to mean “earth”! As I suspected, we’re well on our way to reconstructing a PIE where every root looks like KWeKW-.
in Indo-European studies everything seems to have been discovered, hence I feel people think that it’s useless to try
IE studies is a thriving field. Any number of new etymologies and other theories are proposed every year. A few win general acceptance, some more stick around for a while as possibilities, and a whole lot get dismissed right away because they’re bad ideas. The proponents of the latter either go home and think and learn some more so they can come up with better ideas, or they stick to their guns and don the mantle of martyred geniuses suppressed by a cliquey Establishment. What these people forget is that IE scholars tend to be huge nerds who care about nothing more than the minutiae of sound changes and reconstructions. Give them a theory that works and they won’t care who your advisor was. So if your theory is rejected it’s not because the cool kids are shutting you out, it’s because it doesn’t work.
…there seems to be no other evidence for the reflex of *sr- in Latin (unless I’m overlooking something)…
It’s true that frīgus is the only good piece of evidence for the word-initial development of *sr-, but we have several absolutely certain examples of word-medial *-sr- > -br-. The intermediate stages must have been *-θr- (or *-zr-) > *-ðr- > *-βr-, which makes one expect *sr- > *θr- > fr- word-initially.
Piotr, what do you make of Slov. srėž? It looks like it could well belong in this cognate set, but I don’t know enough Slavic to be sure.
The semantic shifts that nice has undergone since entering English from French beggar belief: 1300 foolish, 1387 lascivious, 1387 punctilious, 1393 cowardly, 1395 extraordinary, 1395 ostentatious, 1398 slothful, 1400 coy, 1400 elegant, 1400 fastidious, 1450 fragile, 1500 not obvious, 1561 subtle, 1567 insubstantial, 1584 strict, 1588 refined, 1589 meticulous, 1593 acute, 1594 trivial, 1598 risky, 1600 accurate, 1621 pampered, 1631 dexterous, 1697 discriminating, 1709 appetizing, 1710 exact, 1747 pleasant, 1797 good-natured, 1799 respectable, 1830 kind, 1850 well-executed, 1863 proper. (Each meaning does not derive directly from the previous: the dates are just the OED’s first record, and the round dates are of course approximate.)
I quote Anatoly Liberman’s latest on the subject of hybrid to show the depths one can flounder in (markup omitted):
“Europeans colonized Indians and wanted to deny their right to the land, so they split them into a myriad of small, unrelated families.”
“Your reasoning here is exactly opposite to that of Hindu nationalists …”
Doesn’t seem to have been part of the grand imperiolinguistic conspiracy in Africa, either; the lumpers seem to have been firmly in the ascendant from the outset, although there has been a salutary change from lumping based on fanciful “ethnic” categories which did indeed reflect unedifying European prejudices, to the Greenbergian lumpery which is at least based on linguistic considerations, whatever doubts one might entertain about the methodology.
My impression is that splittist tendencies tend to be most in evidence among those who actually, like, know some of the languages.
Even if Americanists are often not much into historical linguistics (though I must say it’s not hard to think of exceptions) there are an awful lot of very good detailed descriptions of American languages out there; African (again, with some stellar exceptions) not so much.
In any case, reliable lumpery can only arise on a basis of solid splittery. Shortcuts to lumpery only achieve validity by accident.
When in doubt, it is best to err on the side of splitting. But “doubt” does not exclude “hypothesis”, and then testing of the hypothesis.
Piotr, what do you make of Slov. srėž? It looks like it could well belong in this cognate set, but I don’t know enough Slavic to be sure.
It could belong to the same word-family. I think the word (which means ‘thin ice, slush, frazil ice’ vel sim.) is absent from East Slavic, but it has a wide West and South Slavic distribution. Somewhat puzzlingly, the initial can be either sr- or str- (often in one and the same language), and in the absence of East Slavic data it’s hard to decide if it reflects Proto-Slavic *strěžь or *seržь (with liquid metathesis producing a secondary sr). If the former, it could go back to *sroig-jo-s or *sroiǵ-jo-s, matching the Latin and Greek words as a root cognate (*sr- normally yields Slavic *str-).
Asking in complete ignorance: Is Slovene srệž at all related to srện ‘hoarfrost’?
No, the latter is Slavic *sernъ < *ḱersno- = Lith. šer̃kšnas, Old Norse hjarn.
Okay, reading this entire discussion has been fascinating, but at this point I do need to jump in and make a few comments.
Piotr: your statement about Marcantonio (whom I have no connection with, just to be clear)-
“She started as a student of Finno-Ugric, and then at some point found that denialism was a good way to further one’s academic career”
-is slander pure and simple. You do not, and cannot, know for a fact that she is insincere in her belief (that there never existed a Proto-Uralic language, in this instance). You are not helping yourself with such mudslinging.
“Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo” is always good advice in debates, not least because outside observers who notice a lack of suavitas are certainly entitled to suspect therefrom that the res has some weak spots too.
You and Vladimir Diakoff do seem to agree that it is unacceptable that her course on Uralic takes her own work on the topic as its basis and gospel. I quite agree. But how abnormal is this?
I do not know how common this is in Italy, but I can assure you that here in Canada and in the U.S. it is depressingly common (practically the norm, if my experience is any guide) for professors who teach seminars to do so solely on the basis of their own work, or that of some guru they studied under or wish they had (No*COUGH*m Cho*COUGH*y, for example): indeed I vividly remember a grad student who was verbally attacked and literally driven to tears after class by her professor and some fellow lowlife gang memb –err, I mean “colleagues of his” –for the crime of bringing up in class the work of a linguist whose claims (you might want to sit down and breathe deeply before continuing. Okay, you have been warned)…contradicted the department’s party line.
Lameen: Likewise, Marcantonio’s ignorance of historical linguistics sounds fairly typical to me. If I had been given a penny for every false statement on the topic of language change I have ever heard (from the mouths of so-called linguists, please note!) I could afford to buy my own University.
In short: enough with the Marcantonio hatefest. I see nothing to indicate that she is morally or intellectually inferior to the typical professor of linguistics. Indeed, if because of her work Uralicists mount a defense of their work and explain very clearly and unambiguously why it is that Uralic must be a language family and cannot be anything else, why, she will then have rendered the field a real service (indirectly, granted).
Vladimir Diakoff: your claim that-
“Europeans colonized Indians and wanted to deny their right to the land, so they split them into a myriad of small, unrelated families”
-is untrue in the context of the history of scholarship on the indigenous languages of the Americas: the history of language classification in the Americas appears to bear no relationship to the chronology of European colonization. Thus, the existence of large language families such as Algonquian, Mayan or Iroquoian was recognized long before (most) speakers of languages belonging to these families were exterminated or dispossessed by invading Europeans. Other families (Uto-Aztecan, Algic, Na-Dene) were discovered long after European colonization was a fait accompli. Conversely, the recognition of the extreme genetic diversity (which may of course not be so extreme, if Marie-Lucie is right) of the North American Pacific coast postdates European colonization and settlement there.
Likewise, Marcantonio’s ignorance of historical linguistics sounds fairly typical to me. …
In short: enough with the Marcantonio hatefest. I see nothing to indicate that she is morally or intellectually inferior to the typical professor of linguistics. Indeed, if because of her work Uralicists mount a defense of their work and explain very clearly and unambiguously why it is that Uralic must be a language family and cannot be anything else, why, she will then have rendered the field a real service (indirectly, granted).
Wha? How can you possibly consider it acceptable that a professor of linguistics, one who makes pronouncements on historical linguistics, is ignorant of historical linguistics? I’m all for civility, but mocking someone as ignorant as Marcantonio clearly is is not a “hatefest,” it’s simply standing up for minimum academic standards.
Etienne: Piotr: your statement about Marcantonio … is slander pure and simple. You do not, and cannot, know for a fact that she is insincere in her belief (that there never existed a Proto-Uralic language, in this instance). You are not helping yourself with such mudslinging.
I apologise for that part of my post, and retract it. I should not have insinuated bad faith on her part. Which said, I suppose she realises how controversial her book is and so shouldn’t be using it as the (only) required reading for the kind of course she’s teaching. If many people in North America and elsewhere do the same, the worse for them, but it remains the wriong thing to do. I value academic freedom when it comes to research and opinions. But professors have no right to impose their non-mainstream views on students, and she is doing that if students are graded depending on how well they perform in tests based on her book. I would have no problem with her using her own book if it were a handbook presenting the current consensus, rather than trying to overthrow the consensus. There are standard introductions to Finno-Ugric and Uralic, and they should be used instead.
Merci, Etienne.
the history of scholarship on the indigenous languages of the Americas
Interested readers: see chapter 2 of Lyle Campbell’s book American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America, especially the first half of the chapter. I don’t always see eye to eye with LC, but that chapter looks solid.
LH: How can you possibly consider it acceptable that a professor of linguistics, one who makes pronouncements on historical linguistics, is ignorant of historical linguistics?
I understand that the lady in question is a professor of Finno-Ugric linguistics, but not of historical linguistics. Unfortunately in this day and age it is quite possible (at least in North America – I don’t know about other places) to get a PhD in linguistics without having taken a single course bearing on historical linguistics. It sounds like she discovered Uralic historical scholarship fairly recently, and does not have enough background to evaluate it, let alone to contribute meaningfully to it. I agree with Etienne that her attacks might prod Uralicists to be more forceful about their field.
marie-lucie,
The anti-Uralic book appeared in 2002, and by that time Dr Marcantonio had been working in historical linguistics for quite a few years. Things have not improved much since. If you want to publish an article on “The evidence to support Verner’s Law” (and in fact arguing that the law is rubbish), where do you submit it? In her case it’s a journal entitlked Vedic Venues: Journal of the Continuity of Vedic Culture. She’s also a member of its editorial board, despite having nothing to do with Vedic studies, cultural or linguistic. Of course the article would not get past peer review in any journal specialising in Germanic or Indo-European linguistics. But crank magnetism causes this strange attraction between her anti-IE views and the journal’s ideological agenda.
Hat, Piotr: I entirely agree with you both: Marcantonio’s ignorance of historical linguistics is as totally unacceptable as her pedagogical “philosophy” (i.e. using her own book only in teaching Uralic linguistics). My point is not that either of these flaws are acceptable. My point is that Marcantonio, in possessing these flaws, is not an aberration within Academia (if my experience in North American Academia is any guide…) and thus it is the system she is a product and part of which needs to be mocked, denounced and criticized, far more than her as a person.
That’s fair enough, but I’m still comfortable mocking her as a person as well as the horrible system; I apply the same standard to politicians. People should be responsible for their actions.
(Closing in on 1,000 comments!)
There are also Hindutva people who accept the IE family just fine – but insist that the Urheimat was India, that Sanskrit is PIE, and that the Vedas are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years old.
This is one more parallel between biology and linguistics: there are Vedic creationists, no doubt commonly the same people. Unlike Christian creationists, they insist that the Earth is much older than science will have it.
And indeed, Marcantonio has made noises in the direction of connecting Hungarian with Turkic (beyond the acknowledged loanword layers).
If you want to read a devastating review, Stefan Georg has one on his academia.edu site. It’s in German, though, and the kind that would be hard to translate. Also, much like Bruce Banner, Georg is always angry. 🙂
BTW, I’ve long been wondering how Verner’s law might have worked on the phonetic level. Reverse tonogenesis? But voiced consonants are associated with lower, not higher pitch; does it mean that Pre-Germanic had low pitch on stressed syllables, as found today in Switzerland, Scotland and Ireland?
Hindu nationalists of Tamil origin are anti-IE. I remember a discussion of Marcantonio and Vajda’s review in sci.lang long ago, spurred by one Tamil nationalist (who I suspect don’t really understand Tamil).
That discussion made me read Vajda’s review, It’s far from positve when you read for content. What he really says is that the unresolved questions of Uralic makes it easy for cranks to score simple points, and that’s a reminder to those working on it to deal with the important questions.
I also think there’s been made notable progress on the internal structure of Uralic within the last few years. No generally accepted breakthrough yet, as far as I know, but much firmer ground for discussion.
PIotr: Thank you for the information. I should have looked up A. Marcantonio – which I did just now. I had thought that she must be fairly new at her specialty, but she has been writing for quite a long time.
Ah, shame on me, I forgot about those!
Quite so.
I remember reading Marcantonio’s paper some time earlier than Vajda’s review and was thoroughly underwhelmed by the lack of substance, so when Vajda’s review came I first thought he was another fanatic splitter. That was before Dene-Yeniseian… Time flies!
Comment 1000!
*gʲʰes-lo-
David, about your comment-
“does it mean that Pre-Germanic had low pitch on stressed syllables, as found today in Switzerland, Scotland and Ireland?”
-I’d be willing to go one step further: could this pre-Germanic low pitch on stressed syllables be the direct source of the Swiss and Scottish/Irish state of affairs? If you look at a map of the Germanic languages of Europe it looks like a textbook example of the survival of an originally universal feature on the geographical periphery of the language family only.
Sure. I haven’t drawn that conclusion because I have no idea what Gaelic stress sounds like.
pre-Germanic low pitch on stressed syllables
When I was getting ready to travel to Sweden and Norway a few years ago I took lessons in the relevant languages. I was surprised at the low pitch occurring on stressed syllables, as in Swedish Tala du ENgelska? (the most useful sentence I acquired!).
@TR
“but we know that *mr- gave Lat br-, not fr- (as in brevis br, hence Lat frater, Gk fra:ter, Skrt bhrater.
“I thought that root was supposed to mean “earth”! As I suspected, we’re well on our way to reconstructing a PIE where every root looks like KWeKW-.”
ikhthus and khtho:n look simiar even in Greek. The Pokorny dictionary has always been known to contain many similarly sounding roots. Some of them over time have revealed minor but important differences. So give it some time. Also, there are studies that suggest that that word for ‘fish’ and the word for ‘earth’ are related. I don’t know if they are, but reconstruction is what it is: you sometimes arrive at similar roots.
“So if your theory is rejected it’s not because the cool kids are shutting you out, it’s because it doesn’t work.”
These are just words. They don’t mean much until you show a better alternative that works. Forms such as *bhreHter don’t have good etymologies. All the existing ones (Szemerenyi’s ‘carrier of fire’ being one of them) are worst than Dziebel’s because they don’t make sense (pun intended). I guess it’s the same as saying they “don’t work.”
@Piotr
“It’s true that frīgus is the only good piece of evidence for the word-initial development of *sr-, but we have several absolutely certain examples of word-medial *-sr- > -br-. The intermediate stages must have been *-θr- (or *-zr-) > *-ðr- > *-βr-, which makes one expect *sr- > *θr- > fr- word-initially.”
It’s another case when a long string of unusual phonetic changes affecting a small set of forms is postulated. Yes, fri:gus is the only example of *sr- > fr, in a form that is not attested outside of Latin and Greek (if reconstructed as PIE *sriHgo-). Yes, it’s assumed that *sr gave -br- medially but is the evidence that strong? Can there be an alternative explanation? For instance, Lat membrum (Skrt mamsa, Slav *menso ‘meat’) can just be derived straight from the root *mem- and not from *mem-s-. mr > mbr is phonetically straightforward and would parallel mr > br in word-initial contexts in Latin. Another, now well-established example os the same development medially is Lat. hibernus (< *gheimrinos). It's a morphology vs. phonology situation.
For Lat crabro (Slav sirseni) 'wasp' Toch B shows kronkse 'bee', so again I don't see much problem with reconstructing Lat *kramro *consonrinus > *consomrinus > *consobrinus. Latin has multiple examples of resonant dissimilation/assimilation (germen < genmen, etc.)
BTW, why is 'ri:gos considered to be from *srig:os but in the case of hydo:r water' h- is just a spelling feature in non-psilotic dialects, as someone argued upstring?
“Comment 1000!”
Let’s Bruderschaft toast to all the cranks and bores in this string!
@marie-lucie
“I doubt that the same individual Europeans denied Indians their right to the land and split their languages into a myriad of unrelated families!”
I wrote it half-seriously. But intuitively there seems to be a connection between the metalanguage of linguistic classifications (lumping, splitting, etc.) and some sort of cultural ideology. Considering how cuthroat some of those battles get, people do take them personally.
“In fact, for quite a long time people interested in Indian languages (such as Jefferson) thought that there were commonalities among them, an important one of which was pronominal incorporation..”
Yes, but Jefferson also observed that they were more diverse linguistically than Asians.
The following paragraph again came out wrong. “For Lat crabro (Slav sirseni) ‘wasp’ Toch B shows kronkse ‘bee’, so again I don’t see much problem with reconstructing Lat *kramro *consonrinus > *consomrinus > *consobrinus. Latin has multiple examples of resonant dissimilation/assimilation (germen < genmen, etc.)"
should read
"For Lat crabro (Slav sirseni) 'wasp' Toch B shows kronkse 'bee', so again I don't see much problem with reconstructing Lat *kramro *consonrinus > *consomrinus > *consobrinus. Latin has multiple examples of resonant dissimilation/assimilation (germen *memrrom > *membrum.
It came out even worse. I surrender. My point was that rhotacism in Latin would turn sr into rr (and then nr > mr), so the correspondence sr ~ br does not hold.
Jefferson also observed that they were more diverse linguistically than Asians.
???? How much experience did Jefferson have with Asian languages?
@Marie-Lucie
“???? How much experience did Jefferson have with Asian languages?”
He dedicated a long paragraph to the comparison of languages of “red men of Asia” to the languages of “red men of America”. It’s reproduced in Lyle Campbell’s American Indian Languages, p. 36. Enlightenment figures often collected vocabularies just like they collected butterflies.
@Vladimir: These are just words. They don’t mean much until you show a better alternative that works. Forms such as *bhreHter don’t have good etymologies. All the existing ones (Szemerenyi’s ‘carrier of fire’ being one of them) are worst than Dziebel’s because they don’t make sense (pun intended). I guess it’s the same as saying they “don’t work.”
Just how far back do you expect to take an IE etymology, Proto-World? Etymology stops somewhere. If we don’t currently know where *bʰréh₂tēr comes from, well, then we don’t know where it comes from, but we’re not to get any further by ditching the comparative method, which is what positing irregular sound changes amounts to. (And note that Szemerneyi’s etymology has indeed not been widely accepted, not because the establishment closed ranks against a maverick outsider but because people considered his arguments and found them inadequate.)
why is ‘ri:gos considered to be from *srig:os but in the case of hydo:r water’ h- is just a spelling feature in non-psilotic dialects, as someone argued upstring?
h- isn’t just a spelling feature; there was a regular change whereby all Greek words in u- (outside of psilotic dialects) acquired an initial h-, u- > hu-. The ῥ- of ῥῖγος is due to the fact that in Greek all initial /r/s of any origin are voiceless.
rhotacism in Latin would turn sr into rr
It wouldn’t, because Latin rhotacism only applied intervocalically.
it’s assumed that *sr gave -br- medially but is the evidence that strong?
Yes. For example when a suffix in -r- is added to an s-stem noun, the result is -br-: fūnus : fūnebris < *founos, founes-ris. The same thing happens when -s- and -r- come together for other reasons: soror : sobrīnus < *swesōr, * swesrīno-.
(we’re not GOING to get any further…)
@Vladimir Diakoff…the claim that PIE *sr yields Latin /br/ word-internally and /fr/ word-initially might indeed seem implausible on the basis of the many intermediate stages which must be postulated, but these intermediate stages are quite close to what needs to be postulated in any case for other PIE phonemes in Latin. Thus, PIE *bh, just like PIE *s when followed by *r, yields /b/ word-internally and /f/ word-initially. Granted, *bh shares with its two Latin reflexes a common point of articulation, unlike /s/. But since word-initially PIE *dh also yields Latin /f/, there is nothing arbitrary or capricious in postulating a similar change in the place of articulation in the history of PIE *s when followed by *r.
@Trond Engen: Is the idea of a Finno-Ugric clade still widely accepted? It seems like scholars are increasingly challening it, like Häkkinen who posits a division into Finno-Permic and Ugro-Samoyedic instead.
@TR
“It wouldn’t, because Latin rhotacism only applied intervocalically.”
This is hard to accept because the -VsR- environment should meet this standard even more so because we are talking about a postvocalic transition of s to resonant r before resonant r !!!
“soror : sobrīnus sororinus. So there’s no s ~ b correspondence whatsoever. What happened after *sororinus is interesting. I suggest that it went *sororinus > *sonorinus > *somrimus > *sobrinus. In any case, it’s beyond the point we are discussing.
Same for funesris > funerris, etc.
So, *srigos > fri:gos can’t be upheld either. Now it becomes clear why the “correspondence” is attested in just one example. This is because it’s a false correspondence.
Again: ““soror : sobrīnus sororinus” should read: “This is a great example. Lat soror is very well attested and (con)sobr:nus is derived from it. So it must be soror > sororinus. There’s no sr ~ br correspondence whatsoever. There’s a standard s > r evolution. And what happened after this is beyond the point of what we’re discussing.
@TR
“Just how far back do you expect to take an IE etymology, Proto-World? Etymology stops somewhere. If we don’t currently know where *bʰréh₂tēr comes from, well, then we don’t know where it comes from, but we’re not to get any further by ditching the comparative method, which is what positing irregular sound changes amounts to. (And note that Szemerneyi’s etymology has indeed not been widely accepted, not because the establishment closed ranks against a maverick outsider but because people considered his arguments and found them inadequate.)”
I don’t believe in an “establishment”. No establishment disproved Szemerenyi’s kinship term etymologies. It’s individual linguists who keep coming up with unconvincing etymologies because, as a “professional group” they are not armed with a comparative method that’s been honed toward etymological reconstructions in addition to sound law formulation.
“we’re not to get any further by ditching the comparative method, which is what positing irregular sound changes amounts to.”
No one is purposefully postulating irregular sound changes. Some correspondences work, others don’t. Same for critique: some criticisms of those correspondences work, others don’t. Whether it’s Schindler or Dziebel. But an etymology is a good filter to build into comparative work. And why are you even talking about proto-World? By working with Indo-European material, we’re reconstructing the proto-Indo-European World.
This is hard to accept because the -VsR- environment should meet this standard even more so because we are talking about a postvocalic transition of s to resonant r before resonant r !!!
…which is a different environment than -VsV-, so there’s no reason why the same change should apply.
Lat soror is very well attested and (con)sobr:nus is derived from it. So it must be soror > sororinus.
That doesn’t follow.
I suggest that it went *sororinus > *sonorinus > *somrimus > *sobrinus
I thought you were unhappy with “long string[s] of unusual phonetic changes affecting a small set of forms”? And how exactly do you get funebris in the same way?
No one is purposefully postulating irregular sound changes.
They’re the only kind I’ve seen from Dziebel.
What puzzles me is why you think his methodology is innovative. I see him doing the same kind of thing other people do all the time — positing cognate sets — just doing it worse because he’s ignorant about basic facts and doesn’t care about consistency or regularity.
Vladimir: [Jefferson] dedicated a long paragraph to the comparison of languages of “red men of Asia” to the languages of “red men of America”. It’s reproduced in Lyle Campbell’s American Indian Languages, p. 36.
His statements on this topic are very vague, not supported by any actual examples. He declared that there are “twenty” Amerindian languages for each one in Asia. Where did he get that statistic? The paragraph only shows that he was interested, but as a source of information about the languages themselves it is worthless.
Vladimir: It’s individual linguists who keep coming up with unconvincing etymologies because, as a “professional group” they are not armed with a comparative method that’s been honed toward etymological reconstructions in addition to sound law formulation.
It is the sound laws (as well as morphological patterns) that “hone” the etymological reconstructions. Otherwise the linking of semantically related forms depends far too much on individual linguists’ tastes and feats of imagination.
@TR
“That doesn’t follow.”
If that doesn’t follow, what does? BTW, aforementioned Szemerenyi correctly reconstructed OEng swiri ‘cousin, nephew’ as *swiririyos sororinus, although they are probably just parallel developments of similar input forms under similar conditions.
“I thought you were unhappy with “long string[s] of unusual phonetic changes affecting a small set of forms”?”
The string I postulated is made up of very minor changes involving a sequence of resonants bookended by two very regular processes: s > r and mr > br. I just have no other choice but reconstruct *sr > *rr > *mr > *br, or *sr > *rr > *nr > *mr > *br.
“And how exactly do you get funebris in the same way?”
*funesris > *funerris > *funemris > *funebris.
“as *swiririyos sororinus, although they are probably just parallel developments of similar input forms under similar conditions”
> “as *swiririyos. So we even have external evidence for soror > sororinus, although the Latin and Old English forms are probably just parallel developments of similar input forms under similar conditions.”
So you end up avoiding phonetic anomaly by positing a change rr > mr? Has such a change ever happened in any known language?
Positing *rr > *mr is certainly insane.
@Marie-Lucie
“It is the sound laws (as well as morphological patterns) that “hone” the etymological reconstructions. Otherwise the linking of semantically related forms depends far too much on individual linguists’ tastes and feats of imagination.”
Why do you feel compelled to exclude semantics, while willing to pair phonetics and morphology into a winning combination? I’d say that if phonology, morphology and semantics are treated with unequal seriousness that reconstructions become subject to tastes and feats of imagination. Schindler’s analysis of thorn clusters is a perfect examples. He semantically attached tikto: to tekto:n without a compelling reason, then he postulated an arbitrary string of changes, some morphological in nature. He held a phonetic assumption that Hitt t- can’t stand for PIE labiovelar, although Sanskrit attested for two velars in the ‘earth’ root.
(In fact there is no phonetic anomaly in the Latin *sr > fr-/-br- change anyway; all you have to posit is the single, perfectly plausible dissimilation *sr > *θr, and everything else falls into place.)
@George Gibbard
“Positing *rr > *mr is certainly insane.”
How does rr > nr > mr look to you? I’m open to other suggestions as well but we got to work within the areas of the known. s > r and mr > br are known areas. We can argue about what’s the best way to connect the two, but it’s beyond the original point which was about sr > br. This should be off the table.
Intuitively, resonant assimilations and dissimilations in Latin feel like examples such as *genmen > germen > germanus.
@TR @ marie-lucie
Marie-Lucie, and you are saying that phonetic developments can’t be subject to subjective interpretations (unlike semantics, in your opinion). TR writes: “In fact there is no phonetic anomaly in the Latin *sr > fr-/-br- change anyway; all you have to posit is the single, perfectly plausible dissimilation *sr > *θr, and everything else falls into place.)” For me this statement is full of subjective assessments. Instead, for me, “In fact there is no phonetic anomaly in the Latin *sr > *-rr- > -nr- > *mr > *br change anyway; all you have to posit is the single, perfectly plausible dissimilation *rr > *nr, and everything else falls into place.)”
“Subjectivity” is by definition an aspect of the mind, not of the world. Semantics, on the other hand, is an aspect of the world. It’s all about methodology and the training of the inherently subjective mind, and not about the inherent propensity of semantics to cause subjective interpretations.
@Vladimir, if your proposed etymology ends up leading you into insuperable difficulties like mr > rr, you should conclude that your etymology is wrong, not declare that the question is off the table.
So why horreō and not *hobreō? The excrescent nasalization in *rr > nr would be odd, as there is lots of /rr/ in Latin; likewise for *nr > *mr — is such a change attested anywhere? I would expect *ndr instead.
@Marie-Lucie
“as a source of information about the languages themselves it is worthless.”
You linguists are harsh-harsh. Even a Founding Father got slammed for bad linguistics. 🙂
Another datum: Lat. tenebrae : Ved. támisrā-, where the -br- : -sr- correspondence is patent.
@TR
“if your proposed etymology ends up leading you into insuperable difficulties like mr > rr, you should conclude that your etymology is wrong, not declare that the question is off the table.”
What difficulties? soror is ‘sister’ with a known change from *swesor; a derivative of soror would be sororinus. If we find in Latin a form (con)sobrinus and we believe (for a good reason) that it comes from the Latin word for sister, which is soror, with the help of affix -i:nus, then sobrinus must be derived from soror. Hence, the only change that’s on the table is rr > br.
And if anything, we see *nr > rr in Latin, not the other way around, as in many compound verbs like irrigō < *in-regō.
@Vladimir: soror is ‘sister’ with a known change from *swesor; a derivative of soror would be sororinus.
So why are you assuming it’s derived from soror, rather than from its earlier form *swesōr (or rather from its weak stem, *swesr-)?
@TR
“Another datum: Lat. tenebrae : Ved. támisrā-, where the -br- : -sr- correspondence is patent.”
It’s subject to the same interpretation: *tenesra > *tenerra > *tenenra > *tenemra > *tenebra.
@George
“So why horreō and not *hobreō? The excrescent nasalization in *rr > nr would be odd, as there is lots of /rr/ in Latin; likewise for *nr > *mr — is such a change attested anywhere? I would expect *ndr instead.”
Good example. First, it shows *sr (Skrt hrsyate) > Lat rr. Second, it doesn’t have a nasal environment. funebris, tenebra, membrum are full of nasals. May be that’s important. Sobrinus doesn’t have a nasal environment, though. But resonant dissimilations are so common in Latin (ms > ns in (com-sobrinus > consobrinus) that I don’t see significant problems with my interpretation. We just need to become assumptive that the problem that needs to solve is rr mr and not sr > br.
@TR
“So why are you assuming it’s derived from soror, rather than from its earlier form *swesōr (or rather from its weak stem, *swesr-)?”
Because we are talking about Latin and not Italic or IE: sobrinus is a relatively late Latin formation built with a typical Latin affix off of an attested form soror that had already undergone rhotacization.
“And if anything, we see *nr > rr in Latin, not the other way around, as in many compound verbs like irrigō nr and nr > rr. But I agree we still need to understand all the details.
““And if anything, we see *nr > rr in Latin, not the other way around, as in many compound verbs like irrigō nr and nr > rr. But I agree we still need to understand all the details.”
>
“And if anything, we see *nr > rr in Latin, not the other way around, as in many compound verbs like irrigō nr and nr > rr.” The very existence of a whole block of words tenebrae, funebris, sobrinus, membrum is good evidence that nr > rr and rr > nr were possible. But I agree we still need to understand all the details.
@Vladimir: Because we are talking about Latin and not Italic or IE: sobrinus is a relatively late Latin formation built with a typical Latin affix off of an attested form soror that had already undergone rhotacization.
And you know this how? Are you assuming the suffix -i:nus didn’t exist before Classical Latin?
*tenesra > *tenerra > *tenenra > *tenemra > *tenebra.
So in the end you are conceding that *-sr- > -br-, just deriving it in a more roundabout way. I don’t see what you’ve gained here.
Anyway, bedtime for me.
Bed time for me too. Good night everybody.
@TR
“And you know this how?”
I also know that 2 + 2 = 4. Do you want to know how? 🙂
“So in the end you are conceding that *-sr- > -br-, just deriving it in a more roundabout way. I don’t see what you’ve gained here.”
I found a solution that’s perfectly natural (all resonants), fully in line with Latin phonetics (resonant assimilation/dissimilation), bookended by two known sound laws (s > r and mr > br), has a parallel in Germanic, doesn’t require un-Latin, un-Italic, un-Indo-European s > th transitions, does not rely on single-case examples such as fri:gus < *sri:gos. I'd say I gained a world here.
Isn’t that just the rising pitch on questions? By English or German rules, I’d only put a high pitch on the stressed syllable here to express surprise: “Oh, do you speak English? I didn’t expect that.”
Yes; that’s one of the things that’s wrong with it. The variants mostly fall together into a single form once you add laryngeals, and the rest has mostly turned out to be wrong in the research of the last forty-five years (…actually more, because the dictionary was already on the conservative side when it was published in 1969).
Why would they have any? Why would a term for “brother” come from anything, especially anything within IE?!?
Seriously, do you think the goal here is to eventually derive all PIE roots circularly from each other?
I’m getting the same impression. Importantly, however, this doesn’t change the shape of the unrooted tree; it only changes the position of the root.
The only controversy about the shape of the unrooted tree I know of concerns the phylogeny of West Uralic: is it the traditional (Mordvin (Finnic, Saami)), or is it (Saami (Finnic, Mordvin))?
I don’t understand what, if anything, you’re trying to say.
Let’s spell it out: “[rː] between vowels is shortened, and then [m] is inserted in front of it for no discernible reason”. How is that supposed to work?
No better: “[rː] between vowels is shortened, then [n] is inserted in front of it for no discernible reason, and then this [n] is dissimilated to [m], even though the opposite happens to in- and con- and even ad-“.
I think you believe that rr is a consonant cluster, a sequence of two consonants that just happen to be identical. It’s not! It’s a long consonant. Consonants can be phonemically long, just like vowels; both consonants and vowels had a phonemic length distinction in Classical Latin.
This is not a dissimilation of [r] before [r]. You are positing a strange shortening of long [rː] between vowels at a time when all other long consonants remain intact; and then you are positing a completely baffling random insertion of an extra consonant out of nowhere. I think you haven’t noticed what you’re doing.
The tradition of spelling long consonants with double letters in the Greek and Latin alphabets is just a spelling quirk. It’s not real. Hebrew and Arabic still don’t do that, and even Latin originally didn’t.
That’s an assimilation: labial + alveolar > alveolar + alveolar.
That’s a really basic, unscientific fallacy you’re committing here. Sound systems change; you can’t guess what they were like even just 1000 years ago by just looking at the present state. I have to go now, but tell me if you want me to dump a load of examples on you.
We’ve already briefly discussed upthread why a [θ] has to be assumed to have been present in an intermediate stage between PIE and Proto-Italic. Given that [θ] was present in the system, a change from [s] to [θ] in certain environments isn’t a big deal to assume.
does it mean that Pre-Germanic had low pitch on stressed syllables, as found today in Switzerland, Scotland and Ireland?
Why not? But does it really solve the problem? Verner’s Law operates not only medially before an accented syllable, but also between unaccented syllable. I possibly affected final fricatives whatever the accentuation (though this is debatable, and the final voicing may be a separate change with a convergent outcome). There are moreover monosyllabic unaccented prefixes that show initial voicing regularly, *kom# > *ɣa# and perhaps *h₁pi# > *βi#. VL never affects root-initial consonant if they are also word-initial, but the second member of a compound may be affected even if the compound is quite transparent: *mati-saxsa- ~ *mati-zaxsa- ‘food-knife’. On the whole, it doesn’t seem as if an adjacent accented syllable were the cause of the voicing. Quite the opposite, it often operates if there is no such syllable.
Oh, and…
That’s just insulting to your own intellect. You have no reason to take for granted that sobrinus was formed within Classical Latin and no earlier.
Yeah. This looks more like unstressed syllables were generally voiced – which would seem to require that they had low pitch, and fails to explain why VL operated before but not behind stressed vowels.
Verner himself “solved” the problem by declaring that Proto-Germanic preferred VC over CV syllables, like Arrernte and approximately nothing else. This idea is highly improbable; it’s no wonder it seems to have abandoned pretty soon.
As for the ‘hornet’ word, *ḱr̥h₂sró-(H)on- (specifically meaning ‘hornet’, as distinct from smaller wasps and bees), Alan Nussbaum devotes a whole chapter to it in Head and horn in Indo-European (1986, pp. 248-260), showing in painstaking detail how it is related to the rest of this superfamily of words, and how it developed in branch after branch. The Latin word is a 100% regular, straightforward development of *ḱr̥h₂srō > *krāsrō > crābrō. Toch. A kronkśe, B kro(n)kśe ‘honeybee’ is unlikely to have anything to do with it; the initial cluster is all they have in common. I have yet to see any convincing etymology of this word.
Vladimir: Semantics, … It’s all about methodology and the training of the inherently subjective mind, and not about the inherent propensity of semantics to cause subjective interpretations.
What methodology? how do you train the mind? Look at the handling of “beard” a while ago:
… Lat barba, Slav *borda ‘beard’, OPruss bordus ‘beard, chin’, Germ. *bardaz ‘beard’, for which he found a good morphological correlate in Gk barathron. Gk barathron is part of a productive IE verbal root based family of words presently reconstructed as *gwer-: Lith gerti, geriu ‘drink’, gurklys ‘throat, crop, craw’, OPruss gurcle ‘throat’, Skrt girati, grnaati ‘he devours’, garas ‘potion’, Arm keri ‘I ate’, Gk bora ‘fodder’, bibro:sko ‘I eat, devour’, barathron ‘gulf, pit, muzzle’, Lat vora:re ‘I devour’ , Slav *zreti ‘devour’, *gordlo ‘throat’. So one of IE terms for ‘beard, chin’ is derived from a notion that beard is something that grows on the front side of the neck near the area where food is consumed. The semantic link is natural, …
On the one hand, “beard, chin”, on the other, variations on “throat” and “eat, drink”. Not even a single word referring to “hair” (the “something” that grows about the chin). There is a phrase in French: les bras m’en tombent, lit. “my arms are falling because of this”, meaning “I am unable to react appropriately”.
When faced with a variety of meanings which may or may not related in one language it helps to look at whether those meanings are also associated in other language families.
Here is another way of looking at the beard (in Nisqa’a, a Penutian language I know well):
y’imq ‘moustache, beard’, y’im ‘porcupine quill(s)’ (suffix -q ‘at or with the mouth’, attested in many other words).
In this language group initial consonants are often clues to meaning. Initial y’ (glottalized y) is rare but does occur in y’aq meaning ‘to hang’, which can be defined as ‘(long object) to be attached at one end but loose at the other’ – an actual property of hair or quills.
@David
“That’s just insulting to your own intellect. You have no reason to take for granted that sobrinus was formed within Classical Latin and no earlier.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. You have to show that sobri:nus is in fact attested as swesri:nus at the same time period when soror is attested as soror and not sosor. Unless you show this, soror > sororinus > sobrinus. OK, it’s not like 2 + 2 = 4. It’s like 4+4=8. A bit more difficult to calculate.
“The tradition of spelling long consonants with double letters in the Greek and Latin alphabets is just a spelling quirk.”
horreo above shows that rr comes from *sr (attested in Saknskrit).
I can’t accept any of your other arguments because they are too emotional and fundamentally miss the rational point that regardless of how rr came to be mr in a small set of words, this has no bearing on a law whereby s > r in this environment.
“Given that [θ] was present in the system, a change from [s] to [θ] in certain environments isn’t a big deal to assume.”
It’s not about big deal or not. You need to prove it by showing similar developments in Latin, Italic or other IE languages (just like I did with OEng swiririya). mr – br and s > r are general sound laws that can be shown on a wide range of examples. sr > θr is an unattested change created ad hoc to explain an observable reality a couple more steps away. What you’re following is tradition, not science.
David: (low pitch occurring on stressed syllables, as in Swedish Tala du ENgelska?) – Isn’t that just the rising pitch on questions?
No, the stressed syllable was definitely lower in pitch than the rest. Otherwise I would not have noticed it.
About Vladimir’s comment they are not armed with a comparative method that’s been honed toward etymological reconstructions in addition to sound law formulation :
“Etymological” here seems to mean “semantic”. Judging from some of what has been presented as “natural” semantic groups or semantic paths, calling some phonological paths “convoluted” is at best ironic.
Younger Avestan has *sr > θr, both initially (θraotah ‘stream’, cf. Ved. srótas- *sréu-tes-) and medially (tąθra- ‘darkness’ < PIr. *taNsra-, cf. Ved. támisra- < *témh₁-s-ro-).
@Marie-Lucie
“On the one hand, “beard, chin”, on the other, variations on “throat” and “eat, drink”. Not even a single word referring to “hair” (the “something” that grows about the chin).”
I like your approach. That’s exactly the kind of issues that need to be discussed. But your concern can easily be quieted by referencing another IE root for ‘beard’, namely *smak’ru- (Lith smakras chin, Hitt zamankur ‘beard’, Alb mjeker ‘chin, beard’, etc.), which clearly shows that beard is conceptually aligned with the the body part it grows on, nit with other kind of bodily hair.
This is to Dziebel’s point that body parts, just like kinship terms go through systematic transformations in the way concepts are classified. We now consider beard as similar to other bodily hair. But proto-Indo-Europeans likely thought of hair not as a unified concept but distinguished different forms of hair depending on its place of growth.
““Etymological” here seems to mean “semantic”.”
No, it’s etymological in the sense of addressing phonological, morphological and semantic aspects at the same time and being word- and form-centric, not phoneme-centric.
@Marie-Lucie
Another example: Skrt grīvā́ ‘back of the head; Avest grīvā́ ‘same’, Greek δέρη ‘neck, back of the head’ but Slav *griva ‘mane’. Same semantic pattern, so the link between beard and front of the neck, chin, mouth is quite natural.
@m-l, Swedish has two contrasting morphemic pitch accents, in addition to garden variety sentence prosody. Despite living here for nine years I’m still mostly befuzzled by it — but I’m pretty sure that engelska has the one that in Central Swedish comes out with a lower initial pitch.
The realization of accents 1 & 2 as well as sentence prosody varies a lot between dialects and regional variants, however.
sr > rr
I agree that this is not an instance of rhotacism, which occurs in intervocalic position. I wonder if the change might have a different cause.
In French, old -VsC sequences ended up as -V:C through an intermediate stage –[VhC], as in Latin bestia ‘animal, beast’, older French beste > later [beht∂], modern bête where ê is a long, lower front vowel. In some Spanish varieties, a -VsC- sequence can become -VhC- in rapid speech, but also -VC:- (which can be perceived as -VCC-. Could sr > rr be a similar case of “consonant lengthening” (even if limited to this particular change)?
compensatory lengthening
I have always had a problem with this notion, which is invoked for instance in the loss of preconsonantal s in French and the replacement of -Vs- by a long vowel, as in the example above. A sequence of rules: 1) loss of s, 2) vowel lengthening does not make sense to me. Instead the case must be 1) s > h, 2) -Vh- > -V:-. In other words, the length of the vowel must derive from the vocalization of h after it, blending with it in quality but maintaining the length of time it took to produce h. Would this make sense?
This is not the only type of “compensatory lengthening”: it also occurs with the French nasal vowels (from older VN sequences) in “unstressed” position (meaning at the end of a word or connected word-group). Still another type (I think) was also mentioned somewhere in this thread, but I can’t find it. Perhaps the author will remember.
@Piotr
“The Latin word is a 100% regular, straightforward development of *ḱr̥h₂srō > *krāsrō > crābrō.”
Even without the Tocharian word *krasro: > *krarro > *kranro > *kramro > *krabro for Latin seems to be a more parsimonious and regular way to go because it utilizes two known sound laws without creating a new one *s > *th for a selected group of words.
“Younger Avestan has *sr > θr, both initially (θraotah ‘stream’, cf. Ved. srótas- *sréu-tes-) and medially (tąθra- ‘darkness’ < PIr. *taNsra-, cf. Ved. támisra- rr change in Latin in terms of the proving procedure. But notably there’s no Lat frotos** to match Ved srotas, Gk ῥόος ‘stream’ to prove *sr > fr word-initially.
marie-lucie (et al.):
I generally avoid commenting on blogs, but I will interject here, to save one of the garden-paths being gone down (and despite what I am going to say below). Contrary to Vladimir Diakoff earlier, though clear from the Sanskrit form he quoted, Latin horreo comes from *g’hors-eye/o-, so it includes the sequence *-rs- (which does go to -rr-), not *-sr- (which goes to -br-): LIV 178
Re: Diakoff – I think you should all consider the possibility that you are being trolled by a very persistent and subtle troll.
On compensatory lengthening I recommend Darya Kavitskaya. Phonetics, Phonology, Diachrony. Routledge 2002, who would, I think,agree with marie-lucie that basically all compensatory lengthenings go through a stage -VhC-.
Vladimir: another IE root for ‘beard’, namely *smak’ru- (Lith smakras chin, Hitt zamankur ‘beard’, Alb mjeker ‘chin, beard’, etc.), which clearly shows that beard is conceptually aligned with the the body part it grows on
Yes, these words make sense, but not an alignment of “beard, chin” with “throat” (an inner part), “devour” and even “potion”. This second set of words has to do with the parts of the body needed for eating and drinking, or rather these functional actions themselves more than the parts.
Another example: Skrt grīvā́ ‘back of the head; Avest grīvā́ ‘same’, Greek δέρη ‘neck, back of the head’ but Slav *griva ‘mane’. Same semantic pattern, so the link between beard and front of the neck, chin, mouth is quite natural.
“Chin”, by all means. “Neck” is not mentioned among the words for “throat” and “devour”, you added it yourself (perhaps influenced by this new set).
The horse’s mane is at the top of its body, and the back of its neck is a continuation of its head and spine. The human neck’s place, its shape and its size relative to the whole body are at first sight completely different from that of a horse: the mane is comparable to the hair on the human head, not to the beard on a full-grown man. Whatever the function of the hairy appendages on or close to the head of either man (human) or beast, they have nothing to do with those of eating and drinking, which the “root” in your earlier post had mostly to do with.
Lars: I’m pretty sure that engelska has the one that in Central Swedish comes out with a lower initial pitch.
Thank you, that confirms my impression. I have not kept up with my Swedish or Norwegian lessons, so I have forgotten most of what I had learned, but I definitely remember the question and its pitch differences.
Even if we accept your first and last sound law there (I still don’t understand the reasons you’re so convinced of them) the middle steps are very strange: *krarro > *kranro > *kramro. Where else do we have *rr > *nr in Latin, with nasalization appearing from nowhere? Why would *nr dissimilate to *mr? I don’t know of any examples of this as a sound change in any language, and I can’t think of any theoretical reasons why it would occur either. As others have said, assimilation of *nr to *rr is more likely.
At the start of this discussion, I somehow had the idea that you were taking a sort of “devil’s advocate” position of presenting Dziebel’s etymologies without necessarily committing to them, but now it seems that you actually are firmly convinced that you know more than mainstream IE etymologists. I don’t understand why you’re so confident. Could you re-present a short summary of the evidence for this change mr > br?
“The very existence of a whole block of words tenebrae, funebris, sobrinus, membrum is good evidence that nr > rr and rr > nr were possible.”
No; everyone agrees with these correspondences, but they don’t agree with your intermediate steps. You need to use other words as evidence for those.
By the way, horreo shows the development of a different cluster, rs (which was a context where rhotacization occurred; another example is terra). Sound changes are highly context-based; it’s fallacious to say that because rhotacization occurred in some contexts such as *rs, it must have occurred in other, different contexts such as *sr.
<a href="“>engelska
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engleska
Sorry, I’ve messed it!
Once again:
engelska
@Marie-lucie
“I agree that this is not an instance of rhotacism, which occurs in intervocalic position. I wonder if the change might have a different cause.”
Not being a professional linguist, I don’t see why sr > rr is not even more likely to have happened than VsV sobri:nus presupposes soror > sorori:nus (not immediately sorrinus), so the strictly intervocalic environment is likely where sr > rr first occurred. And then it shifted to the rr > nr > mr > br path.
Juha,
Thanks for the speech sample.
It often happens that words are pronounced differently in isolation (especially if the speaker is “careful”) and in a sentence.
Vladimir: sr > rr
I was not commenting on the specific examples you were discussing (with -br-, etc), but on a potential explanation for this alleged change (if indeed it does exist). I have nothing to propose on the -br- question. I am not an Into-Europeanist, so I may have questions, but no specific answers.
Vladimir: Not being a professional linguist …
Professional usually means “fully trained in a specialty and earning a living from it”. Not everyone here is, in fact professional linguists are in the minority, but some people are so knowledgeable about the topic that they could well be. Several non-professionals here know a lot more than I do about Indo-European, for instance, along with some other language families. If anyone wants to argue with those who know their stuff, they need to learn it too.
@Marie-Lucie
“Yes, these words make sense, but not an alignment of “beard, chin” with “throat” (an inner part), “devour” and even “potion”. This second set of words has to do with the parts of the body needed for eating and drinking, or rather these functional actions themselves more than the parts.”
In the case of *smak’ru- ‘chin, beard’ we don’t know what the verbal root is. This is precisely because Indo-Europeanists apparently consider etymology “out of scope”. But it won’t be out of the ordinary to foresee that the concept ‘chin’ may ultimately link to a root with the meaning ‘chew’ (as in Old Church Slavonic živo ‘to chew’, Lithuanian žiaunos ‘jaws’, so the semantic string chew > chin > beard would parallel the semantic shift swallow > mouth/throat > beard.
” Whatever the function of the hairy appendages on or close to the head of either man (human) or beast, they have nothing to do with those of eating and drinking, which the “root” in your earlier post had mostly to do with.”
I didn’t mean to connect the ‘mane’ toot with the ‘beard’ root. It was just another example of how in Indo-European languages words for different kinds of hair derive from their respective places of growth, not from a general notion of ‘hair’.
“but on a potential explanation for this alleged change (if indeed it does exist). I have nothing to propose on the -br- question.”
My earlier response to you git garbled. I just made a point that it’s hard for me to understand why a postvocalic and pre-rhotic environment would be so different from an intervocalic environment in facilitating sr > rr. Even if it “technically” different, it looks even more conducive to this change. I’d be curious to know your opinion as a linguist not an Indo-Europeanist.
@Nick Z
“Contrary to Vladimir Diakoff earlier, though clear from the Sanskrit form he quoted, Latin horreo comes from *g’hors-eye/o-, so it includes the sequence *-rs- (which does go to -rr-), not *-sr- (which goes to -br-): LIV 178”
Not sure how this is relevant: the chain I postulate starts with sr > rr, which makes perfect sense considering Latin rhotacism and the *rs > *rr transition you’re referencing. Only from there does it go to mr and finally to br. And we know it happened that way because sobrinus can only come from *sororinus. So help me understand how it happened, not why it could not have happened.
Vladimir: it’s hard for me to understand why a postvocalic and pre-rhotic environment would be so different from an intervocalic environment
It has been more than abundantly demonstrated in all sorts of language families that environments are crucial to the conservation or evolution of sounds, usually starting with slight differentiation in casual speech in some environments and potentially going on to permanent differentiation, resulting in languages with different phonologies. Exactly “why” a given change happens in a given environment may or may not be readily understandable.
@Eli Nelson
“Even if we accept your first and last sound law there (I still don’t understand the reasons you’re so convinced of them)”
You are questioning Latin rhotacism? What your reasons for doing this?
“Could you re-present a short summary of the evidence for this change mr > br?”
Medially : hibernus < *gheimrinos.
Word-initially: brevis < *mreghus (Gk brakhus)
That's not counting the fr- < *mr- (formi:ca < *morw-) forms that Dziebel proposed.
All–
On the fate of PIE *sr in Latin…
Here is what I wrote yesterday:
“the claim that PIE *sr yields Latin /br/ word-internally and /fr/ word-initially might indeed seem implausible on the basis of the many intermediate stages which must be postulated, but these intermediate stages are quite close to what needs to be postulated in any case for other PIE phonemes in Latin. Thus, PIE *bh, just like PIE *s when followed by *r, yields /b/ word-internally and /f/ word-initially. Granted, *bh shares with its two Latin reflexes a common point of articulation, unlike /s/. But since word-initially PIE *dh also yields Latin /f/, there is nothing arbitrary or capricious in postulating a similar change in the place of articulation in the history of PIE *s when followed by *r.”
Here is what TR wrote yesterday:
“(In fact there is no phonetic anomaly in the Latin *sr > fr-/-br- change anyway; all you have to posit is the single, perfectly plausible dissimilation *sr > *θr, and everything else falls into place.)”
And here is what Vladimir Diakoff wrote today:
“You need to prove it by showing similar developments in Latin, Italic or other IE languages (…). sr > θr is an unattested change created ad hoc to explain an observable reality a couple more steps away. What you’re following is tradition, not science.”
and here is what he wrote later today in response to a comment of Piotr’s (embedded within his response):
“(PIOTR) Younger Avestan has *sr > θr, both initially (θraotah ‘stream’, cf. Ved. srótas- *sréu-tes-) and medially (tąθra- ‘darkness’ fr word-initially.
Here Vladimir seems to forget his earlier point: for, whatever cognates outside of Indo-Iranian the examples given by Piotr may have, they do point to a *sr > θr change, thereby showing that his earlier claim (that such a change is unattested) is false. I like to think that my own comment and TR’s above both show that there is no basis to his calling it “ad hoc” either.
The above is typical of his M.O., and so I trust hatters will understand why it is that I have not left any comments on this thread before yesterday.
basically all compensatory lengthenings go through a stage -VhC-
That seems unlikely for such cases as Greek ksenwos > Ionic kse:nos (the Greek “third compensatory lengthening”).
I’m starting to think that Etienne’s course of action is the wisest, but I’ll just point out that Vladimir is now claiming that PIE *mr- gave both Latin br- (brevis) and Latin fr- (frigus), as usual based on which outcome happens to be wanted for each etymology; and also that even if it could be established that Latin fr- comes from PIE *mr-, this would obviously have no bearing on the question of whether PIE *bhr- in the “brother” word comes from (pre-)PIE *mr-, which is how we got here.
Etienne: Thus, PIE *bh, just like PIE *s when followed by *r, yields /b/ word-internally and /f/ word-initially. Granted, *bh shares with its two Latin reflexes a common point of articulation, unlike /s/. But since word-initially PIE *dh also yields Latin /f/, there is nothing arbitrary or capricious in postulating a similar change in the place of articulation in the history of PIE *s when followed by *r.
It’s even better than that. PIE *bʰ always gives Latin b word-internally, no matter what the environment. The default reflex of PIE dʰ is d word-internally, but it becomes b after of before *u/w, after or before *r, and when followed by *l.
The two consonants also merge word-initially as f. Since *dʰ > f can’t have happened directly, we need to posit an intermediate step, preferably a fricative which shares its place of articulation with *dʰ but is acoustically similar to [f]. [θ] fits the bill ideally, since it tends to merge with /f/ in several languages that have both (boaf) phonemes, and is often replaced with [f] by foreign learners who can’t master /θ/ (see not only foreigners’ English but e.g. the pronunciation of Greek names in Russian). We can therefore be pretty sure that *dʰ > *θ > f word-initially. It remains disputable whether *dʰ became *θ via *ð (deocclusion first) or via tʰ (devoicing first), but this is a minor point. Both developments are natural and, either way, *θ is required as an intermediate stage.
Now there’s a lot of evidence (including Sabellic data) that the PIE breathy-voiced series became Italic fricatives in all positions, and that the word-medial reflexes b and d come from “hardened” voiced fricatives, *β and *ð (which originally functioned as word-internal allophones of /f/ and /θ/. [b] and [d] are not confusible acoustically, but [β] and [ð] are, and it’s easy to imagine that [ð] could be replaced by a labial fricative either in a labialising environment (next to [u/w]) or when its interdental pronunciation posed an articulatory difficulty (as is commonly the case next to an apical liquid); dissimilation to [β] could then be a simple remedy. Thus, the following changes have to be proposed word-internally:
*bʰ > *β > b
*dʰ > *ð > d
But, in some environments (specified above),
*ð > *β > b
All these changes are independently needed to account for the history of Latin consonants. We only have to propose one extra change, *sr > *θr (with medial voicing to *ðr) to account for *sr- > fr- and *-sr- > -br-. I have already shown that such a change is not unprecedented.
TR: basically all compensatory lengthenings go through a stage -VhC-
Reread my comment: I did not say that “all” cases were of this, someone else did.
I cited the French “lengthening” cases of -VsC (> -VhC-) and -VNC- (the latter not involving h) and I mentioned a third case which I could not remember.
That seems unlikely for such cases as Greek ksenwos > Ionic kse:nos (the Greek “third compensatory lengthening”).
I agree.
Is there an accepted explanation for this development? Is there a possibility that -enw- became -ewn- and the diphthong lost the labialization and became a long vowel?
Thanks Piotr!
Is there an accepted explanation for this development? Is there a possibility that -enw- became -ewn- and the diphthong lost the labialization and became a long vowel?
It’s parallelled by the Old English lengthening of vowels before intervocalic *-Rh- (with loss of *h), e.g. PWGmc. *selhas > *seolhæs > WS sēoles, Anglian sēles, gen.sg. of ‘seal (animal)’. This lengthening is the reason why Mod.E seal has a long vowel. Similarly, OE mearh ‘horse’ (poetic), pl. mēaras.
This kind of lengthening seems to be triggered by resyllabification. After the loss of the digamma [w], ξέν.Ϝος changed into ξέ_.νος, leaving a timing slot (previously occupied by the resyllabified consonant) that could be deleted (Attic ξέ.νος), filled with consonantal material (Aeolic ξέν.νος, with an ambisyllabic long consonant), or adding length to the preceding vowel (Epic/Ionic ξεῖνος with [eː], later raised to [iː]).
Thank you for the explanation.
Lazar: Trond Engen: Is the idea of a Finno-Ugric clade still widely accepted? It seems like scholars are increasingly challening it, like Häkkinen who posits a division into Finno-Permic and Ugro-Samoyedic instead.
I don’t follow it that closely, but that’s my impression too. And the rethinking has been followed by some real progress on establishing correspondences. My impression is that a better understanding of the soundlaws has pulled Samoyedic closer to the rest of the languages, to the point where one can at least speak of eastern isoglosses spanning across the not-longer-binary-divide.
and
Oh, you forgot about ablaut! 🙂 Let me propose a chronological sequence that starts at PIE:
*swesōr, *swesrejnos
*swesōr, *sweθrīnos
*swezōr, *sweðrīnos
*swezōr, *sweβrīnos
*swerōr, *swebrīnos
*sorōr, *sobrīnos
soror, sobrīnus
How about that?
Dunning, meet Kruger.
Oh, how convenient for you. You’re blocked from noticing my point that /rː/ didn’t and could not have become /mr/ in any set of words by the fact that I used boldface.
I need to show that it can happen, and this is most easily done by showing that it has happened elsewhere. Piotr has now done that; as it happens, his example is even from IE.
I absolutely do not need to show similar developments specifically in Latin, Italic or even IE as a whole. Any language (family) that has such consonant clusters would do just as well. How easy such sound changes are depends on how easy certain sounds are to articulate in certain environments, and that depends on human mouth anatomy, which is the same everywhere. It does not depend on the languages people speak, and I’m really surprised this isn’t obvious to you.
But neither is there any other reflex of that root in Latin, is there? It seems to have been lost altogether.
Unless, of course, if Rōma itself belongs here. But who knows the history of that word. Etruscan didn’t have a [f], for example.
=============================================
Pitch accent probably renders this moot anyway, and I’m ashamed I forgot about it. But the rising pitch of questions often spreads over half a sentence in mainstream English and mainstream German, so that the stressed syllable at the beginning of this rise is pronounced with low pitch, overriding the default that makes stressed syllables high. That’s why I asked.
You forget that he’s trying to deny the existence of PIE voiced aspirated phonemes altogether. He’s trying to claim they were all clusters of plain voiced plosives with a laryngeal.
He has not, however, tried to establish which roots contained this laryngeal and which did not, how the laryngeal behaved in different branches based on more than one example per branch, or which side of the vowel the laryngeal even was on – he mentioned Schwebeablaut upthread; funnily enough, that’s metathesis by analogy, two concepts he’s been arguing against when they don’t appear in combination.
There are also English accents that do this, apparently without any foreign influence. Classic Cockney is one, or so I’ve read.
Also, isn’t there a Northwest Germanic change *θl- > *fl-?
Low-pitch stress is a feature of what I call Central Scandinavian. I’m not sure about the isogl… isotone on the Swedish side, but in Norway it’s considered the defining feature dividing Western and Eastern Norwegian, with Western incl. Northern (e.g. Bergen, Tromsø) using high pitch for stress and Eastern incl. Central (e.g. Oslo, Trondheim) using low pitch. The tonemes 1 (“acute”) and 2 (“grave”) (and marginally “circumflex”, in some dialects with apocope) are not defined by high or low pitch, but by the contour of it.
Norwegian examples here.
But neither is there any other reflex of that root in Latin, is there? It seems to have been lost altogether.
It has been conjectured that fluō ‘flow’ is *fruō < *srew-e/o- contaminated with pluit ‘it’s raining’ < *plew-e/o-. It’s just a guess, but the orthodox alternative, *bʰleuH-, refers to a root which means ‘overflow, boil over’ (or ‘vomit’, as in Slavic), rather than just ‘flow’, in the other branches that have it.
Also, isn’t there a Northwest Germanic change *θl- > *fl-?
Yes, and there are sporadic cases elsewhere, even in High German. Can you guess which common German word has /f/ for PGmc. *þ?
I can hear it! [bʱlɛʊ̯χːːː] 😉
…No.
Is it cognate with tenebrae?
TR: Yep. And it’s Old English cognate is þēostru.
Its. Dammit, am I not a lousy typer.
When I first learned of *þimster > finster I was excited because it looked like a vanishingly rare case of subsegmental POA feature metathesis, so I was actually a bit disappointed to learn of the more prosaic explanation.
@TR
“Vladimir is now claiming that PIE *mr- gave both Latin br- (brevis) and Latin fr- (frigus), as usual based on which outcome happens to be wanted for each etymology; and also that even if it could be established that Latin fr- comes from PIE *mr-, this would obviously have no bearing on the question of whether PIE *bhr- in the “brother” word comes from (pre-)PIE *mr-, which is how we got here.”
I have already explained it above – and our avalanche of posts makes it easy to miss some of them, so I’m happy to clarify again. In frater, the aspiration is a secondary feature that emerged after the mr > br transition. So it’s not like one single input mr- generated two different outputs (br and fr). Aspiration is a secondary feature derived from a laryngeal further down the sound string.
@David
“Let me propose a chronological sequence that starts at PIE”
Why would it start at the PIE level? We are talking about a Latin development. If it started at the PIE level we would have had sr > br in several IE branches, not just in Latin.
“You’re blocked from noticing my point that /rː/ didn’t and could not have become /mr/ in any set of words by the fact that I used boldface.”
I’m not blocked at all. I just see that you’ve missed a fundamental Latin sound law of s > r called rhotacism and hence you’ve started your modeling from a wrong baseline. (Sorry, I’m an engineer by day, I hope this is clear language.)
@Piotr
“I have already shown that such a change is not unprecedented.”
I have noticed that and I thanked you for bringing it to my attention. It doesn’t prove that sr > thr happened in Latin but it is a necessary part of an argument for it. I have no issues with th > f in Latin. This is established beyond reasonable doubt. It’s just as strong as the s > r development, which I believe is the one that created sobrinus from soror and other -br- words we are discussing.
@Etienne
“Here Vladimir seems to forget his earlier point: for, whatever cognates outside of Indo-Iranian the examples given by Piotr may have, they do point to a *sr > θr change, thereby showing that his earlier claim (that such a change is unattested) is false. I like to think that my own comment and TR’s above both show that there is no basis to his calling it “ad hoc” either.”
I didn’t forget it at all. I even said that what Piotr pulled up matches a corresponding parallel that I adduced in support of the sr > rr transition, namely OEng swiri ‘cousin, nephew’ < *swiririos. Same word, same process as the one that affected sobri:nus. But this example from Young Avestan is not enough, not lastly because Latin does not show any form with a fr- onset that corresponds to θraotah ‘stream’, Ved. srótas-, Gk ῥόος ‘stream’. Word-initially we would expect *sr-, *sn-, *sl- to go to Latin r-, n-, l-.
@Vladimir: it’s not like one single input mr- generated two different outputs (br and fr)
So that means you can EITHER derive the br- of brevis OR the fr- of frigus from *mr-, but not both, right?
Piotr, TR: Lat tenebrae, OE þēostru, ProtoG (?) *þimster > finster
Is the OE word missing a nasal consonant? if so, which one? If not, what is the explanation?
@marie-lucie: yes, there was originally a -m- in the word (Ved. támisrā-); the Latin -n- appears to be a dissimilation. The loss of the nasal in OE is, I think (Piotr, please correct me if I’m wrong), due to the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law.
Thanks TR. So another instance of “compensatory lengthening”, here representing the loss of a nasal rather than an h.
In this case the Ingvaeonic treatment must have been slightly more complicated than in the case of homorganic nasals + fricatives. The labiality of *m has left a residue:
*em > *im (raising before the *-ija- suffix) > *iw̃ > iu (OSax. thiustri, OFris. thiūstere).
(it’s my proposal, cf. footnote 5 here).
@marie-lucie: the Greek second compensatory lengthening is of the same sort, Vns > V:s.
Finster?!? Awesome. 🙂
…I’m not talking about the sound change here; I’m talking about your claim that sobrinus must have developed from soror after Latin rhotacism. I don’t at all deny that s became r between vowels in Latin, or that *rs became rr between vowels.
Now, why do you refuse to notice my other point, which is that *rr > *nr is impossible?
He’s deriving br- from *mr- and fr- from *bHr- and/or *brH-, if not *brVH-.
So, is düster ~ duster a Low German loanword, then? (That could explain why it’s lacking from my active vocabulary, while finster is very common there.)
@David
“Now, why do you refuse to notice my other point, which is that *rr > *nr is impossible?”
I’m not ignoring the difficulty at all but I think it’s just past the point when soror became sororinus (same applies to the other words from the same group), so it’s a different conversation. We can and should have it but this has no bearing on our original issue. Maybe rr > nr > mr started in highly nasal whole-word environments (membrum, tenebrae, funebra, consobrinus) and then analogically expanded to other non-nasal environments (crabro)?
“He’s deriving br- from *mr- and fr- from *bHr- and/or *brH-, if not *brVH-.”
Yes, that’s exactly right.
@Marie-Lucie
“It has been more than abundantly demonstrated in all sorts of language families that environments are crucial to the conservation or evolution of sounds”
I’m fully aware of this. I thought may be you had some comments, from a typological standpoint, on the plausibility of extending the intervocalic environment to post-vocalic-and-pre-rhotic environment when it comes to rhotacization. David seems to accept this (which is good), and he also adds VrsV situation as being essentially the same conditioning environment (which is great).
Also, are you satisfied with my comparative Indo-European-internal evidence (verbal root > chin >beard, verbal root > back of neck > mane) for semantic evolution “swallow > mouth, front of the neck, throat > beard” that Dziebel postulated to etymologize the IE *bhardheH- ‘beard’? I’m only talking about the semantic path. If not, what would make an etymology successful from a semantic standpoint, IYO (aside from the usual suspects such as “house” ~ “house” or “go” ~ “go”)?
Vladimir: I thought may be you had some comments, from a typological standpoint, on the plausibility of extending the intervocalic environment to post-vocalic-and-pre-rhotic environment when it comes to rhotacization.
Not having run into this sort of problem, I don’t have an opinion.
are you satisfied with my comparative Indo-European-internal evidence (verbal root > chin >beard, verbal root > back of neck > mane) for semantic evolution “swallow > mouth, front of the neck, throat > beard” that Dziebel postulated to etymologize the IE *bhardheH- ‘beard’? I’m only talking about the semantic path.
“Chin, beard”: possible.
The rest: NO.
Not all similar roots convey similar meanings.
@marie-lucie
Les bras m’en tombent. 🙂
David: “He’s deriving br- from *mr- and fr- from *bHr- and/or *brH-, if not *brVH-.”
Vladimir: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Vladimir, this part of the discussion started with you positing a relationship between Lat. frigus and a Slavic root *merg- “freeze”. What exactly is the PIE form that you’re deriving both of those from?
@TR
“this part of the discussion started with you positing a relationship between Lat. frigus and a Slavic root *merg- “freeze”. What exactly is the PIE form that you’re deriving both of those from?”
PIE *merHg’- > *mreHg’- > *breHg’ > *bhreHg- > friHgus > *fri:gus.
It’s basically the same as
PIE *mer- > *mreH2ter > *breH2ter > *bhreH2ter > frater ‘brother’
PIE *morwiH- > *mrowiH- > *browiH- (Gk μύρμηξ, βύρμᾱξ, βόρμᾱξ) > *bhrowHi- > *fromi:ca > *formi:ca ‘ant’
Also Lat formido- ‘fright’ and Gk mormoros ‘fear’, mormo: ‘bugbear’.
So *mr- > *br- already in PIE? How come this didn’t happen in *mreg̑ʰwis “short” (Avest. mərəzu)?
And how are you getting the vowel change in *bhreHg- > *friHgus?
@TR
“And how are you getting the vowel change in *bhreHg- > *friHgus?”
No perfect solution yet. But comp.: Lat fiber ‘beaver’ (< PIE *bhebhros).
One more ad hoc change, then… And to my first question?
@TR
“One more ad hoc change, then…”
You keep saying this but your usage is wrong. Ad hoc is something else. We say ad hoc when a theory is developed purposefully to explain one single fact and can’t scale beyond that. sr > thr in Latin is an ad hoc theory. *TK > *KT is an ad hoc theory to explain ‘thorn’ clusters. When a minor fact remains unexplained in the context of providing a solution for a bigger problem is not ad hoc. It’s a field for further study.
“And to my first question?”
What is it again?
We’ll have to disagree on what ad hoc means. My question was: So *mr- > *br- already in PIE? How come this didn’t happen in *mreg̑ʰwis “short” (Avest. mərəzu)?
@Piotr: …filled with consonantal material (Aeolic ξέν.νος, with an ambisyllabic long consonant)…
The third CL didn’t hit Aeolic at all, unless I’m much mistaken. Early Boeotian still shows καλϝος; later when digamma is lost we get Attic-like forms such as κόρα, μόνος.
@TR
“So *mr- > *br- already in PIE? How come this didn’t happen in *mreg̑ʰwis “short” (Avest. mərəzu)?”
It happened in mr- roots but not in mer- or mR- roots. Lat brevis, Gk brakhus ‘short’, brakhion ‘upper arm’ < *mreg̑ʰwis (Goth gamaurgjan 'shorten', markwace 'upper leg, thigh'). Also, Skrt brávīti 'talks', but Slav *mluviti-, so it must have also affected ml- clusters derived from *mel- roots. (Comp., possibly, Lat fulgor and Slav *mluniji-, OPruss mealde 'lightning'). At some point after the breakup of IE, this rule may have stopped working in some branches.
Avestan has mraot ‘he said’, so the denasalization in Sanskrit should be late.
@George Gibbard
“Avestan has mraot ‘he said’, so the denasalization in Sanskrit should be late.”
Yes, it’s possible that due to phonetic naturalness of this change, it may have happened several times in the history of IE languages: in PIE times and then in, say, Sanskrit.
@Marie_lucie
“Gk brakhus ‘short’, brakhion ‘upper arm’ < *mreg̑ʰwis (Goth gamaurgjan 'shorten', markwace 'upper leg, thigh'"
Note this old semantic pattern affecting body parts: we don't merge such polar body parts as arm and thigh, while PIEuropeans probably did. (There are similar examples in other cognate sets.) In Russian we say palec for both 'finger' and 'toe', while in English they are distinct concepts. Dziebel uses those examples to illustrate parallelism between semantic patterns in kinship terms and body parts: Hitt huhhas 'grandfather' but OIr (h)aue 'grandson' where polar categories are again merged.
I think George Gibbard’s point was that you can’t get Avestan mraot in the first place if *mr- > *br- already in PIE.
In any case, what exactly is this PIE *mer- that the “brother” word is supposed to be derived from? The only such root listed in LIV is the one meaning “die”.
The Avestan word is cognate with the forms cited by Diakoff Skt brávīti ‘talks’ and OCS mlŭviti (where -lŭ- probably should not be the Proto-Slavic; should it be *-ĭl-?), so I’m saying *ml- > *bl- shouldn’t be right at a PIE level.
Ah yes, sorry, it has an *-l- of course. Still, the point stands, unless the two liquids are supposed to have behaved differently.
Well I may well be wrong about the ŭ, since the root is *mluH-, but I was getting the issues confused with earlier discussion of words with *-lH-.
@TR
“In any case, what exactly is this PIE *mer- that the “brother” word is supposed to be derived from? The only such root listed in LIV is the one meaning “die”.”
I cited the forms above somewhere. It’s the family of words that includes Gk meirax ‘boy, girl’ (< *meryaks), Lith merga 'girl', Germ. bru:di 'bride', Lat mari:tus 'husband'. Most importantly, Dziebel cites Latv martiya 'brother's wife' that's morphologically identical to Lat fratria 'brother's wife'.
Another form to be considered in this context is Lat fluo-, flucto 'flow' (cited by Piotr above). It's part of the IE cognate set *bhleH-/*bluH- 'overflow' (Gk phleo 'to abound', fluo: 'to boil over'). Under Dziebel's theory I suppose we can consider comparing *bhleH-/*bluH- to IE *melk- 'milk', Lat mulgeo, OIrish bligim, Germ. *meluks, melkana, etc. Considering the importance of milking for Indo-Europeans, the original specific meaning got later generalized to 'come forth, flow'.
So what’s the semantic path that connects these *mer- words to “brother”?
I suppose the semantics could be made to work, but I’m still not happy about the formal side. There are counterexamples like Avestan mraot (and possibly others, I haven’t looked), and I’ve seen no really good parallels for the *mR > *b(ʰ)R change (I don’t accept the frigus connection, and I note that your etymology for formīca contains not one but two unmotivated metatheses; presumably likewise for formīdō). As for the “milk” root, it’s not *melk- but *h₂melǵ-, which is not easy to link with *bʰleuH-.
The third CL didn’t hit Aeolic at all, unless I’m much mistaken.
It’s more likely that I was. I took the -νν- forms from Liddell abd Scott:
“Aeol. ξέννος Hdn.Gr. 2.302; scanned _^ and written ξεῖνος in Theoc.28.6, 30.17 : Aeol. Sup. ξεννότατος Sch. Tz. in An. Ox. 3.356.18 (sed v. fin.)”
… overlooking the “sed v. fin.”
At the bottom of the entry they have the parenthetic comment:
(From ξένϝος, cf. “πρόξενϝος” IG9(1).867, Ξενϝάρης ib.869, Ξενϝοκλῆς, Ξένϝων, ib.4.315,348: hence it is improb. that the Aeol. form was ξέννος.)
But even if the -νν- forms were genuinely Aeolic, this would only mean that the loss of the digamma led to the lengthening of /n/, not the vowel.
@David,
The forms without /n/ have Ingvaeonic provenance (cf. Mod. Dutch duister beside Middle Dutch deemster). The situation is complicated by the fact that we are probably dealing with several inherited variants of the stem, among them *þimistra- < *temh₁és-ro- and *þimstrija- < *témh₁s-ri-o-. Additionally, there’s *þemraz ‘darkness’ (OHG demar). Kroonen compares it with Skt. tamrá- ‘oppressing, darkening’, but it could just as well (if not more plausibly) reflect *þemzra- < *temh₁s-ró-, with the Vernerian treatment I have proposed. My approach unifies them all, but the Ingvaeonic forms have been regarded by some as unrelated to the rest and mysterious in themselves.
OHG inherited both dinstar and finstar. The latter must have arisen in the prehistory of High German, when the initial was still [θ], confusible with [f].
Finster and Dämmerung all from the same root… I like that. 🙂
Not so fast. 🙂 [s] > [r] between vowels, [rs] > [rː] between vowels and [sr] > [rː] between vowels are all plausible; but that doesn’t mean you can’t have one of these changes without the others, or two of them without the third. Latin shows plenty of examples for the first two; but the one example you have proposed for the third has been shot down as actually being a case of [rs] > [rː].
It’s pretty common that similar sound changes have similar but unequal probabilities, so that some languages do the whole set, but others only undergo some of the changes while the others never happen. Voiceless aspirated plosives turning into fricatives comes to mind as such a set.
Does Slavic *merz- have acute intonation? If not, it shouldn’t have contained a laryngeal. And that metathesis on the way to Italic looks unmotivated.
Almost, but not quite; I recommend this post and the following ones.
The “thorn clusters” aren’t one single fact, though; they’re a whole class of regular correspondences where, furthermore, e-grade *TeK has a zero-grade *KT or *K or *S instead of the expected *TK.
Strictly speaking, *[sr]- > *[θr]- accounts for a single known example in Latin; however, because of the well-understood intervocalic voicing of fricatives in the prehistory of Latin, it’s actually the same thing as *-[sr]- > -br- which is attested again and again (see upthread).
Vladimir:
the family of words that includes Gk meirax ‘boy, girl’ (< *meryaks), Lith merga 'girl', Germ. bru:di 'bride', Lat mari:tus 'husband'.
I don’t know about the Greek and Lithuanian words, but certainly the German and Latin words have nothing to do with each other.
I seem to remember learning that bride and its cognates such as bru:di, Braut are related to breed, brood and also bird (from earlier brid ‘baby bird’ – part of the “bood” in the nest), in any case having nothing to do with Latin maritus.
IE specialists: The shape of maritus suggests a past participle, is that correct? The intervocalic -r- suggests earlier *s, would the root be *mas- as in masculus?
Another form to be considered in this context is Lat fluo-, flucto ‘flow’ (cited by Piotr above). It’s part of the IE cognate set *bhleH-/*bluH- ‘overflow’ (Gk phleo ‘to abound’, fluo: ‘to boil over’). Under Dziebel’s theory I suppose we can consider comparing *bhleH-/*bluH- to IE *melk- ‘milk’, Lat mulgeo, OIrish bligim, Germ. *meluks, melkana, etc. Considering the importance of milking for Indo-Europeans, the original specific meaning got later generalized to ‘come forth, flow’.
Milk is produced in female mammals as food for newborn and immature offspring. Under the normal circumstances of life in nature you never see milk, which does not “come forth” on its own: the young must draw it out through a type of sucking. If the calf, lamb or other young animal is removed from the mother (usually in order to provide meat for humans), the mother will continue to produce milk for a while. Some of this milk may “leak”, but with domestic animals it is usually appropriated by humans for their own use.
“Milking” by humans needs to be done by a special, learned technique in order to “let down the milk”, which will not “flow” by itself (and similarly, for human females “pumping” is necessary in the absence of the baby). A semantic shift from “milking” to “flowing”, a term more often used of water, which does flow very freely at the slightest opportunity, would seem bizarre. The opposite is more likely to be true. Even truer would be the use of two different roots. As TR said above:
As for the “milk” root, it’s not *melk- but *h₂melǵ-, which is not easy to link with *bʰleuH-.
OOps! of course the “brood” in the nest
Piotr, that’s interesting about ξέννος. I’d guess it’s an artificial pseudo-Aeolism: after all, Theocritus and Herodian couldn’t be expected to know the difference between the first and third compensatory lengthenings…
Anyway, *-nw- > *-nn- took place in Germanic: *tn̥h̥₂-w-i- > *þunwi- > *þunni- ‘thin’, etc.
*tn̥h₂-w-i- (just the nasal was syllabic 🙂 )
@marie-lucie: The shape of maritus suggests a past participle, is that correct? The intervocalic -r- suggests earlier *s, would the root be *mas- as in masculus?
The -tus does represent the same morpheme as in the past participle, but in this case it’s not being used deverbally but denominally, in the sense “having X” (X here being “a wife”). The -r- is original, not from -s-, as the cognates show (Welsh morwyn “girl”, etc.).
Thanks TR!
Can you think of other examples of -tus in this use?
It’s a productive use, and there are plenty, e.g. (from a word we’ve discussed) barbātus “bearded”.
It looks like -tus here is like -ed in English, for instance in long-haired “having long hair”, or the be-…-ed structure as in bejewelled ‘having jewels’.
Bearded, precisely.
It’s a common enough semantic extension. You get the same thing in Hebrew, and doubtless many other languages.
In French the corresponding suffix is -u, as in barbu ‘bearded’, chevelu ‘having lots of hair on the head’, velu ‘having lots of body hair’, poilu ‘hairy’. This suggests -utus as the Latin form.
(I don’t think it is restricted to “hair” words but I can’t think of other words that would be readily analyzable or definitely denominal. It is not productive but could be in a jocular way).
You get the same thing in Hebrew, and doubtless many other languages.
Including some Penutian languages!
French also has ventru “pot-bellied”, têtu “stubborn” (~”having a head”). Italian and Spanish have similar formations with -uto and -udo. It looks like the suffix -ūtus became productive in this use in Vulgar Latin, which is a bit strange as it’s otherwise not generally productive in Latin, I believe; maybe it’s a case of extension from a single word where the -u- was etymologically valid, but I’m not sure what that would be (cornūtus “horned” is such a word, but it doesn’t seem like an awfully likely model).
You are right! It is not all “hairy” but seems to apply to body parts, with a slightly pejorative connotation. Fessu ‘having big buttocks’ is another one, also pansu ‘having a big stomach’, bossu ‘hunchback’. Chenu ‘white-haired’ is an old one (now somewhat literary), from a lost stem (cf Spanish canas ‘white hairs’). Fun!
For what it’s worth, here’s a list of Latin adjectives in -utus (length not marked), some with English derivatives in -ute: acutus, astutus, cinctutus ‘girdle-wearing’, cornutus, delibutus ‘smeared’, hirsutus, nasutus ‘with large/sharp nose’, versutus ‘adroit, able to turn easily’, verutus ‘armed with a javelin (verutum). There is also the adverb actutum ‘instantly’, and the nouns aluta ‘leather’, arbutum ‘wild strawberry’, cicuta ‘hemlock’, Matuta ‘goddess of dawn’.
It’s interesting that mari- began by meaning ‘wife’, added a suffix in Latin to become ‘husband’, and later lost the suffix by a series of normal sound-changes to produce French mari ‘husband’! Speak not to me of “improbable semantic shifts”.
Nasūtus (in Horace) shows that the suffix, however it originated, was already at least somewhat productive in Classical Latin.
@TR
“So what’s the semantic path that connects these *mer- words to “brother”?”
With this etymology, Dziebel responded to Needham’s interest in seeing if ancient IE kinship terms combined affinal and consanguineal meanings because this is a key diachronic universal of historical kinship system typologies reflecting ancient practices of cross-cousin marriage. So not only that the meanings should be easy to relate from the point of view of Marie-Lucie’s “intuitive semantics” approach, they are also typologically verified.
@David
“Does Slavic *merz- have acute intonation? If not, it shouldn’t have contained a laryngeal.”
Judging by Serbo-Croatian *мра̏з (same as бра̏т ‘brother’ [rː].”
It wasn’t shot down. For me, it’s a simple subset of the conditioning environment. Any example to show rr br after the original change, but since all the most similar phonetic environments support the postulated sr > rr development, I think the criterion is met.
“And that metathesis on the way to Italic looks unmotivated.”
Slav *merz- is probably a retention from much earlier times. There are lots of different words denoting ‘freeze’ in IE languages, so this semantic slot experience multiple lexical replacements, so the Slavic ~ Latin isogloss is old, hence the metathesis observed in several other slots that have better lexical representation across branches.
“Strictly speaking, *[sr]- > *[θr]- accounts for a single known example in Latin; however, because of the well-understood intervocalic voicing of fricatives in the prehistory of Latin, it’s actually the same thing as *-[sr]- > -br- which is attested again and again”
-thr- > -br- is a well attested change but not sr > thr (fr/br). And when you start a chain with it, it’s just not as convincing as when you put out a known sound law first and then connect it to another known sound law. What’s the phonetic rationale for the sr > thr development by the way? And how does it fit with Latin phonology in general?
@Vladimir, you skirted my question — what is the actual semantic development you’re proposing? Of the putative cognates you’ve posited, those with a specifically gendered meaning mean “girl”, not “boy”, so why should they be connected to the word for “brother” (rather than, say, “sister”)?
@Marie-Lucie
“I don’t know about the Greek and Lithuanian words, but certainly the German and Latin words have nothing to do with each other. I seem to remember learning that bride and its cognates such as bru:di, Braut are related to breed, brood and also bird (from earlier brid ‘baby bird’ – part of the “bood” in the nest), in any case having nothing to do with Latin maritus.”
Dziebel lifted it from one of the recent Kluge dictionaries. Methodologically, ‘bride’ and ‘husbans’ belong to the same conceptual category, while ‘bride’ and ‘nest’ look more like a folk etymology to me.
“As for the “milk” root, it’s not *melk- but *h₂melǵ-, which is not easy to link with *bʰleuH-.”
I don’t understand the reasons to reconstruct *H2melg’- vs. *meH2lg’-. The latter would be the root shape to condition the laryngeal to shift leftwards. Lat fluctus is compatible with Lat mulgeo, OIrish bligim morphologically (suffix -g’ regularly devoiced in front of a voiceless stop in Latin). The OIrish form is critical for the morphological alignment between *meH2lg’ and *bhleg- because it shows the ml > bl transition but I agree that semantically it’s not a easy tie-in.
@TR
“you skirted my question — what is the actual semantic development you’re proposing?”
I didn’t skirt it. I just pass along to you what I know by reading Dziebel. He’s an expert on kinship terminologies, I’m not. But let me think about it more.
I don’t understand the reasons to reconstruct *H2melg’- vs. *meH2lg’-.
They’re easily found in the dictionaries and handbooks. Honestly, if this is going to turn into a game where you set us beginner-level historical phonology problems and we’re supposed to post the answers, then thanks but no thanks.
It’s a productive use, and there are plenty, e.g. (from a word we’ve discussed) barbātus “bearded”
Of course English bearded (PGmc. *βarð-ōða-) has the same or very similar structure, as does Polish brodaty (*bord-ato-), and countless other denominal adjectives with Germanic *-ōða-, Slavic -ato- and Baltic -uota-. The details may vary, e.g. Latin prefers *-e-h₂-to- with thematic stems, while Balto-Slavic seems to have *-o-h₂-to-, and the Germanic forms could be either, but such pseudo-participial denominals are obviously inherited as a type.
@David
Corrected a garbled paragraph from above.
“Judging by Serbo-Croatian *мра̏з (same as бра̏т ‘brother’ [rː].”
It wasn’t shot down. For me, it’s a simple subset of the conditioning environment. Any example to show rr br after the original change, but since all the most similar phonetic environments support the postulated sr > rr development, I think the criterion is met.”
should read
“Judging by Serbo-Croatian *мра̏з (same as бра̏т ‘brother’ [rː].”
It wasn’t shot down. For me, it’s a simple subset of the overall conditioning environment. Any example of sr > rr would violate the regularity of sound change because all the words with this cluster migrated to the mr > br shape medially. But since intervocalic and intervocalic-cluster environments yield rhotacization, then sr must yield rr intervocally.
Any example to show rr br after the original change, but since all the most similar phonetic environments support the postulated sr > rr development, I think the criterion is met.
Piotr: Of course English bearded (PGmc. *βarð-ōða-) has the same or very similar structure, as does Polish brodaty (*bord-ato-), and countless other denominal adjectives with Germanic *-ōða-, Slavic -ato- and Baltic -uota-. The details may vary, e.g. Latin prefers *-e-h₂-to- with thematic stems, while Balto-Slavic seems to have *-o-h₂-to-, and the Germanic forms could be either, but such pseudo-participial denominals are obviously inherited as a type.
I don’t know if it’s somehow useful, but in traditional Nynorsk the psudo-participles end in -ut: skjeggut “bearded”, toskut “foolish”, krokut “crooked (hunched)”. The actual realization in dialects vary, with e.g. -åt or -at around Trondheim, -et in Bergen, and -ete in Urban Eastern (with the final -e from the weak (= definite) declension, I presume), but nowhere except Bergen and the most danified Oslo speech, does it coincide with the weak past participle, which is mostly -a or -t.
Just to derail this thread even further with a quibble: arbutum is presumably not actually ‘wild strawberry’, but rather Arbutus unedo, the so called “strawberry tree”, more familiar on the West Coast as “madrona”. Its Berber name (i-sisnu / sasnu) is one of the more reliable Berber substrate words in North African Arabic, at least in regions mountainous enough to have the plant.
The Pacific madrona is Arbutus menziesii — a beautiful tree, but not that similar to the Mediterranean “strawberry tree”, and with much less edible berries.
(In Hebrew a strawberry is tut sade, lit. “field strawberry”, while the strawberry-tree fruit is tut ets, lit. “tree strawberry”.)
Me: … which is mostly -a or -t.
… which elsewhere is mostly -a or -t.
@TR
“They’re easily found in the dictionaries and handbooks. Honestly, if this is going to turn into a game where you set us beginner-level historical phonology problems and we’re supposed to post the answers, then thanks but no thanks.”
If you really knew IE material, then it would take you longer to write your cranky posts than to engage into a common sense conversation. But I understand my every question makes you go through a ton of dictionaries and textbooks, which is taxing. 🙂
AFAIK, H2melg’- comes from one form, namely Gl amelgo- where a- is not supported by any other IE form. Could there be a different explanation for a- in Greek such as a prothetic vowel?
“A prothetic vowel” is not an explanation. A prothetic vowel is an observation that has to be explained. We know (extrapolating from many other cases when there is independent evidence) that the most likely explanation of a Greek prothetic vowel is a laryngeal. If you have an alternative explanation and evidence to support it, please go ahead and tell us what it is.
@Piotr
““A prothetic vowel” is not an explanation. A prothetic vowel is an observation that has to be explained. We know (extrapolating from many other cases when there is independent evidence) that the most likely explanation of a Greek prothetic vowel is a laryngeal.”
Why are we not seeing a vowel before -m- in other IE forms then?
Vladimir:
Marie-Lucie’s “intuitive semantics” approach
It’s your phrase, not mine. If that is a fit description of my approach, I can happily contrast it with your and Dziebel’s definitely “counterintuitive” semantics. Sometimes I wonder if the two of you actually live in the real world rather than in dictionaries.
husband and bride
The origin of husband is something like “householder, house manager”. When learning English I was surprised by the phrase “animal husbandry” which turned out not to mean the mating of animals, but rather the general care and management of farm animals. Regardless of their marital status, human beings should also be careful to “husband” their money and other assets, by managing them properly in order to prosper and to avoid running out of resources.
The currently most common meaning of the noun “husband” is “a man considered with respect to a woman he is married to”. He is a husband as long as he remains married, a situation which traditionally used to last until his or his wife’s death. “Bride” on the other hand traditionally means a woman at the very beginning of her married life, especially on the day of the celebration, and in any case before she has produced any children. The two terms therefore do not correspond to each other.
Why are we not seeing a vowel before -m- in other IE forms then?
Because *h₂ in this position leaves no visible reflex except in Greek, Armenian (where it gets vocalised intoi a “prothetic vowel”), and Anatolian (where it becomes h-). This particulat root does not happen to be attested in Anatolian and Armenian, so Greek is the only witness for the laryngeal. The other branches that have the root (Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Tocharian) can’t provide such evidence, since they regularly drop a word-initial laryngeal before a nasal.
Sometimes it’s possible to find less direct evidence, e.g. the lengthening effect of such a laryngeal in compounds and reduplications (especially in Vedic, which has plenty of both), but again there are no unambiguous traces of *h₂melǵ- in Indo-Iranian.
I’m waiting for your alternative explanation of the initial vowel in ἀμέλγω.
@TR: tut ets? I never heard that! Do people eat it? The decorative strawberry trees I have seen have edible fruit, but they are quite flavorless.
@Piotr
“Because *h₂ in this position leaves no visible reflex except in Greek, Armenian (where it gets vocalised intoi a “prothetic vowel”), and Anatolian (where it becomes h-). This particulat root does not happen to be attested in Anatolian and Armenian, so Greek is the only witness for the laryngeal. The other branches that have the root (Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Tocharian) can’t provide such evidence, since they regularly drop a word-initial laryngeal before a nasal.”
Hitt hanna- ‘grandmother’ corresponds to OHG ana, ano ‘grandfather, grandmother’, Slav *vunuku ( *mmelgo > *amelgo-. Syllabic nasal > a is a unique Greek development just like amelgo is a morphologically isolated Greek word within its cognate set.
Thoughts?
What a fast thread…
French word with -u: pointu “pointed”.
Latin phonology is irrelevant there, because Latin phonology as a system is younger than the later change *θ > f!
The phonetic rationale is that it’s possible, and that it can explain f and b in otherwise unexpected places.
What wasn’t shot down is lost to HTML errors. Are you talking about your ludicrous proposal that [rː] became [nr]? Because if you complain that [sr] > [θr] is “only” attested in Avestan, you should reject [rː] > nr altogether because it’s attested nowhere at all.
On top of that, you still haven’t even tried to explain where this mysterious [n] even came from.
No, “intervocalic cluster” is not a single environment. “Preceded by [s]” is a single environment, “followed by [s]” is another single environment.
Like… have you even begun to think this through?
How about *sk and *ks on the way to Proto-Germanic? The latter became *[xs], the former stayed unchanged.
This is garbled again, so please try anew.
A word-initial syllabic consonant in front of a vowel is a rather creative solution; it hasn’t been proposed for any other PIE word that I’m aware of. It fails to account for the many cases where we do have external evidence for a laryngeal.
Ahhh, it did it again!
“Hitt hanna- ‘grandmother’ corresponds to OHG ana, ano ‘grandfather, grandmother’, Slav *vunuku ‘grandson’ ) *mmelgo > *amelgo-. Syllabic nasal > a is a unique Greek development just like amelgo is a morphologically isolated Greek word within its cognate set.
It’s just not working!!!!
“Ahhh, it did it again!
“Hitt hanna- ‘grandmother’ corresponds to OHG ana, ano ‘grandfather, grandmother’, Slav *vunuku ‘grandson’ ) *mmelgo > *amelgo-. Syllabic nasal > a is a unique Greek development just like amelgo is a morphologically isolated Greek word within its cognate set.
Hitt hanna- ‘grandmother’, OHG ana, ano ‘grandfather, grandmother’, Slav *vunuku ‘grandson’ )< *anonko-/*anuko-), Lat anus 'old woman', Arm han 'grandmother'.
So, when we have enough attestations. we can see that Hitt H2 gives a- before a nasal across all the dialects, not just in Greek. Gk amelgo must therefore have a different explanation.
My hypothesis is that amelgo comes from a reduplicated stem *memelgo- > *mmelgo > *amelgo-. Syllabic nasal > a is a unique Greek development just like amelgo is a morphologically isolated Greek word within its cognate set.
@Marie-Lucie
““Bride” on the other hand traditionally means a woman at the very beginning of her married life, especially on the day of the celebration, and in any case before she has produced any children. The two terms therefore do not correspond to each other.”
They are both terms for social status, hence closer to each other conceptually than ‘bride’ to ‘nest’. Both husband, bride and brother are derived terms in this cognate set. Gk meirax, Lith merga look more basal. The notion of “young” (both boy and girl) looks like the most fundamental, from which all of the more complex notions can be derived.
” If that is a fit description of my approach, I can happily contrast it with your and Dziebel’s definitely “counterintuitive” semantics.”
What’s counterintuitive about beard ~ mouth, front of neck? The word mustache is derived from the word for mouth. Beards often grow on chins and necks (at least mine does) covering precisely the area of the throat that the food goes through. Food gets into your beard, unfortunately, too. Sometimes I feel semantics is just not what historical linguists do because your preferences in this field are not as predictable as your preferences in the phonology area.
What? How? Where does this *a- suddenly come from?
*facepalm* There’s a vowel in between. The nn shows that the first a is real: we’re looking (if at anything) at *h₂an-, not at **h₂n-.
1) Let a reduplication drop from the sky!
2) Randomly take its vowel out – irregular sound changes are suddenly OK!
3) Profit!
(Shared by Indo-Iranian. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us in this particular case.)
“Brood”, not “nest”.
Please explain.
As I said long ago in this thread, you’re right about this: there is so far no theory of semantics. Dziebel has tried to create one – unfortunately it consists of lots of unsupported and even outright counterfactual assumptions.
@David
“Latin phonology is irrelevant there, because Latin phonology as a system is younger than the later change *θ > f!”
Does it mean that the postulated sr > thr > fr transition happened in pre-Latin, Italic times?
“Are you talking about your ludicrous proposal that [rː] became [nr]? Because if you complain that [sr] > [θr] is “only” attested in Avestan, you should reject [rː] > nr altogether because it’s attested nowhere at all.”
It’s not my ludicrous proposal at all. My proposal is that sr > rr in Latin intervocalically by rhotacism law. (Same happened in OEng swiri ‘cousin, nephew’ rr by an ad hoc *sr > thr. The logical implication from rhotacism law is that -rr- > -mr-. How did it get from rr > mr I don’t know for a fact, but there are a couple of options that I suggested above. If rr > nr > mr does not work then I suggested that the cluster got nasalized first in highly nasal words such as tenebrae, funebra, consobrinus, membrum and then analogically extended to forms such as crabro.
“Like… have you even begun to think this through?”
Could you just calm down and stick to rational points? I’d like to focus on linguistics not psychology. 🙂
@ Marie -Lucie
Moustache.
Just a quick pull: “French moustache (15c.), from Italian mostaccio, from Medieval Greek moustakion, diminutive of Doric mystax (genitive mystakos) “upper lip, mustache,” related to mastax “jaws, mouth,” literally “that with which one chews,” from PIE root *mendh- “to chew”
Chew > mouth, lip > moustache.
“As I said long ago in this thread, you’re right about this: there is so far no theory of semantics.”
This is not good for linguistics. Semantics is part of every word. If linguistics doesn’t deal with semantics, it doesn’t deal with words.
“Dziebel has tried to create one – unfortunately it consists of lots of unsupported and even outright counterfactual assumptions.”
AFAIK, Dziebel didn’t create anything. He drew on 150 years of ethnolinguistic and anthropological theory. Since linguistics doesn’t have a theory of semantics, anthropology might be of service. And I honestly don’t know what you mean when you said that Dziebel made “counterfactual assumptions.”
Vladimir, it’s no longer funny. So you prefer to propose an otherwise unattested kind of reduplication (occurring only in Greek in all the forms of the verb ἀμέλγω and all its derivatives, such as ἀμελκτός ‘milked’, ἄμελξις, ἀμολγή ‘milking’ (in which one would not expect reduplication), etc. And this house of cards collapses instantly if you look at forms containing the augment: ἤμελγε. This of course is the natural outcome of *é h₂melǵ-e-t > Proto-Greek *ā́melget, but to derive it from “*é m(e)-melǵ-e-t” you would have to build another Rube Goldberg machine. I have had enough, and I refuse to waste any more time on your crazy alternative linguistics.
I understand my every question makes you go through a ton of dictionaries and textbooks, which is taxing.
It would certainly make it easier on the rest of us if you read them yourself. In any case, it looks like we’re heading for yet another round of “let’s rewrite large swaths of IE linguistics for the sake of my pet etymology”. I’ve grown tired of this game, so will leave it to others who still have some patience for it, if anyone.
@David
“What? How? Where does this *a- suddenly come from?”
That has always been a standard point of view. I myself is not 100% happy with it (why not anuku** in Slavic if Lith has anyta ‘aunt’ from the same root? and Dziebel has done more work on it) but again this is beyond the point. And the point is that H2 does not go to zero before nasals in Indo-European languages.
“The nn shows that the first a is real: we’re looking (if at anything) at *h₂an-, not at **h₂n-.”
Splitting hairs. What’s the difference between Gk amelgo and Arm han < Hitt H2- in both cases?
"Let a reduplication drop from the sky!"
Piotr asked for it. 🙂
@Y: tut ets? I never heard that! Do people eat it? The decorative strawberry trees I have seen have edible fruit, but they are quite flavorless.
Those are tutei ets, I believe. As you say, they’re edible, but don”t compare with your proper tut sade.
Yes, of course. I’m sorry I didn’t notice your confusion – I thought that was obvious all along! It happened at some point between PIE and Proto-Italic.
All of them are untenable. This means that the words which you compared to arrive at “-rr- > -mr-” cannot in fact descend from a common ancestor.
Once again: rr isn’t a cluster. It’s a single consonant.
You are proposing that this consonant was shortened, and that another consonant inserted itself in front of it.
I’m talking about logic, about consistency…
There’s one in this very thread: he assumed that words in logical sets, like kinship terms or numerals, can only evolve as a set; I brought up the Russian word for “40”; he actually conceded this point.
Oh, the software here can’t deal with Old Italic alphabets. Trying again:
Are you kidding me?
In the one case we have *h₂m-, a word-initial consonant cluster, becoming *m- in all branches except Greek (and presumably Phrygian and Armenian). In the other, we have *h₂an-, without a consonant cluster, becoming *an- in all branches except Anatolian (…and maybe Armenian, but Armenian h is a chaotic affair).
Even Wiktionary offers two more PIE words that began with a consonant cluster that started with *h₂:
See? Armenian, Greek and Phrygian point to *an-, while all other branches except Anatolian point to *n-; Anatolian is inconsistent, and only represented by Luwian and Lydian.
And again, because Gothic isn’t allowed either. I’ve also taken the cuneiform out, which doesn’t display for me anyway:
Even better: Armenian and Greek point to *ast-, all other branches except Anatolian point to *st-, and Hittite has the ḫ preserved. Keep in mind that the cuneiform script had no way of writing clusters of three consonants, so we can’t tell from the spelling alone whether the pronunciation was ḫast- or ḫst-.
There are also at least two with *h₃, which becomes o in Greek and e in Armenian (unattested in Phrygian) but disappears elsewhere in word-initial position immediately before a consonant:
I happen to know that the x of onyx hides a kʰ (regular outcome of *gʰ), because the genitive is onykʰos. On the other hand, I don’t know what exactly is going on with Latin, or if the Welsh word really belongs here at all.
Two more, “name” and “tooth”, are listed under *h₁, but have also been proposed to begin with *h₃ instead because different Greek dialects have different “prothetic” vowels there.
David, the Luwian word annarummi- means ‘forceful, virile’. It is derived from annara/i- (id.) and corresponds to the Hittite base innara- ‘strength, vigour’ (forming a large number of derivatives). There is no way the initial ann- (Hitt. inn-) could reflect *h₂n- or *h₂an-. If it’s related to *h₂ner- at all, it has to be a more complex structure, possibly a compound like *h₁en-h₂nər-o- ‘manly inside’ (or something of the kind). But truth to tell there’s little ground for claiming that the stem has an IE etymology.
David: pointu: Yes! ‘having a sharp point’ (eg a pencil, a knife).
Here are two more: pentu ‘having a steep slope’ (eg a roof or piece of land)
and of course moustachu ‘having a heavy moustache’.
Vladimir: Sometimes I feel semantics is just not what historical linguists do because your preferences in this field are not as predictable as your preferences in the phonology area.
In phonology it is not a question of preference but of consistency and systematicity. Paths of change are many but not in infinite number, and they are based on the possibilities of the human speech apparatus, With occasional exceptions, the sounds of a given language change in every word which contains the same sound in the same environment. This allows for precise systematization. If there are differences in the way different linguists interpret and systematize the paths, usually these differences get resolved ultimately through further work, and in any case the possibilities are limited: for instance, rhotacism changes s to r, not to w. Moreover, the paths in question being based on universal human physical characteristics mean what a given change can pop up in a wide variety of languages, regardless of whether they are related or not. The linguist reported earlier, who denied that *kw could end up as p, was simply not familiar with languages where this change is attested.
Semantics on the other hand tends to affect words individually, and changes of meaning are frequently unpredictable. That’s why it has not been possible to create a comprehensive theory of semantics. What Dziebel seems to be doing is first setting up a group sharing some general organizing feature (eg kinship or body parts), then deriving some common linguistic feature among the members of the group. This may be possible in a few limited cases, but not overall.
Unlike the human speech apparatus and its finite sound production capabilities, which constrain sound changes, the human imagination which propels both semantic categorization and semantic change is apparently limitless. Change is not random, but since if affects individual words rather than whole groups, it does not proceed “across the board” and that makes consistent generalizations difficult if not impossible, unlike the generalizations of phonology and morphology. In addition, semantic generalizations are very likely to be affected by a inguist’s own personality and experiences, as well as more or less conscious desires for specific results. Such personal influences are much less likely to play a role in determining phonological relationships.
rhotacism changes s to r, not to w
Indeed, that would be wotacism.
@David
Ok, I got convinced that Gk amelgo represents *H2melg’-. And as I see from the examples, H2 > 0 outside of Greek and Armenian happened not just before nasals but before s(t)- as well.
This does not affect, however, the proposed equation *H2melg’/*H2mulg’- ~ bhleg’/*bhlug’-. The only difference is that bh- formed via H2 + b and not via b + H2 as in the case of breH2ter, etc. I do take Marie-Lucie’s semantic concerns seriously in this case, so it’s an exploratory equation by all means.
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry I didn’t notice your confusion – I thought that was obvious all along! It happened at some point between PIE and Proto-Italic.”
You are making it even worse by proposing this. Not only that sr > thr is ad hoc but now it’s also unverifiable because you pushed it back into the unknown past. Unless you are proposing that Young Avestan and Latin form a clade in IE phylogeny.
“All of them are untenable. This means that the words which you compared to arrive at “-rr- > -mr-” cannot in fact descend from a common ancestor.”
They surely can and did because sr > rr is by rhotacism law. You can’t cancel it just because you don’t buy what I propose happened after.
“Once again: rr isn’t a cluster. It’s a single consonant.”
It’s not a single consonant it’s a cluster: soror > sororinus. Can you see 2 r’s? Sobrinus… Can you see -br-? It’s a cluster.
“There’s one in this very thread: he assumed that words in logical sets, like kinship terms or numerals, can only evolve as a set; I brought up the Russian word for “40″; he actually conceded this point.”
Like all normal scholars, Dziebel accepts facts. And he himself acknowledges that there are “cultural” (as opposed to “conceptual”) shifts in semantics. They are unique and can usually be ascertained only thanks to written attestations or because they are recent. But this does not invalidate his systematic approach to cognate set composition, to etymology and to reconstruction. It’s like using Eng dog as a testament to the lack of phonetic regularities. Linguistic evolution can’t be reconstructed on the premise that every event is a unique event. The assumption of “Dziebel’s counterfactual assumptions” is counterfactual.
@Marie-Lucie
“Semantics on the other hand tends to affect words individually, and changes of meaning are frequently unpredictable.”
I have serious doubts that this is true and if linguists believe in this, it’s just bad news for linguistics because you can’t identify phonetic laws and accomplish reconstructions without a scientific approach to cognate set composition. The input determines the output.
“What Dziebel seems to be doing is first setting up a group sharing some general organizing feature (eg kinship or body parts), then deriving some common linguistic feature among the members of the group. This may be possible in a few limited cases, but not overall.”
I won’t simplify it too much. He’s looking at the whole set of morphological, semantic and phonetic regularities (sic!) to provide etymologies and conduct reconstructions. Just like there’s phonetic naturalness and stepwise chains of phonetic changes (with some exceptions), the same degree of systematicity is present in semantics (with some exceptions). It’s just a fundamental scientific approach to reality whatever it is. There are multiple examples of semantic transformations within IE that all follow the same conceptual path: verb denoting an internal action (chew, swallow) > body part (chin, mouth, throat, back of neck) > hair growing over that body part (mustache, mane, beard). Combined with morphology and phonology, it creates a robust etymology.
In fact, I won’t be surprised if his approach can help you with your Penutian project. If you don’t identify cognate sets correctly, you won’t achieve compelling results.
“Such personal influences are much less likely to play a role in determining phonological relationships.”
As I suggested above, subjectivity does not emerge from some aspect of reality (such as semantics). It’s an altogether separate process driven by culture, tradition, education and psychology that can apply to phonology and semantics alike.
@David
IE ‘eyebrow’ (Lith bruvìs, Skrt bhrū́ṣ, Gk οφρῦς, OIr brūad, OEng brú, ONorse brún, Macedonian ἀβροῦτες) seems to fit the H2/3/1V- pattern you have listed. Another example with a non-nasal environment.
The actual realization in dialects vary, with e.g. -åt or -at around Trondheim, -et in Bergen, and -ete in Urban Eastern (with the final -e from the weak (= definite) declension, I presume), but nowhere except Bergen and the most danified Oslo speech, does it coincide with the weak past participle, which [elsewhere] is mostly -a or -t.
No, that’s too fast. The connection with the past participle isn’t lost in my own “Broad(ish) Urban Eastern” either. I can produce an infinete number of counterexamples: gråhåra “having grey hair” (but hårete “being full of hairs”), langbeint “longlegged”, keivhendt “lefthanded”, skjeløyd “squinteyed”, blåøyd “blue-eyed”, murkhuda “darkskinned”; storkjefta “loudmouthed”, hulkinna “hollowcheeked”, sidrompa “sagbutted”, surmaga “sour-stomached (dyspeptic => cross)”.
The forms with -ete seem to be in some sense distributive. In gråhåra the characteristic applies to the one mane of hair, while in hårete the point is that the hairs are distributed all over the surface. Likewise,stripete “striped”, prikkete “dotted”, etc. refer to distributed patterns.
I’m not surprised. I think people sometimes commit original research on Wiktionary by just plopping in attested forms that look vaguely similar to a root that has an entry.
Well, first, you can’t get *-ul- from *-el- in PIE; the zero-grade of *-el- was just a syllabic *-l-. This part actually helps you, because *-ml- > -bl- has happened elsewhere, while *-mul- > -bul- is, AFAIK, only attested from languages where *m > b is the default development.
If this happened here, the outcome would be a paradigm with an unusual consonant alternation: *b in the zero-grade, *m in the other grades. You would need to posit that the paradigm split, resulting in one with *m and one with *b, and that both paradigms survived with different meanings.
Then you’d need to propose a completely new sound law that turned *h₂b into *bʰ – even though *h₂t did not turn into *tʰ anywhere, not even in Indo-Iranian. You’d need to find a lot more examples to substantiate this.
So, even if we completely ignore all semantics, a connection between and…
Wait. Suddenly you call it “bhleg’/*bhlug’-“. It’s *bʰleuH-, with both e and u. It has /ew/ where *h₂melǵ has /el/; its zero-grade had a syllabic /w/ = *u.
This Wikipedia article is far from perfect, but I still recommend it to you as a starting point.
No, why? Like in biology, everything that can evolve once can evolve twice.
I really can’t see what you think would be so unlikely about [sr] > [θr] > [fr].
To explain *-sr- > -br-, which is all over Latin, we already need to assume an intermediate stage with either [θr] or [ðr]. It’s really not a stretch to assume that the same thing, without intervocalic voicing, happened at the beginnings of words.
FFS, no! Latin rhotacism is the change of *s to r between vowels, not between a vowel and a consonant. That’s not the same environment! The *rs > rr change is similar, but it is a separate change.
You’re misusing the terminology here: ror is neither a long consonant nor a consonant cluster. It’s a consonant followed by a vowel, which in turn is followed by a consonant.
However, you propose that the next step was that this unattested early Classical Latin *sororīnus contracted to the equally unattested *sorrīnus. The *rr in that form is a long consonant. Upon touching, the two rs immediately merge, because clusters of identical continuants simply aren’t possible; *sorrīnus would be */sorːiːnus/. The fact that most of us write “rr” rather than “r̄” is just an arbitrary convention.
The mainstream view is of course that sobrīnus was not formed by adding Classical Latin -īnus to Classical Latin soror, but that it was formed much earlier by joining ancestors of these Latin forms at a time when the ancestor of soror still had ablaut. I detailed a possibility in this comment two days ago…
Of course you can: you look for regular correspondences, use them to make reconstructions, and then see if you can get the semantics to make sense. That’s not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Well, he’s looking at those he knows, or those he believes he knows. He has missed a lot, as this thread shows.
Yes! Another example of what happened to *h₂ at the beginning of a word immediately before a consonant. 🙂
You look for regular correspondences, use them to make reconstructions, and then see if you can get the semantics to make sense. That’s not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Occasionally it does not, as with harp, found in all the Germanic languages and borrowed into Late Latin > the Romance languages. Its apparent formal equivalent in Latin, as Tolkien pointed out, is corbis, but what harps have to do with baskets, nobody knows.
JC: A harp is made of parallel strings attached to a frame. This definition also fits some types of basket under construction, with the vertical pieces in place but before the cross “strings” (I am not sure how to call the basket pieces) have been woven in. (This is also seen with a basket “under destruction”).
This reminds me of my anglophone Canadian students’ astonishment that the French word “raquette” meant both ‘racket’ (eg for tennis) and ‘snowshoe’. Their uses are very different, but not their construction: both consist of a rounded frame within which strings (or equivalent) are interwoven.
but what harps have to do with baskets, nobody knows.
Basketry, wickerwork and weaving. I bet the harp was named for its similarity to a loom. It might actually be the old name for it.
Semantic agreement.
Trond: I bet the harp was named for its similarity to a loom.
Great comment! Weaving can be done in the round (baskets) or “in the flat” (mats, cloth).
(Latin corbis) … might actually be the old name for it.
The root or stem cor-b suggests something curved (French courbe ‘curve, curved’, corbeille, a type of basket). If so, basketry was the original semantic domain, with techniques later extended to flat weaving. But the meaning of corbis could have evolved towards “loom” as cloth weaving (in the flat) became more widespread and basketry became less useful (as baskets were replaced by pottery for many uses, notably including heating water or food over a fire).
Great comment!
Tolkien’s equation is suspect. The Balto-Slavic words for ‘basket’ apparently related to corbis, such as Lith. kar̃bas and Russ. kórob point to *korbʰo-, with *bʰ (the PIE root-structure constraints seem to be violated here, but it may be a Wanderwort of post-PIE date). I think it’s more probable that the ‘harp’ word is connected with the root of Lat. carpō ‘pluck’. One would need to invoke Kluge’s Law to derive Germanic *xarp- from PIE *karp-, but then most medial /p/’s in Germanic must be due to Kluge’s Law anyway.
@David
“I really can’t see what you think would be so unlikely about [sr] > [θr] > [fr].”
It’s very simple: there’s no evidence for sr >thr this. We can concoct any scenarios we want but showing that this is exactly what happened is a little more difficult.
“To explain *-sr- > -br-, which is all over Latin”
There’s *rr > br all over Latin if you recall rhotacism law that would change sr > rr intervocalically when Latin becomes Latin.
“atin rhotacism is the change of *s to r between vowels, not between a vowel and a consonant. That’s not the same environment! The *rs > rr change is similar, but it is a separate change.”
It’s a subset of the same environment. s > r, sr > rr, rs > rr – all intervocalically. This is how you formulate laws. One law ladders up to high-order law. Otherwise, we again open it up to subjective interpretations.
“However, you propose that the next step was that this unattested early Classical Latin *sororīnus contracted to the equally unattested *sorrīnus. The *rr in that form is a long consonant. Upon touching, the two rs immediately merge, because clusters of identical continuants simply aren’t possible.”
You are thinking about it correctly… at the beginning… then you make a mistake. When *ror became *rr the two identical consonants dissimilated either into *nr or *mr in a nasal word-large environment, e,g.,*sorri:nus > *sonri:nus.
“The mainstream view is of course that sobrīnus was not formed by adding Classical Latin -īnus to Classical Latin soror, but that it was formed much earlier by joining ancestors of these Latin forms at a time when the ancestor of soror still had ablaut. ”
Well, my explanation is better because it works with Latin sound laws when it comes to explaining a Latin innovation.
” you look for regular correspondences, use them to make reconstructions, and then see if you can get the semantics to make sense.”
That’s not how it works in practice. Regular correspondences don’t descend from God, they are derived from an pre-arranged material in the first place by human beings. And humans err. I’m almost 100% confident that linguists can derive correct sound laws but they don’t have no methodology for composing cognate sets. Hence, there are mistakes in the way reconstructions are conducted, sound laws formulated and etymologies built. Or there are no etymologies whatsoever because a scholar hits a dead-end. That’s how bizarre etymologies such as brother < carrier-of-fire emerge. When semantics is not included at the cognate set composition phase it turns into chimeras in the end of the process.
"Another example of what happened to *h₂ at the beginning of a word immediately before a consonant."
Yes, but that's not where things end. I assume you wouldn't argue that HC-clusters derive from earlier full-grade *HeC-
"You would need to posit that the paradigm split, resulting in one with *m and one with *b, and that both paradigms survived with different meanings."
Yes, that's exactly how I'm thinking about it. I'll take the rest as a homework.
marie-lucie: The root or stem cor-b suggests something curved
I have no particular reason to go the long route through “(standing) loom”. It might equally well be named directly from handheld frames. But …
Piotr: I think it’s more probable that the ‘harp’ word is connected with the root of Lat. carpō ‘pluck’.
And Eng. harvest.
Somehow related, No. harv/horv, ON harfr, Eng. harrow. They used to be more frame-like.. But it’s not a formal equivalent of anything relevant.
Vladimir: I’m almost 100% confident that linguists can derive correct sound laws but they don’t have no methodology for composing cognate sets.
“Cognates” are words which derive from the same ancestral root. A root is identified through morphological analysis of words. Roots common to languages identified as related through morphological resemblances and sound correspondences form the basis of “cognate sets”. That is the methodology for finding those sets, and it is quite precise.* Roots which are phonologically similar or identical but which (alone or through their derivatives) have little or no semantic commonalities are simply homophonous roots, a coincidence.
Dziebel attempts to compile “cognate sets” on the basis of (what he thinks are) semantic commonalities, then he has to twist himself silly trying to find phonological paths between the members of the set. (I hate to bring up the “beard” set again, but if those meanings are so close to each other, why are the English words for them so completely different?).
*I understand that “brother < bringer of fire" was one linguist's proposal but has not been corroborated by others, so it is not a valid example of accepted reconstruction practice.
Trond: I still like your comment even if your guess is not correct.
Piotr: I think it’s more probable that the ‘harp’ word is connected with the root of Lat. carpō ‘pluck’.
German Harfe would indeed seem to fit in.
Vladimir: My comment: languages identified as related through morphological resemblances and sound correspondences
I mean sound correspondences in words similar in form and meaning, not in the abstract.
@Marie-Lucie
” A root is identified through morphological analysis of words. Roots common to languages identified as related through morphological resemblances and sound correspondences form the basis of “cognate sets”. That is the methodology for finding those sets, and it is quite precise.*”
You are right all the way till the moment when I expect to hear “semantics” but I don’t. It’s phonology + morphology + semantics (all together as the undivided “form” of a word) in time and space.
“Roots which are phonologically similar or identical but which (alone or through their derivatives) have little or no semantic commonalities are simply homophonous roots, a coincidence.”
That’s exactly right: in practice linguists go after forms with “similar” meanings (to be on a safe side, so you have father compared to father and tree to tree) and overlook forms with regularly different meanings associated with a similar or different form. They forget that the forms they are dealing with are outcomes of a process of phonetic, morphological and semantic differentiation, not the forms that haven’t changed and that can be mechanically moved up in time and declared “protoforms.”
“(I hate to bring up the “beard” set again, but if those meanings are so close to each other, why are the English words for them so completely different?).”
You prove my point. You are seeking words (and preselecting them) that are “similar.” Greek telos, polos and kyklos are different (native speakers won’t see any connection between them) but they are regularly different and hence related because derive from the same protoform. Same for Slav *gordlo ‘throat’ and *broda ‘beard’ – they are “different” but they share critical and not easily observed commonalities in morphology (affix -d-), semantics (adjacent body parts) and phonology (PIE labiovelar split gw > g, gw > b) that make them cognates.
“*I understand that “brother < bringer of fire" was one linguist's proposal but has not been corroborated by others, so it is not a valid example of accepted reconstruction practice."
Unfortunately, it is an accepted reconstruction practice. Another example is a widely supported, textbook-level etymology of PIE *sweso:r 'sister' as 'one's own woman', which, as Dziebel argues, is a folk etymology with multiple semantic, morphological and distributional problems. He proposed an alternative that connected *swes:or to *swek'ru- 'husband's parent' and showed that PIE *s and satem *s is the same phoneme that reflected differently in different environments. But since a cognate set was misanalyzed from the very beginning, the reconstruction became a dead-end and an etymology emerged that was rather naive. (I can try and defend his position here from a phonology standpoint but I mainly use it as an example of his argument.)
Harfe is just harpe in High German, isn’t it?
1200!
Trond: No, it is Harfe. I remember seeing the word on a music score and noticing the f. But I just checked with a dictionary to make sure.
m-l: Trune means that Harfe is what you get when you push harpe through the High German sound shift.
Thanks JC.
Trond, sorry if I misunderstood “High German”.
The f in Harfe definitely comes from the High German consonant shift, followed by the regular development of rpf to rf (OHG scarpf > modern scharf). This second step has one exception, Karpfen “carp”.
“Basket”, however, is Korb. And Kluge’s law is all over it. Kroonen (2011: 179, 180) reconstructs nom. *krebō, gen. *kurpaz from earlier *kurppaz, and then spends a page listing forms from all over Northwest Germanic – English crib is one of them – which would, if taken literally (as by the principles set forth in Pyysalo’s thesis…), point to *kreban-, *krebbōn- (mostly but not only through the derivative *kreb(b)jō(n)-), *kreppan- (via *kreppjō(n)-), *kerba(n)- or *kerbōn-, *kruppa- or *kruppōn- partially via *kruppjō(n)-, *krubbōn- (partially via *krub(b)jō(n)-) and finally *kurba(n)- or *kurbōn-.
P. 181: “It has been suggested that these words were adopted from Lat. corbis^354, but since *kurba(n)- is perfectly understandable from within the Germanic context, it is more probable that the Germanic word was adopted by Latin.^355″
Footnote 354 is a citation, 355 says that Korb was early passed on to Slavic and then on to Lithuanian and Finnish.
P. 181–2: “In spite of the straightforward reconstruction of *krebō, *kurp{p}az, no clear etymology is available. The connection with Greek γρῖπος, γρῖφος ‘basket, fish net’^362 is uncertain because of the Greek consonantal irregularities. ON hrip n. ‘pannier’^363 has been compared, and if this link is correct, the word must be of non-Indo-European origin, as has been argued by Kuhn (1959: 39).^364 The problem with these etymologies, however, is that the meaning “basket” is secondary in Germanic. At least, this is what must be concluded on the basis of the closest intra-Germanic cognates ON kerf, kjarf n. ‘bundle (of twigs)’ and OSw. kærve m. ‘id.’ < *kerba(n)-.”
Footnote 362 is a citation of Pokorny. 363 reads: “= Allgäu German reaf ‘hölzernes Rückentraggestell‘”, which means “wooden contraption for carrying things on your back”. 364: “Theoretically, ON hrip can also be interpreted as a loanword from a hypothetical Proto-Celtic form *kribi-, which can be postulated on the basis of Lat. corbis < *kr̥bʰ-i- (cf. De Vaan 2008: 135.)”
German Kerbe f. “notch” and English kerf are not discussed, presumably because they’re semantically too far away.
Right now I have no time for the rest, except:
Part of this would work if you modify your hypothesis: put the dissimilation before the irregular contraction – *sororiːnus > *sonoriːnus > *sonriːnus. There you’d have a testable hypothesis about what happened to *-r-r-(n?-) sequences long after Latin rhotacism. How you could get to *somrinus with *m, however, is beyond me.
And your insistence that -s- is in the same environment in -VsV- as in -Vsr- is just denial of evident reality. Try again.
@David
“Part of this would work if you modify your hypothesis: put the dissimilation before the irregular contraction – *sororiːnus > *sonoriːnus > *sonriːnus. There you’d have a testable hypothesis about what happened to *-r-r-(n?-) sequences long after Latin rhotacism.”
I don’t see why one is better than the other but at least you’re coming along.
To return a favor, for your/mainstream hypothesis of a deep pre-Latin “fuse” of sr > thr > br, there are several forms that show the same/similar affix as Lat sobri:nus, namely Slav *sestrinu ‘sister’s son’, OEng swiri ‘cousin, nephew’ (*swesriyos) and Arm k’eri ‘mother’s brother’ ( thr > br) happening at the “Italic-Germanic,” “Italo-Germano-Slavic” or “Italo-Germano-Slavo-Armenian” nodes because they would have turned up as specific developments in all those other languages. Only -s- can be seen all the way down. This suggests that sr > br is as late as Latin and has to follow Latin sound laws through and through.
“Try again.”
I tried. s > r, sr > rr, rs > rr – all intervocalically. Now you try.
Garbled again.
Latin rhotacism is the statement that *s becomes r when *s was intervocalic. “Intervocalic” means “not preceded or followed by r” because r is not a vowel.
That’s why, as I said, the Latin development of *rs > rr is not part of rhotacism; it’s a similar but separate change.
The f in Harfe definitely comes from the High German consonant shift, followed by the regular development of rpf to rf (OHG scarpf > modern scharf). This second step has one exception, Karpfen “carp”.
OE hearpe, ON harpa, OHG har(p)fa all reflect the same (weak feminine) stem, *xarpōn-. This may be a remodelled ablauting nasal stem *karp-(V)n-. Kroonen for some reason does not discuss it, buit he has many parallel examples (the ‘basket’ word is one of them). *xarfan-/xar(p)pa- (via Kluge’s Law, with consonant shortening after a heavy syllable) was levelled out as *xarpan-, reformed into non-ablauting *xarpōn-, like other such feminines. I have a semantic problem with this explanation, though. Deverbal n-stems are basically agent nouns, but a harp doesn’t pluck; it’s plucked. So perhaps it’s a secondary nasal stem, from *karp-náh₂ (a collective meaning ‘(row of) strings’?) > *xarpō, or something of the sort.
“Basket”, however, is Korb.
The Balto-Slavic words are indeed often suspected of being Germanic loans (words for ‘basket’ travel easily). Of course if both Korb and Harfe are inherited from Proto-Germanic, they can’t be cognate.
Choice quote from Jouna Pyysalo’s thesis (p. 68):
“1. From the comparative point of view, associating reconstruction with forming hypotheses is not acceptable. Rather than making hypotheses, the comparative method results in proto-phonemes, discovered empirically and experimentally, based on correspondence sets defined by the data.”
TV Tropes ought to have an entry “You Fail Science Theory Forever”. Reconstructed proto-phonemes are hypotheses, and the correspondence sets they’re derived from are also hypotheses! It’s only science.
Piotr: Of course if both Korb and Harfe are inherited from Proto-Germanic, they can’t be cognate.
Too bad!
So Fr courbe> and corbeille come from Latin words borrowed from Germanic.
Courbe seems to have started as an adjective (which it still is), later also developing a technical sense as a noun: the TLFI cites mid-13C corbe for “piece of a wheel surround, curved piece of wood” (worked to have that shape, not naturally curved).
The same article supposes Vulgar Latin *curbus corresponding to Classical
curvus. Does that make sense?
There are two basic words for “basket” in French: le panier and la corbeille. The first one derives from Latin panis ‘bread’ and is likely to be used of a basket with a handle, used for carrying rather than just containing. The second one derives from Latin corbicula, a diminutive of corbis. The TLFI defines it as a ‘light basket’. For me it is likely to refer to a handleless basket, with a connotation of more elegance than that of the more utilitarian panier. In a French house you will probably find une corbeille à pain as well as une corbeille à papier ‘wastepaper basket’. Un panier à pain is more likely to be found at a bakery, for carrying loaves from the oven to the shop.
David: There may be a translation problem. When Newton famously said Hypotheses non fingo, he meant that he drew no conclusions except from empirical data, which he called “phenomena”. Here’s a modern English translation of the whole passage:
We no longer talk of induction, but the rest is entirely modern except for the use of the word hypotheses. I think it is hypotheses in Newton’s sense to which Pyysalo is referring.
m-l: Such baskets are called panniers in English. They usually come in pairs and are joined by a stick which passes over a person’s shoulders or the back of another beast of burden.
JC, I saw these in use in my grandparents’ village in Southern France, many years ago. They must have been very hard on the shoulders. Some women also wore baskets on their heads, like in Africa.
In English I know the word “panniers” as bicycle accessories attached on either side of the back wheel. The same word was used in the 18C for a kind of light frame that elegant women (let’s say Marie-Antoinette and her friends) wore under their skirts to make them look extra-wide. The dresses were known in French as robes à paniers.
“Feign” isn’t a very good translation of fingo in Newton’s passage — “invent” would be better.
JC, I guess “wore baskets on their heads” is not quite right: they “carried” them on their heads. French uses “porter” for both meanings!
@Vladimir Diakoff:
sr > rr, rs > rr is counterproductive to postulate because it would mean that these clusters started out differently, fell together, and then somehow separated again. It forces you to jump through hoops to describe the development of the cluster br from the former but not from the latter. The “nasal-word environment” hypothesis you’ve tried to advance has several pieces of evidence against it, such as crabro, cerebrum, salubris (and on the other hand, possibly narro, murrio, marra, verrinus, murrinus; although I’m not sure if the rr in all of these is old enough to be relevant). From what I can see, this makes it inferior to the hypothesis that sr > br, rs > rr (with whatever non-merging intermediate steps are needed).
@David
“and Arm k’eri ‘mother’s brother’ ( thr > br)”
( r and rs > rr. Resonants tend to follow vowels in a sonority hierarchy, so the an sr environment is clearly different from an -sc- environment (Lat masculus but mari:tus). Plus we are talking about rhotacization in a post-vocalic and pre-rhotic environment followed again by a vowel, so I don’t see how this can be a problem.
@ David
The thing that gets garbled is the form *swesriyos that yielded Arm k’eri.
@ Eli Nelson
“The “nasal-word environment” hypothesis you’ve tried to advance has several pieces of evidence against it, such as crabro, cerebrum, salubris (and on the other hand, possibly narro, murrio, marra, verrinus, murrinus; although I’m not sure if the rr in all of these is old enough to be relevant).”
Being aware of those examples, I proposed the origin of the transition in a nasal whole-word environment with subsequent analogical leveling in non-nasal environments. Latin is notorious for its resonant assimilation/dissimilation (e.g., germanus nr > mr causing so much doubt?
“It forces you to jump through hoops to describe the development of the cluster br from the former but not from the latter.”
The nasal whole-word environment explains this puzzle.
@Vladimir Diakoff:
The correspondences *-sr- > -br-, *-rs- > -rr- are as far as I can see perfect. Why should I discard them for your new proposal, which introduces new “puzzles” and only halfway solves them? You bring up resonant assimilation/dissimilation, but “germanus” appears to actually involve the opposite process (loss, rather than gain, of nasality on a segment, kind of like the later development in Spanish of lendinem > liendre), and its development is, as far as I can tell, unique (to IE scholars: are there any other Latin words where *rm* comes from earlier *n…m?). It’s not strong evidence for rVr > nVr or rː > nr. You bring up analogical leveling: this might possibly explain salubris (after funebris) but what would be the basis for analogy in crabro or cerebrum? What words with a “nasal whole-word environment” are they being modeled after?
Vladimir: you wrote Latin is notorious for its resonant assimilation/dissimilation (e.g., germanus nr > mr) . Just a typo, or do you have other potential examples of nr > mr?
Eli: any other Latin words where *rm* comes from earlier *n…m?
I think there is carmen “song” from *can-men. Perhaps there are more, but I learned this one a long time ago and it just stuck in my memory. (I am not a Latin or IE specialist).
germanus : Is this word from *genmanus? What would be the analysis?
@ Eli Nelson
“The correspondences *-sr- > -br-, *-rs- > -rr- are as far as I can see perfect.”
As I wrote to Marie-Lucie, phonology (not just semantics) is subject to subjective interpretations. For me, -s- > -r-, -sr- > -rr- and -rs- > -rr- are 100% perfect and interconnected to form a high-level law. How can we not assume that rhotacism worked in a post-vocalic and pre-rhotic environment if we know it worked in intervocalic environment? VsrV > VrrV is an even more natural condition for the s > r change to occur than VsV > VrV because in the latter case there’s no /r/ to help make s into r. At the same time, sr > br is ad hoc, and sr > fr is unique (fri:gus).
“You bring up analogical leveling: this might possibly explain salubris (after funebris) but what would be the basis for analogy in crabro or cerebrum?”
Those two forms have a very heavy whole-word rhotic environment. I would expect *crarro and *cererrum to dissimilate into something like *cranro > *cramro and *ceremrom > cerebrum. Just like *memrrom > membrum.
“germanus”
It is a unique development as far as I know but it gives a sense of how Latin treats resonant-heavy words. It dissimilates them using other resonants.
@Marie-Lucie
“germanus : Is this word from *genmanus? What would be the analysis?
Yes, it’s presumed to have come from *gen(e)men, from *gen(e)- ‘give birth’.
“Vladimir: you wrote Latin is notorious for its resonant assimilation/dissimilation (e.g., germanus nr > mr) . Just a typo, or do you have other potential examples of nr > mr?”
No, that’s just one of my garbled posts. I don’t have any exactt examples of nr > mr.
“carmen”
That’s an interesting one. I think it’s attested in Old Latin as casmen ‘song’ and then -s- got rhotacized before a resonant!
Isn’t carmen just a frozen participial form of cano? If casmen is attested, could it be a hypercorrection?
I’m also reading a 19th century comparative grammar book (Westphal) and it says that that words such as veternus, carmen and Minerva derive from, respectively, vetesnus, casmen and Minesva. And the rhotacism law covers 2 environments: intervocalic and pre-nasal. If this is the case, then expanding it to pre-rhotic environments becomes even more inevitable.
Pjotr,
You wrote:
“The metathesis of TK took place in the common ancestor of the modern IE languages (after the separation of Anatolian and Tocharian). Please demonstrate that your examples date back to that period. If you can’t they aren’t valid counterexamples.”
This is easy: the root IEW 1059 *tekw, e.g. in
RV. tak- (pr.) ‘eilen, dahinschießen (Vogel, Rosse, Strome)’ (WbRV. 509-10) (RV. ná takti)
OCS. tek- (vb.) ‘laufen, eilen’ (Sadnik 953, tešti, tekǫ)
Has a zero grade *tkw- in
OInd. ava·tká- (a.) ‘herabfließend’ (AIWb. XX)
which is very well backed in Avestan.
No way TK would develop an sibilant (and lose dental stop after that).
@Piotr
You wrote:
“This [= The sound laws are supposed to function universally.] is not true. Sound laws are regular, but not always perfectly regular. They are not mechanical physical processes. But even assuming Neogrammarian regularity, a word will only have undergone a given change if it happened to be in the right language at the right time (when the change was an active phonetic process).”
This is certainly incorrect illusion. In the phonetic/phonemic level the regularity of the sound changes is nearly absolutely regular, far greater than the Neogrammmarians ever could imagine.
Have a look @ PIELexicon
http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi
anywhere you like – and you’ll see that we are capable of generating far more than 99 percent of the forms in a complete regular manner.
@ David Marjanović says:
Quoting my thesis you wrote:
“TV Tropes ought to have an entry “You Fail Science Theory Forever”. Reconstructed proto-phonemes are hypotheses, and the correspondence sets they’re derived from are also hypotheses! It’s only science.”
I see this differently. In my opinion reconstruction is re+construction i.e. something constructed again (re) on the basis of preserved phonemes and their features (or parts/components).
As I see it there was a single underlying proto-language that can be brought back to existence by means of correct reconstruction by means of combining the preserved parts together as they once were.
That is science in my view.
@Jouna, the majority view on science is this: You start with a hypothesis, figure out its consequences and how to detect if it’s wrong (falsifiability). When every test you can do fails to falsify it, you tentatively accept the hypothesis as something to build on — while bearing in mind that new data or new methods may test it in new ways at any time, and it may turn out to be false after all.
The history of the reconstruction of PIE must be full of examples. You yourself are hoping to falsify the hypotheses of everybody else, if I’m not mistaken.
But if you think there can be such a thing as objectively, provably correct reconstruction, you are doing science in different way. I wish you the best of luck!
This is certainly incorrect illusion. In the phonetic/phonemic level the regularity of the sound changes is nearly absolutely regular, far greater than the Neogrammmarians ever could imagine.
Wake up, look at any real sound change happening out there in the real world (e.g. /æ/-tensing in the varieties of North American English, or the BATH-lengthening in British English) The expectation of regularity is important as a heuristic, but you have to keep it in mind that there are all sorts of random phenomena interfering with phonetic processes. Also, no language is homogeneous — ask any dialectologist or sociolinguist. A change may be regular locally but becomes sporadic as it spreads in the larger population.
No way TK would develop an sibilant (and lose dental stop after that)
Your example is still Indo-Iranian. We don’t even know for sure that avatká- contains the root *tekʷ-, since its meaning is not clear, and even if it means ‘spring water’, as some gloss it, we also have Rigvedic avatá- ‘well, cistern’ (no /k/).
But since you mention *tekʷ-, it forms a reduplicated desiderative in Avestan, tixšəṇti. Now this form is likely to be old, and reflects PIE *tí-tkʷ-(h₁)s-n̥ti. What happened to the dental?
Oops, a typo: *tí-tkʷ-(h₁)s-o-nti. But the question remains.
@ Piotr , @Jouna
Hitt has wa-tkuzzi ‘pour, flow’. How does it fit with the rest?
It means ‘leap, jump’, not ‘flow’. watku-zzi is hard to analyse; one would not normally expect zero-grade in a 3sg. root present, even with a preverb (*we-tkʷ-ti), but perhaps the vocalism of the 3pl. was generalised. (The other possibility it that watku- isn’t connected with *tekʷ-.) Of course in Anatolian there are numerous -TK- clusters: the “thorny” metathesis did not operate there.
@Piotr
“It means ‘leap, jump’, not ‘flow’”
I checked two secondary sources (Shea’s Vestiges of IE. amphikinetic presents in Celtic) as well as a recent Russian dissertation (http://www.philol.msu.ru/~ref/2015/2015_TrofimovAA_diss_10.02.20_24.pdf) and neither of them gives “leap, jump’. Shea says wa-tkuzzi means ‘flees’. Trofimov “flow, pour”. All the meanings are similar but I don’t know whom to believe. What’s your source?
Trofimov (p. 156-7), BTW, cites Kloekhorst who si preparing a paper arguing against Schindler’s solution for thorn clusters. One of Kloekhorst’s arguments is IE *ok’to:/*h3ekteH3 ‘eight’ that gives *asta in Skrt, not aksa’ as Schindler’s solution predicts.
Weird, there must be a misunderstanding somewhere. What I thought, based on earlier discussion in this thread, is that Schindler’s solution is TK > TsK > KTs. If this is the case, I don’t see why we’d expect pre-existing KT (as in the “eight” word) to have the same reflex, as it would lack the inserted s.
Vladimir, Lars: Latin “carmen”
Philip Baldi (The Foundations of Latin)
p. 296 : about dissimilation from n … n (to n–l or r–n)
* Note: the second example is about germen, germinis not germanus.
From the examples given it seems that n … l occurs between vowels, n … r before a consonant (at least before m, since there are few examples). I don’t think it is a matter of “rhotacism”, rather of relative sonority.
About -men, Baldi (75) says that PIE had a similar participle attested in the cognate Greek suffix -menos, but both Latin and Greek forms seem to be noun formatives and I don’t see a need to appeal to their PIE ancestry.
@Marie-Lucie
Thanks!
” I don’t think it is a matter of “rhotacism”, rather of relative sonority.”
In the case of carmen there seems to be an attested antecedent, OLat casmen. Does Baldi reference it? And by “relative sonority” you mean that Latin dissimilates contiguous resonants in the direction of greater sonority? ( r is more sonorous than n).
Vladimir, Lars: carmen, casmen
Baldi does not mention the -s- form at all.
In the history of French there are a few instances of r > s. Perhaps the best-known one is in the ‘doublet’ pair (la) chaire/chaise, from Lat cathedra ‘chair’ (seat).
The normal development is chaire, formerly meaning ‘chair’ (as borrowed into English) but nowadays meaning ‘(academic) chair’ and more commonly ‘pulpit’. Chaise was reported at one time as a local Parisian pronunciation of intervocalic /r/ as [z] (hence “Paris” as /pazis/), which was perhaps stigmatized and anyway did not survive in general speech, except for the one word (perhaps because this pronunciation allowed a disambiguation between the everyday ‘chair’ and the formal ‘pulpit’). In any case this change was the opposite of rhotacism.
Latin anima ‘breath, soul’ underwent competing changes on its way to Modern French. Attestations from the 1100’s are aneme, anme, arme. Modern âme, suggesting earlier /asme/ seems to be due to another instance of r > s. Using arme to mean ‘soul’ would have created ambiguity with the word meaning ‘weapon’. Similarly, some old texts suggest âbre ‘tree’ where the modern word is arbre, apparently a learned pronunciation after Latin arbor.
@Marie-Lucie
“Baldi does not mention the -s- form at all.”
Wiki: (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carmen) cansmen > casmen > carmen. This seems to agree with veternus < *vetesnus.
The fact that Baldi says that "the sequence nm is not permitted in Latin" suggests that sequence -nr- may not be permitted either, so once two rr's came in contact due to rhotacism the cluster quickly went through -nr- to -mr- choosing the next possible option on the sonority scale.
But mr is barely permitted any more than nr. (Both can be found occasionally in Classical Latin words, but only in compound words like inrado~irrado or circumrado). Regarding rhotacism in VsN environments, I’m wondering why it didn’t occur in “luna” < Old Latin "losna." Maybe it was voiceless because it was originally preceded by a consonant.
@Vladimir Diakoff:
I just checked a grammar of Oscan and Umbrian to try to see if there are any inscriptions that show the reflex of sr in these languages (unfortunately, I didn’t find any great examples; but the expected reflex -fr- has some possible examples) and it says that Umbrian had rhotacism of intervocalic s, and in some cases final s, but it retained the intervocalic clusters sn sm rs. So there is absolutely no reason to suppose that rhotacism of intervocalic s implies rhotacism of s in any other cluster, such as -sr-, in Latin.
Umbrian also has extensive examples of f descending in other cases from etymological s of some sort: original final -ns becomes f, medial -nss- (corresponding to Latin -ns-) from earlier -ntt- or -nts- becomes f, medial -rss- (corresponding to Latin -rs-) from earlier -rtt- or -rts- becomes rf.
https://archive.org/details/grammarofoscanum00buckuoft
I wonder where the -s- in *cansmen came from when the verb is just cano — but that makes the example irrelevant for the putative -nm- -> -rm- dissimilation. Lewis & Short confer it with censeo instead of cano.
How about germen from *genh₁men, then? No -s- there that I can see, but does the laryngeal mess up things? (Side form genimen according to wikipedia).
One of Kloekhorst’s arguments is IE *ok’to:/*h3ekteH3 ‘eight’ that gives *asta in Skrt, not aksa’ as Schindler’s solution predicts.
Trouble is, there’s no “thorny” cluster in ‘eight’. Schindler’s solution deals with T(s)K, not with original KT.
What’s your source?
Hittite dictionaries and text collections, where the word is shown in a context (many times). It may mean ‘leap up into something’, ‘jump out of somewhere’ (sometimes = ‘flee from a place’, but also used of a bull’s penis becoming erect), ‘rise’ (of a star in the sky), or ‘leap upon’ (of an animal in sexula excitement). It’s never used of water, as far as I can see.
sexula –> sexual
@Eli Nelson
Thanks for the research!
“So there is absolutely no reason to suppose that rhotacism of intervocalic s implies rhotacism of s in any other cluster, such as -sr-, in Latin.”
I also read around a bit more and as far as I can tell Italic evidence is inconclusive all around. On the one hand, it looks like rhotacism happened at different times in different branches of Italic: Oscan is most conservative and doesn’t have it; Umbrian has it independently of Latin; Latin rhotacism is relatively late).
There’s an account (http://wolfgang.demelo.de/faliscan/5_phonology.pdf) that shows that s > z > r happened in latin not only between vowels and before nasals but also before voiced consonants (Lat mergo ~ Skrt majjami).
“Umbrian also has extensive examples of f descending in other cases from etymological s of some sort.”
Umbrian f corresponds to Lat b (and Umbrian b to Latin f), so this doesn’t clarify much. I assume you didn’t see any examples of a dental in Italic dialects (such as th) that corresponds to s in Oscan and to b in Latin.
Vladimir: veternus < *vetesnus.
I guess “vetesnus” is not attested in the Latin corpus. Baldi (p. 226) quotes Priscian who gives veter as an analogical formation instead of vetus ‘old, ancient’ (gen. veteris). So veternus must be just veter-n-us.
Eli: “luna” < Old Latin "losna."
Baldi (p. 172) mentions “losna” as “Praen.”, indicating that the form comes from the Praenestine Fibula, which according to him was a 19C forgery (p. 125-126, fn. 2). He does mention PF forms in the text because he says that this object is often cited as a source of older Latin, but he does not include it in his own list of Latin inscriptions.
The Latin word has a long vowel, so lu:na. Years ago I was taught that it came from *luks-na, but I wonder if *lu:k-na would make more sense, since the s is a suffix, like -na. Lu:men seems to be an instance of the same structure, possibly *lu:k-men. The root is lu:k- as in lu:c-e:re ‘to shine’ and lu:x, lu:cis : *lu:k-s, *lu:k-is ‘light’. Baldi cites cognates of lu:k- in Goth liuhath (th = theta, thorn), Lith lau:kas ‘pale’, from PIE *leuk- ‘shine’.
The prototype is *louk-s-nah₂-, cf. Slavic *luna ‘light in the sky’ (hence Russ. luna ‘moon’), Old Prussian lauxnos ‘the stars’, Av. raoxšna- ‘radiant’ (as in the name Roxana, Alexander the Great’s Bactrian wife).
And compare An Lushan, whose given name was probably Rokhshan.
Piotr: “moon”
Thank you. I suppose the letter “x” in the Old Prussian and Avestan transcriptions means ks then, not the velar fricative, so my suggestion was wrong (Baldi did not mention the topic at all), but I have two questions: 1) what was the function of -s-, and 2) why did Slavic lose both consonants?
@Marie-Lucie
“I guess “vetesnus” is not attested in the Latin corpus. Baldi (p. 226) quotes Priscian who gives veter as an analogical formation instead of vetus ‘old, ancient’ (gen. veteris). So veternus must be just veter-n-us.”
I don’t know whom to trust. Some old dictionaries list vetesnus as an actual form. Next to Minesva (> Minerva), hodiesnus (> hodiernus), and casmen (> carmen). There are also words that seem to show the transition in question because they have parallels outside of Latin (e.g., verna ‘slave’ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verna).
Plus now the new evidence that s > r even before voiced consonants (see above re: Lat merga).
There’s another recent paper that challenges the very notion of rhotacism for Latin. So I have to study it in depth. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.225.8217&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I’m not Piotr, but “x” in Old Prussian is [ks] (Old Prussian was basically written down by German-Speakers), while in Avestan it’s [x] (fricative). Proto-Slavic basically lost any consonant that was not in a syllable onset (the so-called law of open syllables); the only clusters in Proto-Slavic were those that were allowed in syllable onsets (e.g. stop + liquid, /s/ + stop (+ liquid), etc. So the syllable boundary of whatever bacame of *louks=nah₂ in Proto-Slavic was probably such that only /n/ was in the onset.
And the structure of lūmen is indeed similar: *léuk-s-mn̥. Germanic has similar derivatives of the basic root without the s-extension, e.g. *léuk-mon- (m.) ‘radiance, beam of light’ (ON ljómi, OE lēoma, which survived into Modern English as northern or Scots leam, leme).
The deletion of pre-Latin *ks (of various origin) before sonorant consonants — with compensatory effects — is the source of some of the strangest corresponcdences between latin and the rest of IE. For example *wéǵʰ-tlom ‘propelling device’ > *wékslom > vēlum ‘sail’ (cf. Slavic *veslo ‘oar’). Note that vexillum ‘standard’ (originally diminutive) shows the /ks/ because the first *l had become syllabic (*wekslelo- > *weksl̥₂lo-) by the time the cluster-simplifying rule began to operate.
Thank you both, Hans and Piotr. Interesting that Slavic lost syllable-final clusters but (at least in the North varieties) ended up with heavy word-initial clusters!
I still wonder what the -s- is for.
@marie-lucie: Baldi (p. 172) mentions “losna” as “Praen.”, indicating that the form comes from the Praenestine Fibula, which according to him was a 19C forgery
The full text of the Praenestine Fibula (which we discussed briefly in this thread; it’s probably not a forgery) is four words, MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI “Manios made me for Numasios”. Baldi’s “Praen.” must mean Praenestine Latin, the dialect of Praeneste (modern Palestrina), a variety of Latin which was seen as aberrant at least into the time of Plautus, who makes fun of it as such.
what was the function of -s-
A “root extension”, an obscure stem-forming element, presumably and old aspectual suffix, found with some roots (so-called s-presents). For example, we have *h₂aug- ‘grow, become strong’ beside *h₂weks- = *h₂weg-s- (same meaning), and *ǵnoh₃- ‘recognise’ (root aorist) beside *ǵnēh₃-s- (present, cf. Hitt. ganēszi). They seem to be somehow related to sigmatic aorists. We have no complete theory of such formations, but “we are working on it” (with renewed interest since Jay Jasanoff reopened the problem in 2003).
m-l,
The heavy consonant clusters in Slavic arose rather late as a result of massive vowel reductions (the schwa-like “yers”, reflecting pre-Slavic *i and *u were deleted in many positions. As a result, a modern Slavic onset often reflects two historical onsets, originally separated by a vowel.
Proto-Slavic was almost consistently an open-syllable language. Only the liquids *r and *l were allowed in coda positions (all obstruents were deleted there, more thoroughly than in French). Even so, during the first centuries after the disintegration of Proto-Slavic unity, there was a phonological conspiracy to get rid of those remaining codas by means of metathesis (West and South Slavic) or vowel epenthesis (East Slavic). All that was in vain, however, because weak vowels began to be dropped soon afterwards, causing the appearance of new codas. One could say that codas returned with a vengeance.
m-l: Proto-Slavic was entirely a CV language due to either loss of final consonants or the addition of epenthetic vowels, but when short /i/ and short /u/ were lost (the so-called “fall of the yers”), consonant clusters returned with a vengeance.
TR: Thank you, it is not clear in Baldi (or perhaps I missed something) but p. 168 there is “Praenestinian” (Pulgram’s name) included with Latin and Faliscan under “Latinian”, a sister to “Italic” (= Oscan + Umbrian). However, the name does not appear p. 169 on Pulgram’s classification of the descendants of Proto-Italic, or p. 170 in Coleman’s alternate classification. I guess then losna must be from Praenestinian, having lost the k but not the s of *leuk-s-nah.
Thank you Piotr too.
@Eli Nelson
“But mr is barely permitted any more than nr.”
This makes it all the more likely for -rr- to shift to -mr- and then rather easily to -br-. We do have a seemingly good example of mr > br medially (gheimrinos > hibernus, Gk kheimerinos, Pokorny, 632).
Vladimir: <ivetesnus/veternus, Minerva/Minesva, etc
So s > r and r > s both seem possible, but probably in different dialects, perhaps also happening through some analogical reformation (cf Priscian quote) or hypercorrection, something which makes it difficult to reconstruct a direction of change. Note that intervocalic s to r probably was [z] rather than [s].
Vladimir: We do have a seemingly good example of mr > br medially (gheimrinos > hibernus, Gk kheimerinos, Pokorny, 632).
Sure, and this example is not the only one, but nothing indicates that -mr- was originally -rr-. A change -ml- > -bl> is also attested in some languages, but similarly does not go back to *-ll.
Piotr, JC: That’s why I used ended up with initial clusters. I did not mean to suggest that the appearance of initial clusters occurred at the same time as the loss of final ones, or shortly afterwards, as some sort of compensation!
@Marie-Lucie
“but nothing indicates that -mr- was originally -rr-.”
For sure… hibernus is not evidence for that. It’s evidence for a rule that once -mr- emerged medially it shifted to -br-. For me, transition sr > rr and mr > br are based on facts and rr > mr is based on logic.
“A change -ml- > -bl> is also attested in some languages, but similarly does not go back to *-ll.”
That’s true but we don’t have any -bl- examples where -bl- in Latin corresponds to -sl- elsewhere. But I agree the expectation is that ml clusters behave just like mr clusters. And they do indeed word-initially.
John Cowan, Marie-Lucie: Proto-Slavic ultimately became a perfect “open-syllable language” (via the elimination of /r/ and /l/ in coda positions, as Piotr pointed out above: there are a few Slavic loanwords in neighboring languages which pre-date this change, incidentally) but never was a perfect CV language: the consonant cluster in Polish “stać”, “to stand”, for example, goes right back to an initial /st/ cluster in Proto-Indo-European, just like the same cluster in English “stand” or Latin “stare”.
So while some word-initial consonant clusters in Modern Slavic languages are secondary developments due to the fall of the jers, not all of them are.
Proto-Slavic allowed sT-, TR- and sTR-type onsets, like most other IE languages. Also when medial, they were not reduced, since they could always be syllabified with the following vowel.
Syllable final liquids were retained in some peripheral dialects, e.g. in the varieties of West Slavic spoken along the Baltic coast. Isolated examples can still be foud in Kashubian, e.g. karwa ‘cow’ (Pol. krowa, Russ. коро́ва, Czech kráva < *korva). Also, -gard ‘town’ is common in Pomeranian placenames (cf. Pol. gród, Russ. го́род, Czech hrad < **gordъ.
Dammit… *gordъ).
No time, just so much:
Old Prussian is generally reproduced as written in the original sources by speakers of German, complete with ck and all. (Only one of the surviving documents consistently marks vowel length, and if stress was predictable is entirely unknown.) There does not appear to have been a velar fricative in the sound system Avestan is given in a 19th-century transcription of the ruthlessly phonetic alphabet that was devised for it in antiquity; diacritic marks abound, and x is used for [x]: *ks > xš by RUKI rule and Iranian fricativization.
This happened within Old Latin: iūmentum is spelled IOVXMENTVM on some old stone in Rome.
I can only repeat myself now: rr is not a cluster. No, not even when it’s freshly emerging. It’s not a cluster; it’s a single long consonant. (Remember that Latin already had phonemic consonant length at this point.) You need to postulate that the dissimilation happened while the vowel between the two r’s was still there; later is too late.
Oops:
in the sound system [of Old Prussian]. Avestan is given
IOVXMENTVM
Yes, iouxmenta in the Lapis Niger inscription.
This is unrelated, but does anyone know of a resource that describes the development of CLOTH /ɔ/ from the LOT vowel before /l/ in some varieties of American English in words like “golf,” “solve,” “doll,” and as the final vowel of words like “alcohol, aerosol, parasol”? I’ve found the forms recorded in dictionaries, but no description of the sound change. All the descriptions of the CLOTH set I’ve found say it occurs before /f θ s/, for some speakers /ŋ ɡ/, in related words by analogy, and exceptionally in a few other words like “on,” “gone,” and “chocolate.” I also asked about it here, but nobody’s come up with anything yet: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303766/why-does-alcohol-end-with-ɔl-for-some-american-speakers-which-ones.
My impression is that /ɔː/ is more common, or traditional, in “alcohol” than in the other /l/ words. But in all of these cases, I think the cause is the velar influence of the following /l/ inducing rounding. There are even low-back merged speakers who have similar allophonic rounding of /ɑː/ before dark /l/.
As for whether this counts as part of the LOT-CLOTH split? I’ve always thought so – to me, that term is basically just a shorthand way of referring to cases where AmEng uses /ɔː/ in place of historical /ɒ/. The “true” LOT-CLOTH split found in BrEng ocurred only before voiceless fricatives and, uniquely, in “gone”; it was an AmEng innovation to expand the split to pre-velar environments and “on”. If those are considered part of the split, then I see no reason to the exclude pre-/l/ cases.
By the way, “on” and “gone” can make for good accent diagnostics. The (unmerged) Midlands use /ɔːn/, /gɔːn/, the North uses /ɑːn/, /gɔːn/, and NYC uses /ɑːn/, /gɑːn/.
One further oddity is that there are some cases where modern BrEng replaces historical /ɔː/ with /ɒ/, like “sausage”, “fault” and “Austria”.
PIotr: Lapis Niger
Thank you for mentioning this interesting object that I had never heard of.
Could its existence and probable use be related to those of the Arabian black stone in the Kaaba, as very ancient Mediterranean cult objects?
@David
“I can only repeat myself now: rr is not a cluster. No, not even when it’s freshly emerging. It’s not a cluster; it’s a single long consonant. (Remember that Latin already had phonemic consonant length at this point.) You need to postulate that the dissimilation happened while the vowel between the two r’s was still there; later is too late.”
I understand your point but the environment is so cluttered with dissimilation/assimilation opportunities (tenebrae, funebra, crabro, sobrinus, cerebrum, membrum, etc.) that for simplicity sake V(s)(r)V > V(r)(r)V should cover all of them. It’s possible that in every individual case the exact phonetic path was different (sobri:nus < somri:nus < sonri:nus, membrum < memrum < memrrum < memsrom, cerebrum < ceremrum < cerererum, etc.)
@Lazar:
That’s right; in fact, I just came across these words today while researching (they are mentioned in Piotr’s paper here: http://www.academia.edu/1504190/The_History_of_ɔ%CB%90_Is_There_Regular_Orthographically_Conditioned_Sound_Change). The shortening in “fault” and “Austria” seems fairly regular based on the phonetic environment (it also occurs in words like “vault” and “austere”) but “sausage” is anomalous.
@Vladimir:
“It’s possible that in every individual case the exact phonetic path was different” I don’t understand why you won’t accept an unconditional change of *sr to *θr because it’s too “ad hoc,” but you’re fine with postulating several different mechanisms for getting from *rr to *mr, when neither of these steps is even attested at all.
@Piotr, Jouna
“But since you mention *tekʷ-, it forms a reduplicated desiderative in Avestan, tixšəṇti. Now this form is likely to be old, and reflects PIE *tí-tkʷ-(h₁)s-n̥ti. What happened to the dental?”
I was waiting for you guys to figure this out, but since Jouna is silent, I will quote Dziebel who connects *tekw- ‘run, flow’ with IE *pet- ‘rush, fly, fall’ (Hitt piddai ‘run, flee, fly’, Gk petomai ‘fly’, poteomai ‘hover’, pipto ‘fall’, Skrt patati ‘flies, hastens, falls’, etc.) to arrive at *kwekw-. Reduplicated Greek pipto corresponds to reduplicated tixšəṇti to yield an all-labiovelar reduplicative *kwe-kwekwe- from which labial, dental or velar outcomes were generalized by the daughter languages. So, nothing happened to the dental, but in fact it’s the dental that evolved from *kw. (Just like in Hitt teka:n ‘earth’ that we discussed above.) The ablaut e/o that we see in both sets comes from the various leveling processes off of an ancient pattern whereby a consonant was followed by the “right” vowel: *kwe-, *po-, te-/ti-. He cites Lat coquo, Greek pesso, peptein but arto-kopos and Lith kepu ‘bake, cook’ as a model for this development as seen within the currently accepted (not his extended) cognate set. Take it or leave it but at least it seems to be a clear alternative to both Jouna’s and mainstream positions that seems to explain facts from the point of view of sound laws, not irregular processes.
@Eli Neslon
“but you’re fine with postulating several different mechanisms for getting from *rr to *mr, when neither of these steps is even attested at all.”
This is because a) the development is bookended by two well-known sound laws; b) the whole-world environment makes intermediate changes natural and very likely; c) there’s a parallel development in OEng swiri, which shows how another language with rhotacism treats the very same cluster as in sobrinus – no -sr- > -thr- transition; c) attestation is an issue for both approaches. The sr > thr transition, on the other hand, comes out of nowhere. Lat fri:gus ~ Gk ‘ri:gos is an odd couple because Lat tends to turn sl-, sr-, sn- into l-, r-, n-. I could understand it better if one argued that sr > str (like in Slavic or Germanic), but once you postulate this you never get br in Latin.
When things don’t come together nicely, the mind naturally seeks other options.
There’s an interesting reflex of IE *memsro- (membrum in Latin) in Slavic. It’s *menzdra ‘membrane, the inner thin layer of a hide’. It exists next to *menso- ‘meat’. The latter is clear, the former is a problem. Vasmer postulated a different suffix *-dhro- to account for it, so it’s *mens-dhro.
@David Marjanović: not that I think Diakoff’s *rr > *nr is plausible for Latin, but I don’t think it’s out of the question for a long consonant to mutate into a cluster of distinct consonants. Standard (ðəŋorban) Moro, as well as the neighboring ðəmwarəŋ proper dialect (of Ləbu Hill, while this is also the name for the Moro language as a whole), have *lː > <ld>.
Is this <ld> phonologically a cluster, and not just phonetically? All I can say is that this is not a kind of complex segment I’ve read about elsewhere. It doesn’t help that *ld, including across a morpheme boundary, has standardly become <ɽ>, apparently merging with *d and *ɽ. (ðt̪ogo(v)lːa in the northeast, the dialect I’ve personally worked on, keeps all three sounds distinct.)
There is some evidence that <ld> is at least along consonant, if not a cluster, for example compare *n(ə)-l(ə)-do ‘in a group, together’ > <ldəɽo> and *e-l(ə)-do ‘id.’ > <eɽo>, from the two different locative prefixes (roughly ‘on’ vs. ‘in’) + *l(ə)-do ‘group’ > <ɽo> (plural *ŋə-do > <ŋəɽo>). When the locative prefix is *n(ə)-, it assimilates to the consonant of the singular noun class prefix, which then contains a vowel (which seems to be present in proto-Heibanian), whereas the vowel of the noun class prefix is lost when there is no locative prefix or the locative prefix e-. I assume the vowel of the noun class prefix is not lost when preceded by a cluster or long consonant.
(ðt̪ogo(v)lːa: lːədo, e[ɹ]do, [ɹ]do, ŋədo.)
[ld] can be phonologically a cluster /ld/ or a singleton /ˡd/, much like nasal+homoörganic stop clusters.
ll > ld
There are a few examples in Spanish, at least these:
Lat cella ‘cell (eg of a monk)” > Sp celda
Lat pillula ‘pill’ > Sp pildora (stress on i)
Possibly, the “long consonant” is released as a stop.
Note that the ll > ld words would have been learned ones connected, one with religious life, the other with medicine, therefore not part of the everyday vocabulary of most speakers and for this reason perhaps enunciated more carefully than in normal speech.
This change was “sporadic” in Spanish, limited to a few words, whereas the usual outcome of Latin ll was ly, later y (as in tortilla). This has happened in most Spanish-speaking countries except parts of South America where Quechua, which has ly, here “palatal l“, is widely spoken. It means that the Spanish spoken at the time of the conquest still had ly, which bilingual Quechua speakers and their descendants were able to maintain in their Spanish.
I will quote Dziebel
Well, if it’s stronger than you…
I’m sure Dziebel can easily “connect” βρεκεκεκέξ κοὰξ κοάξ with cock-a-doodle-doo.
I will quote Dziebel …
The ubiquitous *kwekw again!
ll > ld
Also Kazakh and Kyrgyz, eg:
molla (=mullah) -> molda, moldo (kg, +rounding harmony)
For two phonemes from one (often geminate), compare Icelandic gull ‘gold’ (now with ll pronounced /tl/), or steinn ‘stone’ ( with /tn/) ; similar process in Manx ben ‘woman’ ( / bɛᵈn / ), though this at least used to be a single consonant.
George Gibbard: I don’t quite follow you: is this /ld/ < /lː/ actually attested in some dialects, or is it merely hypothetical? You don’t star it the first time, but do star it the second. Because if it’s hypothetical, it may just be someone’s explanation of how /lː/ > /ɽ/ because they think that sound-change is too bizarre to happen in one step. But if such things can happen in Austronesian, they can happen anywhere.
@anhweol – Also Eyjafjalla-you-know, with both intervocalic voiced and final devoiced versions of ll: [ˈeɪjaˌfjadlaˌjœːkʏtl̥] or something like that. (Wikipedia wants a [-tl-] in fjalla, but the voice clip doesn’t sound like that).
It strikes me that for sound-writing correspondence we have Welsh ll for [l̥], Spanish-devised tl for [l̥] as well (like in Nahuatl), and then Icelandic (historical) ll for [dl]/[tl̥]. Variety is the spice of life…
And that stop-to-unvoiced-nasal release in [staɪtn̥] took a bit of trial and error. I have a cold right now, and I was afraid to try at first!
I’ve wondered before, with changes of the /ll/ -> /tl/ type, if there wasn’t some intermediate stage where the liquid was first devoiced, at least in part, leaving behind a release of air that (also position-wise) was acoustically close enough to get reinterpreted as a dental stop.
@John Cowan: Standard Moro has maintained the protolanguage’s distinction between *lː and *ld, which go to [ld] and [ɽ] respectively.
minus273, thanks — what languages have /ˡd/? (Also are there languages with /dⁿ/?)
@elessorn, Icelandic intervocalic long L retains a voiced lateral in [-tl-] — the Log of course had spectrographic proof that it isn’t [-dl-] — so it seems a detour to posit devoicing there.
Southwestern Norwegian dialects also have -dl- < -ll-, e.g. fjedl “mountain”, adle “all”. This is believed to have been more widespread earlier.
The dialect of Western Telemark took it even further, > -dd-, fjadd, adde. I was going to provide a clip with the hostess of the national music award show this weekend, the folk singer Ingebjørg Bratland, but had no luck searching.
George: There are a lot in Sino-Tibetan, but unfortunately nobody has written about them in the context of phonology. I cited Zanskar Tibetan (Hoshi & Tondup Tsering 1978) in an article that is still under review. Also in Sino-Tibetan, they exist also in Rgyalrongic languages, unfortunately there is no specific discussion about it either. I have not heard nor heard about [dⁿ]; it is not as “natural” as prenasalized stops or prelateralized coronal stops, but why not.
George,
Some Australian languages (e.g. Aranda) have prestopped nasals, descended from long nasals, functioning as single phonemes. Adnyamathanha has allophonically prestopped nasals and laterals (several point-of-articulation flavours of each). Prestopped rhotics can also be found here and there.
In Europe, allophonically prestopped nasals and laterals occurred in monosyllabic words in Manx.
Thanks, guys! So /ˡd/ and /ᵈn/ do exist; are /lᵈ/ (as m-l suggests) and /dⁿ/ distinct logical possibilities?
Thie may or may not be relevant: the French name of Ariadne (the Minoan princess) is Ariane. I suppose that the cluster -dn- became -nn- and later just -n-: in Italian she is known as Arianna.
So /ˡd/ and /ᵈn/ do exist; are /lᵈ/ (as m-l suggests) and /dⁿ/ distinct logical possibilities?
Yes. Prestopped nasals and postnasalised stops contrast word-finally in some Aslian languages (e.g. Temiar). The former (widespread in the Aslian family) have developed from historical nasals, and the latter from stops. The contrast between them is a matter of the relative acoustic saliency of the oral and nasal phases, but also of voicing. Some dialects of Temiar show a curious flip-flop change: Proto-Aslian (voiced) nasals are reflected as voiceless prestopped nasals, and Proto-Aslian (voiceless) stops as voiced postnasalised stops.
See here, section 4.2.1 (pp. 183-184), keeping it in mind that Temiar has several dialects with different reflexes of the original series.
The Aranda consonant system is a thing of beauty. It’s even neater than Sanskrit.
TR: beautiful, but not easy to learn!
Piotr, TR, thanks!
@Piotr
“I’m sure Dziebel can easily “connect” βρεκεκεκέξ κοὰξ κοάξ with cock-a-doodle-doo.”
Yeah, that’s just not an argument. Earlier, you reconstructed téteḱ- ∼ *téḱts- → *títeḱ- ∼ *tíḱts- > *títek- ∼ *tíkt- → τικτ-ε- ∼ τικτ-ο-). I can’t even reproduce now the string of changes postulated by Schindler to connect Hitt te:kan to Slav *zem-.
@Marie-Lucie
“The ubiquitous *kwekw again!”
Why not? Greek has pipto and peptein – two different roots that sound very similar. Hittite has many reduplicatives such as hahaltana or even better laplappipan ‘eyebrow’, etc.
“ll > ld”
Nice discussion, thanks.
@George Gibbard
“not that I think Diakoff’s *rr > *nr is plausible for Latin, but I don’t think it’s out of the question for a long consonant to mutate into a cluster of distinct consonants.”
A thought/question: does accent play a role here? I mean can rr be a cluster if the preceding syllable is accented, but it’s a long consonant is the accent falls on the following syllable?
Since you’re addressing the question personally to me, I guess I have to say, I’m not familiar with such a concept, but do you have data that would support that distinction?
I think l is not r. I can’t put it in exact words, but I feel that l is more “stoppy”. It’s a special kind of d in a way that r is not. A simple timing can change l into ld, while no timing can change r into rd. r is not l-plus-some-coarticulation.
@George
Unfortunately, not. My knowledge of languages is limited. But intuitively I felt that an accent falling on the preceding syllable would make rr more of a cluster, while an accent placed on the subsequent syllable would make a speaker merge rr into one long sound.
If others have anything to add, that’s great. I didn’t mean to address my question it only to George.
Earlier, you reconstructed téteḱ- ∼ *téḱts- → *títeḱ- ∼ *tíḱts- > *títek- ∼ *tíkt- → τικτ-ε- ∼ τικτ-ο-).
This is pretty far from what I actually reconstructed, but never mind. The point is that I posited nothing ad hoc. The forms of *téḱ- I discussed represent familiar, well-established and well-understood reduplication patterns, and therefore do not call for a special justification. They come free of charge with the rest of known IE morphology. Schindler’s metathesis is a regular sound change, whose stages are parallelled by other Indo-European developments (the realisation of *-t-t- as *[-tst-]) and cross-linguistic preferences (TP and TK clusters disfavoured in comparison with PT and KT). It accounts for regular correspondences between T+K in Anatolian on the one hand, and Skt. kṣ, similar Iranian outcomes, and Gk. KT on the other.
By contrast, Dziebel-style derivations crucially depend on special pleading, ad hoc developments, and Rube Goldberg contraptions. In historical linguistics, it’s the hallmark of crackpottery. I have devoted some time to refuting that rubbish, but since this thread is already too long, I refuse to play this game any longer.
@Piotr
Don’t take me wrong – I can see that you know Indo-European material very well, you read a lot and your thoughts are backed by data. I’ve learned from you! However, you also bring arrogance into the conversation. I honestly don’t understand why you call what Schindler proposed “regular” (and philosophically you even deny strict regularity) but you are entitled to your opinion. I strongly disagree with your attitude of trying to shoot down anything Dziebel or Pyssalo or whoever else proposed ex cathedra and using language and tone that’s quite shocking. What I like about web forums is an opportunity to think openly about problems and to hear different opinions. I understand that I’m an amateur and don’t have commitments to academic schools of thought. But as a human being I can tell you: if you are angry, it means you are wrong.
However, you also bring arrogance into the conversation.
Piotr is not in the least arrogant; if he were, he would never have engaged with you in the first place. It’s a rare professional who will take the trouble to discuss their specialty with amateurs, since it’s a draining and frustrating process, and I’m amazed (and grateful, since I’ve learned a lot) that he’s stuck it out this long. You’ve been quite polite throughout, which is admirable, but here you’re trying to have a triumphant last word with your condescending ” if you are angry, it means you are wrong.” No, he is not wrong, and you should rethink your approach.
Let’s say you’re a professional builder; you know your materials and their qualities inside out, and you’ve built many well-regarded houses. Now some guy who’s never done the work but loves wood and has lots of ideas comes up and says “Say, why do you have to do it that way? Why can’t you just stick this into that and put the other thing on top of them and save a lot of time and money?” And the builder says “Because X, Y, and Z.” “Huh, you’re right, that’s a problem. But what about this other thing?” “No, that won’t work either, because [long, careful explanation].” “Interesting! But I still think you’re being too stick-in-the-mud; you could try blah-blah-blah…” Don’t you see how wearisome this becomes, and how inevitable it is that the professional is going to get tired of it and go do something more useful? Rather than sniping at Piotr, you should be grateful for his attempt to educate you; you might even try getting off your hobbyhorse and learning what he and others have been trying to get through your head, but I realize that’s probably too much to ask.
@Steve
I’m perplexed myself – Piotr was helpful on a number of occasions, he “did get through my head” and I did express my gratefulness to him. Maybe he’s an exception among linguists most of whom wouldn’t even talk to an engineer like me about linguistics. But both Pyysalo and Dziebel are trained professionals, so I’m still confused why Piotr is so dismissive of what they have to say. And dismissive is a “polite” way to translate some of Piotr’s expressions.
He’s dismissive because they’re wrong. He’s willing to be patient and helpful, but he’s not willing to pretend black is white. I’m sorry you’re so committed to their outsider views that you’re unwilling to face facts, but facts are facts.
He’s dismissive of them, they are dismissive of him and maybe of each other. All of them appeal to facts. I’m only asking to be polite and stay cool. Anyways, I think we’re all tired of this long string. My apologies if I interfered in a debate without understanding all the academic politics behind it. Thanks Steve for moderating. Best of luck to all.
Vladimir,
I’m prepared to take German Dziebel seriously as an anthropologist — that’s the area in which he has received professional training. But he isn’t a linguist, let alone an Indo-Europeanist, and even if he has brushed arms with some linguists it’s painfully obvious that his linguistic speculation is amateurish. There’s nothing wrong with being an autodidact. I know several people who aren’t professional linguists but are knowledgeable and smart enough to engage in discussions at a professional level and contribute interesing ideas. But I have yet to see such a contribution from German Dziebel. As for Jouna Pyysalo, what exactly makes him a trained expert? “Publish or Perish” records 3 publications by him, one of them cited once (by Jouna Pyysalo himself). Not much impact for a professional. And I’d rather not return to the quality of his PhD thesis — let’s draw the curtain of mercy over it.
Still, I don’t dimiss what either of them says based on their formal credentials or publication record. I judge it on its own merit (or lack thereof), and I have done my best, in this thread, both to justify my dismissal and to show you how historical linguistic analyses should be done. Sorry if you find my calling a spade a spade “shocking”.
As for regularity: I rejected Jouna’s claim that sound change is mechanically regular like the laws of physics. This doesn’t mean that I reject the expectation of regularity and its heuristic value. We would not be able to distinguish genetic relationships from chance similarity if it were not for systematically recurring regular correspondences. Let’s suppose that someone claims that Lat. deus and Gk. θεός must be related because they mean the same and sound almost the same. But since the intuitively proposed relationship violates the known correspondence patterns in several ways, we have to play by the rule: we reject it as unlikely, declare our initial hypothesis falsified, and continue looking for more satisfactory etymologies (eventually concluding that deus is related to δῖος and Ζεύς, and θεός to fās and fānum). We would never have discovered these connections if we had been content with superficial similarity of sound and meaning, and waved aside the formal mismatch, saying, “Oh, come on, sound change doesn’t have to be regular; it’s semantics that really matters.”
Piotr’s last paragraph is such a great summation of the most basic truth of historical linguistics that it alone makes the whole thread worth it.
I second this!
Piotr,
Let me tell you why I’m attracted to Dziebel’s and Pyysalo’s perspectives. And I’m not at all dismissing yours – I’m trying to extract a grain of truth from everybody. Dziebel is not just an anthropologist and hence non-linguist by definition. He is an anthropologist who’s done work on kinship terms, which has been a “contested territory” between linguists and anthropologists for decades. So whose “turf” it is hasn’t been clear from the very beginning. He is calling a shovel is a shovel on Indo-Europeanists’ etymologies such as “one’s own woman”, “carrier of fire”, etc. And, as Marie-Lucie noted, linguists don’t have a theory of semantics, so they can’t claim that they are experts on it. But semantics is part of every single word, so linguists are leaving out an important component. Dziebel represent a tradition of research and thinking, which linguists just don’t study, and hence their etymologies look amateurish and folkish to an anthropologist such as Dziebel.
As for Pyysalo, I’m plowing my way through his thesis and it looks like he’s trying to be faithful to Neo-Grammarian principles and rejects what he perceives as the deviations from those principles in 20th century linguistics (arguably, not the best century for any historical discipline). And the deviations are the creation of a forest of abstract laryngeal symbols, only a small number of which are actually attested in Hittite. This is also the position of Moscow linguists led by the late George Starostin and composed of such established authorities as Vladimir Dybo and others. So, Pyysalo is not alone. Szemerenyi, Pyysalo, and the Russians may represent an “Eastern European” school of Indo-European reconstructions. (Poles are notorious for leaning “western” – please take it as a good-natured joke.) So, again, there’s some collective wisdom behind it.
I don’t know exactly what Pyysalo would say but your example with δῖος and Ζεύς, vs. Greek θεός and Lat fās and fānum is great and has definitely made it into textbooks. But Gk θεός, Lat fās and fānum is a very isolated isogloss. Why is not attested broader? There’s a change of meaning between “god” and “temple,” “festivity” and no semantic overlap between the two sets of cognates (as close as they are semantically). Greek already inherited the PIE word for ‘god’… why create another one? What happened to -s- in fānum (why not fernum**) and why is the vowel coloring change between fānum and feriae, festus?
On the Latin side:
(1) fās ‘religious law’ (indecl.) < *θas < *dʰ(ə)h₁s-;
(2) fēriae ‘holidays’ < *θēz-iā < *dʰeh₁s-ijah₂;
(3) fēstus ‘festive’ < *θēs-to-s < *dʰeh₁s-to-s;
(4) fānum ‘temple’ < *θaznom < *dʰ(ə)h₁s-no-m.
Notes: (1) is a root noun with a generalised zero grade (as with most other CVCC roots) and analogical nom.sg. lengthening. The development of *-Vzn- into Latin -V̄n- is regular. Rhotacism did not happen in this context. Cf. Lat. a(h)ēnus ‘brazen, made of bronze’ : Umbrian ahesnes (abl. pl.); Lat. cānus ‘grey’ (of hair) < *kazno- (related to English hare), etc.
On the Greek side:
(1) θέσ-φατος ‘announced by the gods, oracular’ < *dʰ(ə)h₁s- ‘ritual, oracle, divine order’;
(2) θεός ‘god, divinity’ < tʰehós < *dʰ(ə)h₁s-ó-s ‘connected with religious ritual’.
Notes: The root noun (1) is preserved in compounds. (2) is an ex-adjective substantivised as a masculine noun. Mycenaean te-o can only stand for tʰehós and rules out all other potential sources of Ancient Greek θ-, namely *dʰw-, *gʷʰ-, *gʰw-, and *ǵʰw-; all of them would have yielded other Linear B representations.
*dʰeh₁s- is in all likelihood a secondary root which arose as an extension of *dʰeh₁- ‘place, establish, lay down, perform’; possibly an old present stem derived from the root aorist (though such s-presents, mentioned earlier in this thread, are a shadowy and little-known category).
*dʰeh₁- is of course one of the most widespread IE roots.
Sorry for minor editing issues. I hope the post is legible.
…he’s trying to be faithful to Neo-Grammarian principles and rejects what he perceives as the deviations from those principles in 20th century linguistics (arguably, not the best century for any historical discipline)
Earth to Jouna:
The 1870s are over. Tocharian, Anatolian and Mycenaean Greek, unknown to the Neogrammarians, were discivered in the course of the 20th century. Scores of previously unidentified language families have been discovered and studied since the heyday of the Neogrammarian movement. With the advent of modern sociolinguistics in the mid-20th century language change began to be studied as an ongoing process (in real and apparent time). Dialectology and sociolinguistics are now being integrated with historical linguistics into a general theory of language change (in which the social context plays a great role). Historical linguistics is not “the queen of linguistic studies”, but it’s a thriving discipline. A lot of progress has been achieved in Indo-European studies not just in the 20th century but in recent decades. Pyysalo should go out a little more and confront his views with those of other people at conferences etc.
And the deviations are the creation of a forest of abstract laryngeal symbols, only a small number of which are actually attested in Hittite.
There are just three of them in the mainstream version of the laryngeal theory. Two of them have direct consonantal reflexes in Anatolian. So, in your opinion, “two out of three” = “a small number out of a forest”, right?
Sorry for minor editing issues. I hope the post is legible.
I bolded a couple of forms where your style seems to require it; let me know if there’s anything else.
There’s an accidentally duplicated gloss in the last-but-one paragraph, if you’re so kind. Thanks!
Done!
Thanks again! May all blogs have such hosts!
a forest of abstract laryngeal symbol
It is nothing but Indo-Europeanist caution and conservatism that prevents them from being notated as *h *x *xʷ like normal proto-phonemes; otherwise they are no more abstract than *b *d *g.
Thanks Piotr. Quick question: What’s that shwa-looking sign in your reconstructions (ə). Wasn’t it replaced with H2 in the laryngeal theory?
A non-phonemic prop vowel which surfaces as Latin /a/ (or the result of laryngeal vocalisation, if you prefer). I could have omitted it, but I’d have had to explain in what positions laryngeals left vocalic reflexes in Latin.
P.S. And it’s *h₁ here, not *h₂. Latin isn’t Greek; it doesn’t have different syllabic reflexes of the three laryngeals in this position.
It is nothing but Indo-Europeanist caution and conservatism that prevents them from being notated as *h *x *xʷ like normal proto-phonemes…
It’s mostly lack of precise information (hence caution). The third laryngeal seems to have been voiced, but not necessarily rounded (the *Kʷ series had no colouring effect in PIE). Also, opinions vary as regards the exact place of articulation of the secod and third “laryngeals”.
Is there any evidence apart from the “drink” verb that the third laryngeal was voiced? That’s the sole datum I’ve ever seen used to support that idea, and it’s a strong one, but it would be nice to have more.
Well, IPA orthodoxy is to use the simplest and most usual symbols as phonemes if you have a choice, so /e/ rather than /ɛ/ if you have only one front mid vowel, and a fortiori /x/ rather than /ɣ/. Naturally, this isn’t always done: I always think it’s bizarre when John Wells writes DRESS as /dres/ when it is by no means [dres], but I understand where he’s coming from.
“Prop vowel”?
I once saw a paper by Reynolds et al., which claimed that the PIE laryngeals were phonetically vowels. I didn’t read it. Does anyone know what that was about?
@Piotr
“A non-phonemic prop vowel which surfaces as Latin /a/ (or the result of laryngeal vocalisation, if you prefer). I could have omitted it, but I’d have had to explain in what positions laryngeals left vocalic reflexes in Latin.”
It’s a little fuzzy for me here. I’d reconstruct fa:num < *feH2znom, *fa:s < *feH2s- because H2 is an a-coloring laryngeal in Latin or Greek.
BTW, how would you reconstruct Gk theios 'divine': *dheHios < *dhesios or *dheiHos < *dheisos?
"θεός ‘god, divinity’ < tʰehós < *dʰ(ə)h₁s-ó-s"
Why it's -e- in Greek and not -e:- considering that H1 is an e-coloring laryngeal? Is it because it's between consontants? If yes, what's another example when e does not lengthen next to H1 in Greek?
"θεός ‘god, divinity’ < tʰehós < *dʰ(ə)h₁s-ó-s ‘connected with religious ritual’."
Unlikely semantically. I can't imagine the concept of "god" emerging from the concept of "ritual" and not the other way around.
"*dʰeh₁- ‘place, establish, lay down, perform’"
Same here. A sudden emergence of a religious concept in Latin and Greek (and only there) from a very general profane concept is not an easy semantic transition to believe in.
@Piotr
“Two of them have direct consonantal reflexes in Anatolian.”
I don’t know whom to blame – myself or Indo-Europeanists. I’m perplexed by the very basic stuff: AFAIK, Hittite has only one consonant H where such representative Indo-European languages as Greek and Latin have /a/ or /o/. So, H2 and H3 are represented by just one sign in Hittite. H1 has no direct reflex in Hittite. What am I getting wrong?
“A sudden emergence of a religious concept in Latin and Greek (and only there)”
Sorry, Arm. dik’ ‘gods’ (< *dheH1s-?) belongs here as well, although k' in Armenian usually represents cluster *sw and not *s.
Lotsa questions here.
TR: [additional evidence for the third laryngeal being voiced]
There’s also voicing before the Hoffman suffix *-H(o)n-,cf.
http://langevo.blogspot.com/2013/06/wild-waters.html
The etymological identification of the Hoffman “suffix” with the root *h₃onh₂- ‘load, charge’ (Birgit Olsen) is quite generally accepted today.
There’s also Anatolian evidence that PA had two “laryngeal” phonemes, a fortis one (reflecting *h₂) and a lenis one (reflecting *h₃ or positionally lenited *h₂); they are treated differently in the Anatolian languages. Melchert symbolises them as *H (fortis) and *h (lenis) in his Anatolian Historical Phonology.
John Cowan: Prop vowel?
Vocalic epenthesis breaking up a difficult consonant cluster(a.k.a. a vocalised or syllabic laryngeal, or “schwa primum”). As far as we can see, the only place where this happened already in PIE was in some word-initial clusters. In other positions, laryngeals could be “vocalised” at a later date in some of the individual daughter languages.
Y: [laryngeals as vowels]
They are syllabified like consonants (e.g. blocking Brugmann’s Law in Indo-Iranian; they are reflected as true consonants in Anatolian; they are capable of causing assimilatory voicing and aspiration; they pattern with consonants phonotactically in PIE roots; they cause compensatory lengthening only when lost postvocalically in coda positions. There’s no way vowels could cause all these effects.
Vladimir:
[reflexes of vocalised laryngeals in Greek and Latin]
They must be distinguished from reflexes of full *e coloured by an adjacent second or third laryngeal (the first one was “neutral”). Only in Greek are the epenthetic vowel coloured as well (“the triple reflexes of vocalised laryngeals”). In word-initial *dʰh₁s-, the vocalised laryngeal becomes a in Latin and e in Greek. The corresponding full grade *dʰeh₁s- would have become ē in both languages. It’s actually attested in Latin.
[one laryngeal in Hittite]
The Anatolian languages have reflexes of two laryngeal phonemes (see above), just as they differentiate fortis and lenis stops (although it wasn’t easy with the spelling system they adopted).
@Vladimir Diakoff:
For the transition “lay down, establish” to “religious ritual”, we could compare Old Norse lagu, “law”, derived ultimately from proto-Germanic *lagjanan, “to lay, to put”, or Old English gesetnes, “law, ceremony, religion”, from settian, “to set down, to fix in place, to establish”.
As for “θεός ‘god, divinity’ < tʰehós “focus of religious ritual” -> “god”?
I’m not quite sure what to make of “I can’t imagine the concept of “god” emerging from the concept of “ritual” and not the other way around”. It’s not that the concept of god arises from ritual — rather, it’s a word signifying “connected with religious ritual” narrowing its semantic range so as to apply more specifically to the pre-existing concept of “god”.
Am I behind the times again, or doesn’t god itself originate as either “that to which is poured out” or “that which is invoked”?
Something that belongs with my previous comment, but I somehow forgot to say: the semantic progression “connected to religious ritual” -> “focus of religious ritual” -> “god” seems like a very natural one to me.
I’m not quite sure what to make of “I can’t imagine the concept of “god” emerging from the concept of “ritual”
Think of “god” as “the worshipped one”. As there is an established PIE word for “god”, namely *deywo-, it is clear that θεός is an innovation, that perhaps started as euphemism.
Am I behind the times again, or doesn’t god itself originate as either “that to which is poured out” or “that which is invoked”?
These are two ideas that have been forwarded, yes. The problem with *ǥuđa- being the “invoked” one is that the root “call” is nowadays normally reconstructed with a final laryngeal *g’hweH- / *g’hewH- (LIV 180/181), which would have given *ǥu:đa-. For the link to PIE “pour”, besides “that to which is poured out” I’ve also seen it explained as “cast (out of metal), idol”.
Yes, and it was also neuter in early Germanic — thus still in Old English and Old Norse when used generically, not as the name of the Christian god. If it reflects *ǵʰu-tó- from *ǵʰeu- ‘pour’, the original meaning was more probably ‘oblation, liquid sacrifice’ (= Ved. hutá-). I suppose the shift of meaning would have been easier in the plural/collective: ‘religious libations’ > ‘the divinities to whom the drinks are offered’.
I can’t imagine the concept of “god” emerging from the concept of “ritual” and not the other way around.
You do realize that what you can or can’t imagine has nothing to do with the alleged ironclad scientific exceptionless laws of semantics you claim to be following, don’t you? (I leave aside the fact that such laws of semantics are impossible, because if you can’t see that for yourself there’s no way I’m going to convince you.)
@Matt et al.
“For the transition “lay down, establish” to “religious ritual”, we could compare Old Norse lagu, “law”, derived ultimately from proto-Germanic *lagjanan, “to lay, to put”, or Old English gesetnes, “law, ceremony, religion”, from settian, “to set down, to fix in place, to establish”.”
In the absence of a semantic theory (and a desire to develop one to keep our thinking on track), it’s a battle of opinions. I will cite Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (p. 231) re: *dheH1s- from *dheH1- ‘place, put, establish’ that says “the semantic connection is not overly compelling.” Neither it is to me. Typically, what makes a semantic connection compelling if there are transitional steps between the source meaning and the end meaning and/or enough semantic diversity to see an evolutionary path. Comp. another (regional) IE word for “god”: *bhago- ‘divide, distribute, enjoy’ (Avest baga ‘god’). The dheH1s- cognate set is very weakly attested (alternatively, its full cognate set may not have been circumscribed), hence its etymology looks forced.
@Hans
“Think of “god” as “the worshipped one”.”
I surely can think about it as a “worshipped one.” We just don’t have the verbal root “to worship” as part of this cognate set. I don’t doubt that “temple” and “festivity” and “god” are connected, but not in a causal fashion, but as descendants of a missing verbal or other kind of source root.
Again, some Indo-Europeanists are still not convinced that Gk theos has a good etymology. I’m most willing to agree that theos is connected to Lat fa:num, etc., but I wouldn’t use this cognate set to celebrate the power of the comparative method.
@Piotr
“In word-initial *dʰh₁s-, the vocalised laryngeal becomes a in Latin and e in Greek. The corresponding full grade *dʰeh₁s- would have become ē in both languages. It’s actually attested in Latin.”
Yes, I got it. Looks like *dʰeh₁s- is attested in Armenian as *di-k’ (comp. li < *pleH1to- 'full'). I also understand now the situation with 2 laryngeals in Anatolian. Thanks.
compare Old Norse lagu, “law”, derived ultimately from proto-Germanic *lagjanan, “to lay, to put” (rather, from the root lag-).
As in lay down the law? Or is that a coincidence?
And what about the -lVg- in the still disputed word religio (which I don’t see as meaning ‘link’).
No coincidence: lay down the law is a cognate object, like dance a dance, sing a song, live one’s life, dream a dream, though less obvious, both words being ultimately < PGmc *lagan, though lay is < the causative *lagjan. Note also statute < Lstatutum < statuere ‘set up’ (cf. statue) and G Gesetz < setzen ‘set, put’.
JC: lay down the law is a cognate object
So I was right about the link, but I did not think of the ‘cognate object’ pattern. Thank you for pointing it out!
Vladimir, I’ve done a bit of research at the Online Etymological Dictionary and developed a quiz for you. What do the following definitions have in common?
Give up? Well, here’s the solution (the final step in the series refers to a slang meaning that these words have in Australian English):
bracket < bragget, “architectural support” -> “typographical characters []/()” -> “anus”
Greek dactylos, “finger, toe” -> “date” (fruit) -> Latin dactylus, “date” -> Old French date -> English date -> “anus”
Old English dott, “speck, head of a boil” -> Modern English “dot” -> “anus”
“ginger” -> “anus”
Middle English quoit, “curling stone” -> Modern English quoit, “large ring for throwing in a game” -> “anus”
“bronze” -> “anus”
(See the recent Language Log post “Australian Dates” for further details)
Do you really think a theory of semantic change could be devised that would account for all of these developments in a non-ad-hoc manner? And if you’re really aiming at developing such a theory and actually testing your hypotheses, wouldn’t it be better to focus on semantic developments that are clearly attested, like these ones? There are plenty of languages and language families that have been written down for millennia, where there’s much less room for a battle of opinions about what a previous form of a word might have meant.
As for “laying down” the law, *dʰeh₁- is used in this sense too, also in Germanic. English doom < OE dōm ‘judgement, verdict’ (OHG tuom, ON dómr) < *dʰoh₁-mo-.
I would propose a link between Gk theos ‘god’, Arm di-k’ ‘gods’, Lat fās ‘religious law’, fēriae ‘holidays’, fēstus ‘festive’, fānum ‘temple’ and IE *dhweH1-/*dhwiH1-to-. OIr dwith ‘loss, destruction’, di:th ‘death’, OEng dwi:nan ‘pine, fade’, Arm di ‘dead body’, Goth afdauiþs ‘tortured’, dauþs ‘dead’, dauþus ‘death’, diwan ‘die’, Slav *daviti ‘press, strangle’, Avest dav ‘same’, Lat fu:nus ‘burial’.
So, basically Gk theos < *dhwesos, Lat fa:s < *dhweH1s-, fu:nus < *dhuH1snos, fe:riae < *dhwH1s-.
How does it look? In the very least, this illustrates the kind of cognate set we need to figure out the phonetics and the semantics. The connection between god, sacrifice, temple and ritual is bulletproof strong semantically.
Sorry, Gk theos < *dhweH1sos
As for “laying down” the law, *dʰeh₁- is used in this sense too, also in Germanic.
And in Greek, νόμον τιθέναι; though not in Latin where the idiom is legem ferre, not facere.
Thanks for the pointer to your Hoffman suffix point, Piotr! Quite the education, this thread is.
(point –> post)
Thanks, Piotr. I thought that article better have had some strong arguments for trying to upend the reconstruction so radically, but as I said I haven’t read it.
Sorry, Gk theos < *dhweH1sos
Impossible. The word occurs in Mycenaean texts, and is spelt te-o there. The Linear B representation of the Mycenaean reflex of *dʰw(e)h₁sos would be *twe-o or *tu-we-o.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B
@Piotr
“The word occurs in Mycenaean texts, and is spelt te-o there.”
Then, pre-Mycenaean theos < *dhweH1sos, no?
The point being we don’t really know when the *dwV- > dV- change occurred in the history of Greek. But judging by Gk de:ron ‘long’ (< *dFaron, Arm erkar, but unattested in Myc) theos can derive from *dhFesos.
Oh, God. I give up.
Oh, *dhweH1-s-, looks like I’m on the right track! He gave up! 🙂
Vladimir: I think you are misunderstanding the situation.
@Marie-Lucie
I think I get it. But I also have common sense and a sense of humor.
Vladiimir: good for you!
Common sense, alas, is not what’s needed here, professional knowledge is. Piotr has it and you don’t.
@languagehat
“Common sense, alas, is not what’s needed here, professional knowledge is. Piotr has it and you don’t.”
It should be a combination of both. It takes some common sense to present an educated critique constructively and rationally, rather than emotionally and prohibitively. I answered Piotr’s question to the best of my ability and I don’t see what’s wrong with it. “Oh, my God” does not help me here.
Nothing helps you, since you are more interested in your preconceived notions than in the facts Piotr has been so patiently trying to explain.
As a side note, this thread is by far the longest in LH history; the previous champion was “A Draft of Mandelstam,” with 752 comments.
@languagehat
“Nothing helps you, since you are more interested in your preconceived notions than in the facts Piotr has been so patiently trying to explain.”
With all due respect, Steve, but pre-conceived notions are all Piotr’s (they are in textbooks). Mine are about bringing new facts to the conversation. I can still be wrong, but I can’t be wrong for a wrong reason.
Not really clear; in “Toward a Hittite historical grammar”, Kloekhorst recently suggested that certain plene spellings like e-eš-zi should be interpreted as reflecting a glottal stop, i.e. ʔe-es-zi for */ʔest͡si/. Also, a recent paper that I don’t have access to argued that the two “Luwian” “hieroglyphs” that were previously both read as a are actually a and ʔa, respectively, the latter directly reflecting *h₁.
You can stop obsessing about “carrier of fire”. 🙂 Szemerényi is dead, and nobody else seems to have upheld this hypothesis.
As for “one’s own woman”, I’m afraid that makes a lot of sense in such a patriarchal culture. But while it’s clear that *ser- “woman” is part of *swesōr, that doesn’t require that the *swe- part is the well-known pronoun. Perhaps it’s (a remnant of) an older word for “sister”, to which *ser- was later added for disambiguation; or perhaps the whole word *swesōr has been deformed by folk etymology (as “one’s own woman”) of an earlier word that was unrelated to either “self” or “woman”. Who knows! External comparanda would be nice.
That doesn’t quite follow. They know enough about semantics to be able to show that the proposed theories of semantics all fail.
Well. Pyysalo takes Fick’s “principle” that if cognates can be found between two IE branches, they must be projected all the way back to PIE with all their detailed features – and adheres to it completely unthinkingly. In several of the examples, the “two branches” are actually just one branch, like Baltic and Slavic, or Indic and Iranian. Pyysalo further tries to take the exceptionlessness of the sound laws so far as to deny all analogy, claiming that there must have been less analogy in the distant past because the sound systems of the languages weren’t yet so eroded back then; this is just silly – PIE is nowhere near the origin of language!
I don’t know his position on this, assuming he has any, but he’s alive and well; his father Sergei is the one who died in 2005.
That’s wrong, and you know it.
@David
“Szemerényi is dead, and nobody else seems to have upheld this hypothesis.”
It doesn’t matter. This kind of etymologies keep popping up. It’s a systematic problem.
“As for “one’s own woman”, I’m afraid that makes a lot of sense in such a patriarchal culture. But while it’s clear that *ser- “woman” is part of *swesōr…”
IE *so:r- “woman” is too poorly attested (only in Anatolian compounds such as hassusara ‘queen’ and dubiously so) to be taken seriously as a PIE word for “woman” that made it into one of the most stable and wide-spread IE words.
“Who knows!”
Well, I’m afraid that’s not nearly enough.
“External comparanda would be nice.”
There very well may be the right “internal comparanda” within Indo-European. That’s why identifying the right cognate set is so critical.
“That doesn’t quite follow. They know enough about semantics to be able to show that the proposed theories of semantics all fail.”
This doesn’t make sense at all. You can argue against a theory only from the position of a different theory. If something doesn’t work, one needs to show what does. Otherwise, s/he doesn’t even understand the problem.
“I don’t know his position on this, assuming he has any, but he’s alive and well; his father Sergei is the one who died in 2005.”
Well, I guess I’m talking about Szemerenyi as if he were alive and about George Starostin as if he were dead. I meant Sergei Starostin. My bad.
“Pyysalo further tries to take the exceptionlessness of the sound laws so far as to deny all analogy, claiming that there must have been less analogy in the distant past because the sound systems of the languages weren’t yet so eroded back then; this is just silly – PIE is nowhere near the origin of language!”
I agree that Pyysalo is an extremist but he is right when he argues against interpretations such as Schindler’s treatment of thorn clusters that are too ornate to be compelling. He just doesn’t have a good solution himself, so he loses because he doesn’t win.
You can argue against a theory only from the position of a different theory.
Not so. To reject the theory that my keys are in my pocket, it suffices to check and see that they are not. I need not have a theory of where they actually are to achieve this.
@John Cowan
“Not so. To reject the theory that my keys are in my pocket, it suffices to check and see that they are not. I need not have a theory of where they actually are to achieve this.”
We can’t base the methodology of science on artificially created allegories.
You simply refuse to think about anything that might contradict your favored ideas; that is the very opposite of a scientific attitude.
No, we base it on the concept of falsifiability. There is no foundational problem in saying that we have no theory about something when all the theories we have been able to come up with fail to account for the facts.
If you insist on keeping a theory until a better one comes along, just to have one, you aren’t doing science.
It’s been clear for some time that he isn’t doing science; various kind people have been trying to educate him, but he has no interest in being educated. He is a missionary, not a seeker of truth.
@Lars
“There is no foundational problem in saying that we have no theory about something when all the theories we have been able to come up with fail to account for the facts.”
I’m not aware of any theory (or any systematic approach) of semantic structures for comparativist purposes. The problem is that not that all the theories have failed, but that no theory has been put forth. And it’s a job of science to put theories forth and then test them.
“If you insist on keeping a theory until a better one comes along, just to have one, you aren’t doing science.”
You are contradicting yourself: if you believe that falsifiability is a criterion of science, then you have to have a theory to be falsified. It may not be falsified in its entirety, so it can be optimized as we go along, but you got to have a theory. Otherwise, the route to folk etymologies is the only one available because there’s no semantic filter out there. Also, one shouldn’t have strong opinions about semantics (like Marie-Lucie sometimes does) unless some formal principles of semantic development are violated. It’s can’t be a subjective exercise and it can’t operate on as “incredulity argument.”
@languagehat
“He is a missionary, not a seeker of truth.”
I consider myself a seeker of truth. I don’t know what preconceived ideas I have exposed.
sister
I find *swesor* from *swe-sor* ‘own-woman’ quite unsatisfactory but I don’t know enough Indo-European to argue coherently.
Semantically, “sister” does not mean ‘independent woman’ but ‘female sibling’. Formally, I don’t think any other IE basic kinship term includes a possessive morpheme of any kind (unlike in some other languages). Instead, most of the other basic kin terms have a suffix compatible with -*ter. Next is the dubious identity of “sor” or “ser”.
On the other hand, an apparent or possible root or stem s-V-s occurs not only in sister and its close cognates but in several other IE languages.
Perhaps hatters more learned in the relevant languages and scholarship can offer comments.
@ m- l: I remember reading somewhere that *s(e?)w- originally meant “familiy, clan”, and that *swe/o- originally meant “belongig to ones clan”, whence “own”. So *swesor- would have been originally “woman belonging to one’s own clan”. Not that I really have an opinion on this; most of internal reconstruction is not really falsifiable.
@ Vladimir Diakoff: those who reconstruct a PIE *sor- “woman” normally also quote the female forms of the numerals “3” and “4” that are attested in Sancrit and Celtic, which go back to *tri-s(V)r- (for “3”) or similar.
IE *so:r- “woman” is too poorly attested (only in Anatolian compounds such as hassusara ‘queen’ and dubiously so) to be taken seriously as a PIE word for “woman” that made it into one of the most stable and wide-spread IE words.
Words for “woman” are quite frequently replaced, while “sister” is one of the more stable concepts. So there would be nothing strange if some stage of PIE the word for woman was used to form a word for sister (or to folk-etymologically influence a pre-existing form, as David proposed), and then was retained as a remnant in that word, while otherwise the word for woman was replaced by *g_wen-.
As i said, I’m not sold on *sor- woman, but I don’t think that your arguments are sufficient to dismiss it.
Hans: I’m not sold on *sor- woman, but I don’t think that your arguments are sufficient to dismiss it.
That’s why I want input from people who know more than I do! I am not dismissing it offhand (I am not competent to do so with my limited knowledge), but I would like to know more about the justification.
Anatolian compounds such as hassusara ‘queen’
What is the accepted analysis of this word?
About the female forms of the numerals “3” and “4” that are attested in Sanscrit and Celtic, which go back to *tri-s(V)r- (for “3”) or similar
Are these forms limited to females, to specifically women and girls (not animals), or are they used also with grammatically ‘feminine’ words?
Thank you in advance, Indo-Europeanists.
@Hans
“As i said, I’m not sold on *sor- woman, but I don’t think that your arguments are sufficient to dismiss it.”
My arguments are coming a bit too late in the game, when everyone is already used to this etymology. But it’s missing some basics (the word sor ‘woman’ is not attested in any IE branch), so it shouldn’t have stayed around that long.
“Words for “woman” are quite frequently replaced, while “sister” is one of the more stable concepts.”
Technically, yes, anything is possible, but trusting that time has graciously erased precisely the facts that we need in order to prove an etymology is like a benevolent conspiracy theory.
@Marie-Lucie
“What is the accepted analysis of this word?”
Hitt hassu- ‘king’, hassusara “queen’; isha ‘master’, ishassara ‘mistress’, Luwian nani(ya) is ‘brotherly’ (< *nana- 'brother' < *negna), nanasrai is 'sister'. So, *-sor is added to a masculine noun to create a feminine noun. In the case of *sweso:r, however, swe- is not 'brother'. Lat uxo:r 'wife' is often cited as also containing *sor- 'woman' but, again, *uk- is not 'husband'. There are no IE forms that even remotely resemble *swe-' 'brother' or *uk- 'husband'. Anatolian *sor- can easily be a feminine affix but it doesn't have to be a grammaticalized noun meaning 'woman'. This alleged source form is not attested even in Anatolian.
linguists don’t have a theory of semantics
This is a misleading way of putting it. There isn’t actually a qualitative difference between semantics and sound change in this respect. It’s not like we have a “theory of sound change” to which all proposed changes have to conform; what we have is an inventory of changes that we’re pretty sure have taken place in various languages. (We can then classify these and try to account for patterns, of course, and the same can be done in semantics.) The more a proposed sound change looks like one we already know, the easier it will be to believe in it. Semantics is basically the same, though the fact that there are more possible meanings than possible sounds makes it less likely that you’ll find an exact parallel for any specific change (and there are other differences, such as that directionality tends to be freer). The idea that we need to come up with a “theory of semantics” before we can meaningfully discuss semantic change is the wrong way around — it’s like saying the Neogrammarians should first have developed a theory of what sound changes are possible and only then tried to find them in languages.
Vladimir: thank you for the analysis. It looks like -sara might mean ‘female counterpart’ rather than ‘woman’.
I agree that … a feminine affix … doesn’t have to be a grammaticalized noun meaning ‘woman’: there are many examples, such as Latin -trix corresponding to -tor, French -(r)esse corresponding to -eur (hence English -(r)ess vs. -er), and many others.
These remarks do not solve the *swesor enigma, but it is perhaps likely that *se/or was a suffix rather than a root or stem, which would explain why no such root appears with a meaning ‘woman’.
Back to *swe- as ‘own’: if *swe-sor = ‘own/self-counterpart’, could it mean specifically ‘woman’s sister’? In many languages a woman’s sister is considered almost interchangeable with her, whether as co-wife to the same husband (a very frequent situation in tales of the Pacific Nothwest) or as ‘little mother’ to her children (this topic was raised here not too long ago).
Are these forms limited to females, to specifically women and girls (not animals), or are they used also with grammatically ‘feminine’ words?
There was no separate feminine gender in PIE proper, but once it emerged in the non-Anatolian (“Core”) subfamily, *-sor compounds became gramatically feminine, of course. *ser- is not directly attested as a root noun, but the extended form *s(é)r-ih₂/*sr-ijah₂- ‘woman, female’ (with the ablauting feminine “motion-suffix” *-ih₂-) is attested in Tocharian and Indo-Iranian (according to my colleague Ronald Kim). I think I have discovered some truly marvellous cognates of Kim’s proposed *s(é)r-ih₂ (which he derives, very speculatively, from an original *h₁ós-r̥/*h₁és-r-) in Germanic, of all languages. Alas, this margin is too narrow to contain those etymologies, but I have already submitted them to a journal and if the article passes the review process it may appear later this year. For this reason I can’t reveal too much.
I trust you’ll let us know when it appears!
I will, but may I ask a favour? I started writing “my colleague Ronald Kim” (we work in the same university department) and somehow managed to omit “colleague”. What’s left looks horribly patronising, like “my Jeeves” or something, and I noticed it too late to use the “Edit” function. Could you help? Thanks in advance!
@TR
“This is a misleading way of putting it. ”
I didn’t mean to say that an abstract semantic theory must precede reconstruction. But it should have at least been developed in parallel paths (and as an interconnected set of models) with phonological and morphological reconstructions. There are several models of PIE phonology (traditional, (mono)laryngeal, glottalic, etc.) but there’s not a single model, or even at attempt at building one, of the evolution of IE semantic fields. In anthropology, on the other hand, there’s apparently a fully developed theory of the historical semantics of kinship terminologies (treated as systems). So, there’s nothing impossible about it. There needs to be a learned discussion about the veracity of such etymological proposals as “put, settle” > “temple” > “god,” call, invoke” > “god,” “woman” + “own” = “sister” in connection with isogloss distribution, language phylogeny as well as, of course, phonetics and semantics. As of now, I feel like people just don’t care whether these constructions make rigorous sense – they work phonetically, it means they are awesome!
@Piotr
“What’s left looks horribly patronising”
Not patronizing but amusing. I thought you were with Ronald Kim like Gamkrelidze & Ivanov. 🙂
Could you help? Thanks in advance!
Consider it done! (I did think it was an odd turn of phrase…)
@Marie-Lucie
“Back to *swe- as ‘own’: if *swe-sor = ‘own/self-counterpart’, could it mean specifically ‘woman’s sister’?”
It’s interesting that you wrote this because Dziebel argued that historically patterns such as “brother-sister” were preceded by patterns such as “woman’s sister”, “woman’s brother”, ‘man’s sister”, “man’s brother” (attested in Europe among Basques and some Kartvelian-speakers), “older brother”, “younger sister”, “younger brother”, “younger sister” (attested among Uralics and Altaics).
Vladimir, once more, semantic change is too amorphous to be compared direcly to phonological change. At one point (1970’s) some members of the Chomsky school tried to invent “generative semantics” on the model of “generative phonology” (which deals with phonological rules). Among other things they tried to set up semantic “distinctive features” such as were used in phonology (eg: /p/ [+ stop, – continuant, – voice, + labial etc] – then the rules manipulate the features (which are linked to observable physical phenomena) under environmental conditions, eg: /p/ > /b/ comes from the rule [- voice] > [+ voice], a frequent rule between vowels, which are themselves (+ voice]). But phonological roles work across the board: they do not pick and chooose [p]’s at random and change or preserve their features indiscriminately. Attempts to discover semantic distinctive features were a failure in practice: such apparently basic ones as [+ human] were too basic and widespread to be actually useful, and apart from very specific cases there were no general rules applicable to whole sets of words sharing the same features.
Another reason that semantics cannot be reduced to a set of units that form clusters or that change on the basis of identifiable rules is that semantics is linked to the circumstances of human life in a way that phonology is not, and those circumstances (and human responses to them) are so varied as to be largely unpredictable: for instance, descendants of the same Latin words in French, Spanish, etc have often followed dramatically different semantic paths. And the individual reactions of scholars attempting the classifications are themselves idiosyncratic. What “makes sense” to one person does not necessarily make sense to another (folk etymology is a good example of this).
Vladimir: Dziebel argued that historically …
I don’t know about the direction of evolution of such terms, but the organization of kinship in various societies surely has to do with determining the various roles of related people in society and its subdivisions. For instance, in the Tsimshiainc languages (Canadian West Coast), there are three types of siblings (and words for them): woman’s sister, man’s brother, and opposite sex sibling. In each of these pairs, the people involved have different roles in daily life and especially in mutual obligations to each other and sometimes to each other’s children, which justify the use of decidedly different terms. Incidentally, the word for “woman’s sister” is closely related to the word for “child (offspring)”, which suggests caring in common for each other’s children.
I was going to say something about “the theory of semantics”, but TR and m.-l. beat me to it.
There are two issues. First, we have a powerful tool in regular sound correspondences, which allows one to evaluate the formal side of cognacy. Thus, the vowel in the German-English cognate pairs rund : round, Hund : hound, Pfund : pound follows the same pattern, which in turn supports the cognacy judgment for Grund : ground.
On the other hand, there’s no such strict predictability for meanings. The semantic identity of Kuh : cow, Katze : cat, Schaf : sheep is inconsistent with the semantic changes of Schwein : swine, Hund : hound, Hirsch: hart; none of the latter are predictable by analogy to other cognate pairs. In that sense, there isn’t, and likely never will be a ‘theory of semantics’.
The second way of looking at a ‘theory of semantics’ is to ask what semantic changes are possible or plausible. This is something that has been done sporadically over the years. The earliest such studies I know of are by David Wilkins (e.g. Natural tendencies of semantic change and the search for cognates, The Comparative Method Reviewed, eds. Durie and Ross, 1996, p. 264). With such compilations you can speak of statistical tendencies, not of absolutes, though they might help dispel some particularly farfetched semantic equations. There are other such studies, but unfortunately none of them is a standard part of courses in historical linguistics, as far as I know.
@Marie-Lucie
“once more, semantic change is too amorphous to be compared directly to phonological change.”
Yes, I understand it’s not that easy and thanks for your example of how simply mimicking phonological features in semantics won’t work. As far as I understand it, when anthropologists compare kinship terms as systems they don’t use semantic features (male, female, etc.) but they look at what categories/concepts are merged vs. what categories/concepts are segregated. In Latin, for example, ‘father’ (pater) and ‘father’s brother’ (patruus) are merged, while ‘mother’s brother’ (avunculus) is segregated. But in English, ‘father’s brother’ and ‘mother’s brother’ (uncle) are merged, while ‘father’ (father) is segregated. Above, Dziebel was trying to argue that IE forms for ‘blood’ and ‘tear’ are etymologically the same because ancient Indo-Europeans merged them as “bodily liquids”, while modern Europeans segregate them because they originate from different organs and are different physically. I guess there’s an aspect of attribute sharing (liquid) vs. attribute differentiation (eye liquid vs. corporeal liquid) but it feels overall a very different approach to the one based on the mimicry of phonetics.
> the extended form *s(é)r-ih₂/*sr-ijah₂- ‘woman, female’ (with the ablauting feminine “motion-suffix” *-ih₂-) is attested in Tocharian and Indo-Iranian (according to my colleague Ronald Kim).
Indo-Iranian forms are at least Sanskrit strī ‘woman, female, grammatical feminine gender’, Sogdian stryc ‘woman’ and Pashto /ˈʂəd͡zə/ ‘woman’. The derivation is problematic because Sanskrit normally keeps *sr- unchanged, but *sr- > str- here could be an instance of sporadic irregular sound change like PIE *ḱrd- ‘heart’ > (Pre-)Proto-Indo-Iranian *ǵʰrd- (Sanskrit hrd-, Pashto /zɽə/, Persian del), or like English one which no longer sounds like its derivatives alone and only. It could be relevant that such changes tend to only strike common words.
@Y
“Thus, the vowel in the German-English cognate pairs rund : round, Hund : hound, Pfund : pound follows the same pattern, which in turn supports the cognacy judgment for Grund : ground. On the other hand, there’s no such strict predictability for meanings.”
Yes, but in your example the meanings stayed the same. That’s even more “predictable” than the phonetic evolution of those forms. I doubt there’s a single form in IE languages that hasn’t changed phonetically. But there are plenty of examples of forms that are exactly the same semantically. This has lulled people into believing that a theory of semantic evolution is not necessary for a phonetic reconstruction, but in reality this may mean that semantics is just slower to change than phonetics, or it has a different pattern of change (maybe punctuated equilibrium of sorts). The above example of a semantic pattern that involved verb > underlying body part (neck, mouth, chin, throat) > hair growing around this body part seems to be pretty “regular” in IE languages as it affected several unrelated cognate sets.
@George Gibbard
“Indo-Iranian forms are at least Sanskrit strī ‘woman, female, grammatical feminine gender’, Sogdian stryc ‘woman’ and Pashto /ˈʂəd͡zə/ ‘woman’. The derivation is problematic because Sanskrit normally keeps *sr- unchanged, but *sr- > str- here could be an instance of sporadic irregular sound change”
Slavic *sestra and Germ *sweste:r both have what appears to be an epenthetic -t-. I think it’s explained phonetically as the hardening of a dental before a resonant ( *swestro-). I’d be curious to know if there are other interpretations. Nota bene: Arm k’oyr ‘sister’ shows the same intervocalic -y- as usually results from *-t- (hayr < *peH2ter).
Sure, *sr > str is a natural change and regular in some languages, but it’s at least not usual in Sanskrit.
What is the semantic change separating Schwein and swine?
Vladimir:
Dziebel was trying to argue that IE forms for ‘blood’ and ‘tear’ are etymologically the same because ancient Indo-Europeans merged them as “bodily liquids”, while modern Europeans segregate them because they originate from different organs and are different physically.
Are there actually languages in which there is a single term meaning “bodily liquid”? or where “blood” and “tear” are the same word or even come from the same root? Not only do they “originate from different organs and are different physically” but the conditions under which they leave the body are quite different. “Blood” normally stays inside the body and flows from it when the body is injured, sometimes so severely as to cause death, but there is no specific organ from which blood flows. Menstruation is a special case, regularly affecting women of childbearing age but no one else. “Tears” are a type of clear salty “water” which flows from the eyes, as a result of emotional distress or of disease, but from nowhere else.
Why would only “blood” and “tears” be equated to each other? what about urine, saliva, semen, nasal mucus? Some people cannot stand the sight of blood, but have no such strong reaction to the other bodily fluids. This “semantic category” is a deliberate rationalization, not one justified by occurrence in a variety of languages.
The above example of a semantic pattern that involved verb > underlying body part (neck, mouth, chin, throat) > hair growing around this body part …
Only in your (or Dziebel’s) interpretation, which invoved several phonological correspondences taken from different sources.
I don’t see the difference between arguing that “blood” and “tear” might derive from the same root and arguing that “sister” might derive from “one’s own woman”. How is the former more theoretically robust than the latter?
@Marie-Lucie
“Only in your (or Dziebel’s) interpretation, which invoved several phonological correspondences taken from different sources.”
Not only. Nape of the neck > mane, chin > beard, jaw, mouth > mustache are all well-established ones. Dziebel just added throat > beard to it.
“Are there actually languages in which there is a single term meaning “bodily liquid”? or where “blood” and “tear” are the same word or even come from the same root?”
Good question. I don’t know. But in IE languages (including Hittite) the semantic/cultural/ritual associations between blood and tears are rich. https://www.academia.edu/3171188/Blood_and_Tears_in_Proto-Indo-European_Poetics. And there are some striking formal resemblances between the two words, which Dziebel interprets as evidence of cognation, while most scholars as secondary contamination.
“Blood” normally stays inside the body and flows from it when the body is injured, sometimes so severely as to cause death, but there is no specific organ from which blood flows.”
There are two known roots for ‘blood’ in PIE *kreuH2- ‘blood outside the body’ and *esH2r- ‘blood inside the body’. It’s the latter that’s associated with ‘tears’. Dziebel etymologically links *esH2r-/n- ‘blood’ with *(d)ak’r-/-n ‘tear’ (asru in a satem languages such as Skrt), while *kreuH2- ‘blood’ he etymologically links with *sreu- ‘flow’ (е.g., Lith srava ‘menstrual blood’, Greek ‘reuma ‘rheum, bodily discharge’). I guess “inner blood” is linked to tears because both are about emotions, while ‘outside blood’ is more about physical substances.
Schwein is the default, unrestricted term, like the English pig. It’s what appears in little kids’ picture books. In common AmE swine is used mostly metaphorically; otherwise mostly as a technical term by farmers, who reserve pig to younger animals.
Not a big semantic change, but a change nevertheless.
Vladimir: Dziebel etymologically links *esH2r-/n- ‘blood’ with *(d)ak’r-/-n ‘tear’ (asru in a satem languages such as Skrt)
Are those links accepted by Indo-Europeanists? Only -r/-n- are common to both “roots” (if both actually occur, as in the -r-/-n- suffixes of some stems – and common suffixes are not evidence of common roots). The “correspondence” zero to d is unusual to say the least.
Y: Good point. So, Piotr, what adjective is pig a hypocoristic denominalized form of? Do you have a theory yet?
>I think it’s explained phonetically as the hardening of a dental before a resonant ( *swestro-).
I see your point was about the phonetics, sorry. I don’t know why there should tend to be fortition of [s] before an [r]; is this the correct interpretation, anyone? Also, [s] is a laminal alveolar sound, not dental; to get from [s] to [r] you have to retract your tongue. But, why exactly a stop can come to intervene I don’t know, so why’d I say it’s “natural”? I guess I meant “familiar”. Possibly if one is not very precise in one’s articulation, the tongue may happen to strike the teeth on the way from [s] to [r]?
Meanwhile in English I pronounce /str/ as [st̻ɹ̻], with a laminal alveolar stop and a “bunched” postalveolar approximant. I’m not familiar with any stop epenthesis in utterances like “he’s wrong”.
@m-l: Are those links accepted by Indo-Europeanists?
I think you can guess the answer to that…
That is, because *sr > str is commonly attested, I’m sure it must somehow be natural, but I don’t know why.
An amusing semantic shift I’ve learned long time ago from a popular book. Russian чёрствый (stale) is an obvious cognate of Czech čerstvý (fresh).
TR: Sometimes silence is best.
DO: Russian чёрствый (stale) is an obvious cognate of Czech čerstvý (fresh).
Such changes resulting in opposite meanings in different languages or dialects are fairly frequent is the original meaning is something in between. For instance, “ripe” could evolve into “stale” (not longer at its best) or “fresh” (almost at its best).
In Latin “altus” meant both “high” and “deep”, the common meaning being “away from ground level”, whether up or down.
Anatoly Liberman has a lot to say about pig, e.g. here, which he puts together in a class of words like big and bag, all having to do with ‘swollen things’. In my ignorance I’ll say that it looks appealing, in that it explains many otherwise opaque etymologies, but by the same token it seems a bit ad hoc.
@Marie-Lucie
“The “correspondence” zero to d is unusual to say the least.”
The alternation d-/0- is found within the ‘tear’ set (Gk dakruma but Skrt asru). There hasn’t been a good explanation for it, but many scholars believe that d- is secondary there, so there’s no big conflict with the ‘blood’ forms. Hittite adds another oddity, namely ishahru ‘tear’, which is universally accepted as a cognate of the other ‘tear’ forms but neither the onset, nor the -h- instead of expected -k- are regular.
@Marie-Lucie
“In Latin “altus” meant both “high” and “deep”, the common meaning being “away from ground level”, whether up or down.”
That’s exactly right! Just like it may not matter to speakers what kind of liquid it is as long as it a “discharge” from the body.
Vladimir: blood and tears
in IE languages (including Hittite) the semantic/cultural/ritual associations between blood and tears are rich. https://www.academia.edu/3171188/Blood_and_Tears_in_Proto-Indo-European_Poetics.
Interesting article, showing the stylistic association of the two concepts in ancient epic poetry dealing with battles, etc where blood flows from physical wounds and tears are caused by the resulting emotional wounds of the survivors. This is not at all the same as naming the two fluids in the same way in normal everyday speech. When Churchill gave his famous speech about “blood, sweat and tears”, he did not mean to say that these three kinds of bodily fluids were identical in nature, he was alluding to the hardships and sufferings that the nation had to endure. The “blood/tears” relationship in the epics is of a similar nature, an allusion to physical and emotional sufferings through reference to the bodily fluids being shed.
And there are some striking formal resemblances between the two words, which Dziebel interprets as evidence of cognation, while most scholars as secondary contamination.
I would agree with “most scholars”, since there is no reason for the names of the actual fluids to be cognates. The formal resemblances affect a couple of rare occurrences (which may result from a common metaphor), not the majority of the citations.
What are the striking formal resemblances?
Vladimir: it may not matter to speakers what kind of liquid it is as long as it a “discharge” from the body.
If your child was crying tears of blood, I would hope that you would be a lot more concerned than with normal salty tears. Can you imagine that the human race has never perceived a difference between the two ‘discharges from the body’?
@TR
“What are the striking formal resemblances?”
Lat assyr, aser and Skrt asru, Hitt eshar and ishahru, Arm ariwn and artawsr (-t- is from d- and hence secondary)… The only reason they are seen as “vastly different” is because Indo-Europeanists see PIE *k’ in Skrt asru but PIE *s in Lat aser. But that’s an interpretation. It may be correct, but this doesn’t make those forms dissimilar.
@Marie-Lucie
“This is not at all the same as naming the two fluids in the same way in normal everyday speech.”
But why does it seem so implausible to you? I mean it needs proof, no doubt, like everything else, but why would it be apriori implausible? Lith srava ‘menstrual blood’ and Gk ‘reuma ‘discharge’ both derive from the same root *sreu- that’s accepted by everybody. I gave the example of Russ palec ‘finger’ and ‘toe’. In English they are two different words and an English speaker would probably laugh if I said “these boots are squeezing my fingers.”
TR: What are the striking formal resemblances?
Look at the link (the article is not very long). The author helpfully bolds the crucial words. In a few cases the two words used both start with as or is (I can’t do the possible diacritics on the s), but they are not the only ones used and they are in the minority, which suggests to me that they may be metaphors enhanced by some phonetic resemblance, rather than the usual terms.
Not knowing the languages, I read rather quickly and no doubt I missed or misunderstood some things. Some of you could give a better interpretation than I would.
@marie-Lucie
“Can you imagine that the human race has never perceived a difference between the two ‘discharges from the body’?”
Having one word for two concepts or objects doesn’t mean not being able to perceive a difference in the real world. I clearly see that my toes and my fingers are different and I won’t lick my toe if I hurt my finger (trust me on that one) but I do call them both ‘palec’ in Russian and ‘big toe’ and ‘thumb’ are both ‘bol’shoi palec’. No difference whatsoever!
Vladimir: Lith srava ‘menstrual blood’ and Gk ‘reuma ‘discharge’ both derive from the same root *sreu- that’s accepted by everybody.
The Lith word cannot be the basic word for “blood” but refers to a special kind of ‘discharge’ (a word also used in a medical context about this very process).
I gave the example of Russ palec ‘finger’ and ‘toe’. In English they are two different words and an English speaker would probably laugh if I said “these boots are squeezing my fingers.”
In French there is no specific word for “toe”, we say doigt de pied, lit. ‘foot finger’.
@Marie-Lucie
“In French there is no specific word for “toe”, we say doigt de pied, lit. ‘foot finger’.”
Yes, we can say the same thing in Russian – ‘palec nogi’ if we want to specify which “finger” (see, English is so primitive, it doesn’t have a generic word for this thing 🙂 ) we’re talking about. It’s usually in medical or traumatic contexts, and those contexts are rare. I studied Japanese for a little bit and they don’t have plurals of nouns. They extract the “plurality information” from the context.
“The Lith word cannot be the basic word for “blood” but refers to a special kind of ‘discharge’ (a word also used in a medical context about this very process).”
The common denominator behind the etymological link between *sreu- and *kreuH2- is ‘to flow, to stream’ (stream is the English cognate of Gk ‘reuma). A few bodily liquids can be derived from this basic notion, including blood, menstrual blood or rheum.
Re “striking formal similarities,” I’m not getting back on the Dziebel merry-go-round, but it should be pointed out that the Sanskrit word is not asru but aśru. Only one of those two phonemes is known to correspond to Latin s.
Re: fresh/stale in Czech/Russian. I don’t think it was divergence from the middle. Most probably, it was metaphoric reinterpretation of something else. Like cold air = fresh air, but cold bread = stale bread.
Vladimir Diakoff, isn’t what you are saying exactly the problem? Based on semantics, you never know what to include in your set and what not. English distinguishes hand and arm, but Russian doesn’t (yes, yes, I know, there is a word specifically for hand in Russian, but you have to have a very good reason to use it). Also Russian has a word that encompasses upper arm and shoulder, but English uses two words to distinguish upper and lower arm. How then can you decide which parts of the human upper limbs should belong to the same semantic set and which shouldn’t?
@TR
“but it should be pointed out that the Sanskrit word is not asru but aśru. Only one of those two phonemes is known to correspond to Latin s.”
yes, yes, I tend to drop diacritics out of fear that they won’t display right, but I was referring to the same thing when I wrote “because Indo-Europeanists see PIE *k’ in Skrt asru but PIE *s in Lat aser.”
My point is that it’s not Indo-Europeanists’ interpretations that “make those forms dissimilar”, as you said above, but the fact that they contain different sounds.
@D.O
“How then can you decide which parts of the human upper limbs should belong to the same semantic set and which shouldn’t?”
There’s no secret or magic bullet here: we should look at semantics, morphology and phonetics and find the systematic patterns across all of them. It’s not driven by semantics alone. Take isolated isoglosses (such as Lat fe:riae, Gk theos) seriously – they may be symptoms of a complex cognate set that’s hard to circumscribe because semantics is more abstract and phonology is tricky. And an etymology should be built at the same time as the reconstruction, rather than after reconstruction is already finished.
@TR
“My point is that it’s not Indo-Europeanists’ interpretations that “make those forms dissimilar”, as you said above, but the fact that they contain different sounds.”
Different forms can still be similar. Only identical things are not different.
1,429th! What a thread!
George Gibbard,
Indo-Iranian forms are at least Sanskrit strī ‘woman, female, grammatical feminine gender’, Sogdian stryc ‘woman’ and Pashto /ˈʂəd͡zə/ ‘woman’. The derivation is problematic because Sanskrit normally keeps *sr- unchanged, but *sr- > str- here could be an instance of sporadic irregular sound change…
The t-epenthesis (presumably already in PIIr.) is an irregular complication, but there’s no such problem with the alternative stem form reconstructed by Kim as PIIr. *sr̥yaH- > Proto-Ossetic *silæ > Digor silæ, Iron syl, nor with Tocharian B ṣarya ‘lady’, nor with the Germanic material I propose to adduce (but cannot disuss yet). It’s interesting that Ved. strī can function like a femininising suffix in compounds, cf. divya-strī ‘female supernatural being, an Apsaras, parallel to Hittite išḫa-ššara- ‘lady, mistress’ (though of course different first members are involved, so strict cognacy can’t be claimed).
/sr/ > /str/ is common and familiar, but often capricious. It happened in Slavic in inherited *sr clusters, but when such clusters appeared again as a result of yer loss, no regular t-epenthesis was reenacted, though we often find it as a random, sporadic change. For example, PSl. *s(w)orka ‘magpie’ (Cf. Lith. šárka) gives standard Polish sroka (but dialectally sometimes stroka), Bulgarian and SCr. svraka, Slovene sraka, but Czech stráka. The same is true of secondary /zr/ > /zdr/ (sporadic and unpredictable).
Joh Cowan,
Sorry, I have no personal hypothesis about the origin of pig.
I just want to point out that Churchill said “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” which has always struck me as a very strange combination. It is three bodily fluids and the unrelated and much more abstract “toil.” The three fluids are all standard metaphors for the activities likely to produce them: violence, sadness, and toil, respectively. So why include “toil” there on its own where it does not seem to fit? While the speech is quite inspiring, that famous line always strikes me as very odd.
The more natural sounding “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” is a band whose name was presumably inspired by Churchill’s speech.
The only reason they are seen as “vastly different” is because Indo-Europeanists see PIE *k’ in Skrt aśru but PIE *s in Lat aser.
What will we hear next? That the only difference between Russian khui and English phooey! is yet another irregular sound shift?
Sorry, I have no personal hypothesis about the origin of pig.
No problem, Piotr. Take all the time you need.
Re: Fingers and toes,
I haven’t done any systematic reserach on that, but my impression is that languages rarely distinguish fingers from toes lexically. Lat. digitus, Greek δάκτυλος, Lith. pir̃štas (= Slavic *pьrstъ), Skt. aṅgúri, Albanian gisht and many others can refer to both kinds of ‘digit’. It’s Germanic that stands out as somewhat untypical.
@Piotr
“The t-epenthesis (presumably already in PIIr.) is an irregular complication, but there’s no such problem with the alternative stem form reconstructed by Kim as PIIr. *sr̥yaH- > Proto-Ossetic *silæ > Digor silæ, Iron syl, nor with Tocharian B ṣarya ‘lady’, nor with the Germanic material I propose to adduce (but cannot disuss yet). It’s interesting that Ved. strī can function like a femininising suffix in compounds, cf. divya-strī ‘female supernatural being, an Apsaras, parallel to Hittite išḫa-ššara- ‘lady, mistress’ (though of course different first members are involved, so strict cognacy can’t be claimed).”
I guarantee I read this somewhere. Maybe Kim has already published it, or someone else wrote something similar. Yes, it does look like a great Indo-Iranian counterpart to the Anatolian formation. But even in divya-strī -strī’s function is to turn a masculine noun into its feminine counterpart. This won’t work for *sweso:r or *uk-so:r. Unless, to Marie-Lucie’s point, *swe- is some kind of reciprocal added to the original root *sor- to signify “woman’s sister.”
“It happened in Slavic in inherited *sr clusters, but when such clusters appeared again as a result of yer loss, no regular t-epenthesis was reenacted.”
AFAIK, it also happened to inherited *k’ as well as in *pestryji ‘spotted’ (Gk ποικίλος, Skrt рḗс̨аs).
But even in divya-strī -strī’s function is to turn a masculine noun into its feminine counterpart.
But not e.g. in nāgara-strī, which means ‘townswoman’, and not ‘female town’.
It’s Germanic that stands out as somewhat untypical.
Finnish sormi, Estonian sõrm mean “finger”, Finnish peukalo and Estonian pöial “thumb”, and varvas means “toe” in both.
Further, they distinguish between a cloven (F. sorkka, E. sõrg) and a whole hoof (F. kavio, E. kabi).
Russian words for ‘arm’ etc
I wonder if the (for IE) unusual ranges of meaning of those words might reflect the influence of a pre-Russian (perhaps Uralic) language. Or are those meanings attested in other IE languages?
Vladimir: AFAIK, it also happened to inherited *k’ as well as in *pestryji ‘spotted’ (Gk ποικίλος, Skrt рḗс̨аs).
Yes, but this falls under “inherited” (Proto-Slavic) *sr (whatever its Balto-Slavic or Indo-European source). A small correction: the asterisked (PSl.) form should be *pьstrъ(jь) < *piḱ-ro- (cf. Polish pstry ‘mottled, variegated’). Another similar example is *ostrъ(jь) ‘sharp’ < *h₂aḱ-ro-.
Juha,
How old is that finger/toe distinction in Finnic? Varvas looks like a branch-specific innovation. I wonder if Germanic influence could be responsible for it.
Piotr, Marie-Lucie: on the topic of making a “toe” versus “finger” distinction:
Actually, French does have a noun “orteil” with the meaning “toe”: interestingly, in major Romance varieties other than French a reflex of Latin “digitum” indeed refers to fingers and toes alike. So, could Germanic influence explain this innovation whereby French stands out within Romance?
Well, as a fictional little girl might have put it had she been exploring etymology instead of chasing rabbits, things get curiouser and curiouser. For French “orteil” has a Latin etymon, “articulum”…but its initial /o/ is phonologically quite irregular and has been explained as being due to contamination from a Gaulish word ORDIGA, which has a possible Old Irish cognate. Intriguingly, this Gaulish word may well be attested in an eighth-century Romance-Old High German glossary, which glosses “ortigas” as “zaehun” (a cognate of “toe”!) and a latinized form “digiti” as “fingra”. The trouble, of course, is that “ordiga(s)” might be an attempt at writing “orteil” itself.
I thus find it very intriguing that a form which we might suspect of being, semantically, Germanic-influenced shows phonological signs of being Gaulish-influenced. I wonder whether Gaulish and Early Germanic might not have shared the semantic innovation of having separate lexemes designating toes and fingers (where the innovation first arose is probably impossible to determine), with this semantic innovation then spreading from Gaulish to the Vulgar Latin spoken in Northern Gaul, with the Gaulish word also contaminating the Latin etymon phonologically and turning initial /a/ to /o/.
And if the Finnic toe/finger distinction is indeed an innovation within Uralic, I quite agree with Piotr: Germanic influence seems very likely.
This page says of sõrm “Läänemeresoome-mordva tüvi”, ie “Finnic–Mordvin root”. varvas is a Finnic root.
In Nykysuomen Etymologinen Sanakirja varvas is explained as derived from varpa “switch, twig, stick”.
Etienne: Actually, French does have a noun “orteil” with the meaning “toe”
How could I forget!!!!
Perhaps because for me this is more of a learned word than an everyday one.
Juha,
That’s why I’m asking. It may be pure coincidence, but the Germanic words for ‘toe’ and ‘twig’ were similar, *taixōn- vs. *taina-, and in Old English they partly fell together (hence mistletoe).
@Vladimir Diakoff: You’re right that a suffix designing females doesn’t need to be derived from a word meaning “woman”. That’s one of the problems of putting semantics into rules, that there are so many possible directions of derivation. Things are somewhat easier when talking about close semantic fields, like kinship terms, body parts, colour terms, numerals, etc., but even there there’s a lot of ways things can go. Still, I wouldn’t discard the possibility that *swesor- originally meant “kinswoman” and was later narrowed in meaning to “sister”.
@Piotr: Now I’m really looking forward to your article.
It’ll be nice if it turns out Piotr is deriving Frau from *sri- via another sr- > fr- change.
Lol, I wouldn’t go that far. Also, my cognates are far more unexpected.
It looks like some people have connected the Germanic -ster suffix (in words like webster, spinster ) to Sanskrit skri. But most of the sources I’ve consulted do not agree on the origin.
Teutonic Etymology: The Formation of Teutonic Words in the English Language, by Josiah Willard Gibbs on Google Books
Wiktionary says it is “from Proto-Germanic *-istrijǭ, *-astrijǭ, from Proto-Indo-European *-is-ter- (suffix),” but it has no articles on any of these putative ancestors, and I don’t know where it’s getting these forms.
The Oxford English dictionary says “it represents a West Germanic type -strjōn-, forming feminine agent nouns, probably a derivative of the Germanic -stro- forming nouns of action, as in Old Norse bakstr (masculine), act of baking, Old High German galstar neuter, incantation.” I guess this is the same as what the Wikipedia article says, just using a different notation that doesn’t show the effects of Sievers’ law.
However, Wiktionary also says the Dutch suffix “-ster” is cognate and “Borrowed from Vulgar Latin -istria, which is borrowed from Ancient Greek -ιστρια (-istria).” Obviously, these can’t all be true.
Either : or -, not both. The length appears in the nominative due to Szemerényi’s law.
@Marie-Lucie
Re: Russian words for ‘arm’.
These semantic fluctuations are not even as extreme as brakhion ‘upper arm’ vs. Goth markwace ‘upper leg, thigh’ (see above for more details). They are fully Indo-European, no need, I think, to invoke substrate. There are three semantic patterns here: the merging of polar body parts (PIE *mregwh- ‘upper arm and upper thigh’) and the merging of adjacent body parts (Russ ruka ‘arm, hand’ but bedro ‘upper thigh’) vs. fully segregating them (Eng. hand, arm, thigh).
@Piotr, @Hans
“But not e.g. in nāgara-strī, which means ‘townswoman’, and not ‘female town’.”
But *swe- is not ‘kin group’. There’s *genos, there’s *weiko-, there is *sibja, there’s ‘clan’, there’s *rodu but *swe- is not the form denoting “kin group.”
@David
“Either : or -, not both. The length appears in the nominative due to Szemerényi’s law.”
Thanks. I was always wondering why the vowels in sweso:r, pate:r, etc. were long.
Frau from *sri-
— and then project back to PGerm, analogize from the apparent feminine, take away the apparent *-on- derivation, project back to PIE, and there you have the source of Latin pre. But no-one would do historical linguistics like that, I’m sure.
Also, I second the call for Piotr to publish his actual Germanic *sri- words and not leave us on tenterhooks.
Vladimir: Goth markwace ‘upper leg, thigh’
Wut? Gothic? This? Where did you find it? It doesn’t even look Gothic (there are no “more details” above, just the same word cited as “Gothic” several times). Are you sure you don’t mean Tocharian B märkwace ‘upper leg’?
What is the difference between “upper leg” and “thigh”? Unless you want to emphasize the resemblance between “upper arm” and “upper leg”.
Does that have cognates outside of Germanic, actually?
Let this be a warning: if you understand PIE less well than Wikipedia does, you don’t understand it well enough to propose new hypotheses about it. Read more – start right at Wikipedia and the papers it links to.
You’ll find that the Wikipedia articles are sometimes outdated in places; you’ll find they sometimes contradict each other on a few details because they rely on different sources (not all of which may be current); you’ll find that some things that are presented without comment are actually somewhat controversial, while others which are presented as controversial ceased to be so quite some time ago. But before you’re able to notice these details, it’s no use if you advocate major changes like the ones Dziebel has proposed.
@David
“Are you sure you don’t mean Tocharian B märkwace ‘upper leg’?”
Good catch! Thanks.
But *swe- is not ‘kin group’. There’s *genos, there’s *weiko-, there is *sibja, there’s ‘clan’, there’s *rodu but *swe- is not the form denoting “kin group.”
It’s not in Late PIE, no. But as I said in this comment , it has been proposed that *s(e?)w- originally meant “familiy, clan”, and that *swe/o- originally meant “belonging to ones clan”, whence “own”, and its later use for the reflexice pronoun. Unfortunately, I read about that proposal years ago and don’t remember where, or by whom it was made. Again, this is internal reconstruction and to be taken with a big lump of salt.
@David
“But before you’re able to notice these details, it’s no use if you advocate major changes like the ones Dziebel has proposed.”
Yes, I understand. But as an amateur, I’m naturally inclined to learn from different sources. His approach makes sense to me, but I understand that I need to learn a lot of basics, too. Sorry if my ignorance gets in the way. In practice, however, those instances when I’m ignorant don’t aways undermine other things that I’m saying. For instance, vowel length in sweso:r is a good thing to know where it comes from but it doesn’t affect any of the arguments I’ve made upstring.
@David
“Does that have cognates outside of Germanic, actually?”
*sibjo: (the correct spelling) seems to be limited to Germanic.
@Hans
“it has been proposed that *s(e?)w- originally meant “familiy, clan””
It’s an interpretation based on the fact that a lot of kinship terms have swe- in them. But it’s not attested as a separate noun in this sense anywhere. Germ. *sibjo: ‘sib’ contains the same swe- but it’s already enlarged with *bh- and *iyo-, so *swe- by itself can’t be ‘kin group’.
It’s an interpretation based on the fact that a lot of kinship terms have swe- in them. But it’s not attested as a separate noun in this sense anywhere.
This is correct, but also irrelevant, as we are talking about internal reconstruction, trying to recover a lost word from the traces it left in derivations. Again, internal reconstruction may not be for you, and until more evidence is found assuming a *s(e)w- “family, clan” for an earlier stage of PIE is just a nice idea, but the existence of later derivations and replacements doesn’t disprove that such a word with such a meaning could have existed previously. (And, BTW, I doubt that *sibjo: belongs here; at least the absence of the /w/ needs to be explained.)
@Hans
” until more evidence is found assuming a *s(e)w- “family, clan” for an earlier stage of PIE is just a nice idea,”
I just see a breach of logic here and a strong desire to build a foundation under an ad hoc idea that *swes:or is somehow “woman belonging to something.” But there are so many other, more parsimonious interpretations that I don’t know why people would get stuck on one. For instance, there’s a well-established root *seu- ‘give birth’ that is known to have spun such pan-Indo-European kinship words as *suHnus ‘son’ as well as local derivations such as Skrt *su:sa: ‘progenitor’ and Alb gjysh ‘grandfather’. Why not link *swe- in *swe:sor back to that root and call it a day?
Sorry, *swes:or nor *swe:sor. David, I need you by my side when I type. 🙂
Why not link *swe- in *swe:sor back to that root and call it a day?
If I recall correctly, that was part of the proposal. Now, If I only could remember where I read it…
@Hans
“If I recall correctly, that was part of the proposal.”
OK, this would make more sense. -s- in *sweso:r then is just an affix followed by another affix *-er(s) > *-o:r. And no need for a ‘kin group’ detour.
Re: -str- in sweso:r : since -t- is so sporadic, I’d consider reconstructing *sweskwer- (*swe- + skw + er), with -t- in Slavic *sestra, Germ. *swest:er and maybe Arm k’oyr (comp. hayr ‘father’ with an intervocalic loss of -t-) being a dental reflex of a labiovelar. In this case, comparison between *sweskwer- ‘sister’ and *swek’uro ‘husband’s parent’ may not be far-fetched. Alb vjeherr ‘husband’s father’, vjeherre ‘husband’s mother’ has -h-, which typically goes back to *-sk- (per Beekes). It was always an anomaly within the traditional reconstruction *swek’uro-. Arm skesur ‘husband’s mother’ is another phonetic puzzle that can be resolved if *sweskur > *skesur is posited.
The -str- of Eng. -ster < *strijo:n or some such? Not surprising enough?
That’s what I was thinking too… Oh, the suspense.
Re: -str- in sweso:r : since -t- is so sporadic, I’d consider reconstructing *sweskwer- (*swe- + skw + er), with -t- in Slavic *sestra, Germ. *swest:er and maybe Arm k’oyr (comp. hayr ‘father’ with an intervocalic loss of -t-) being a dental reflex of a Labiovelar
And where did your assumed labiovelar go in Latin, Celtic, or Baltic? -sr- > -str- are regular processes in Germanic and in Slavic, so there’s no need to assume anything else here.
The -str- of Eng. -ster < *strijo:n or some such? Not surprising enough?
Even better that that, and more surprising 😉
Sorry, I wish journals processed the submitted stuff faster. I am the first person to regret that they don’t.
@Hans
“And where did your assumed labiovelar go in Latin, Celtic, or Baltic? -sr- > -str- are regular processes in Germanic and in Slavic, so there’s no need to assume anything else here.”
Do you know that ‘sister’ in Old Prussian is swestro? So we have Slavic, Germanic, Baltic and possibly Armenian showing a consonant after -s-.
@Hans
Again, we may have a split cognate set here: we have strong evidence for -kw- (later clusterized as ku) in the ‘husband’s parent’ set (Gk hekura, Lat socrus, Slav *swekru), with some evidence for assibilation in Arm skesur, Skrt svasura, Lith sesuras) and some evidence for -t- in the ‘sister’ set, which also shows a strong sibilant across the board. If we reconstruct *sweskwer-, we can see how one set generalized -kw- and mostly lost -s-, while the other one generalized -s-, while reflecting *-kw- as -t- in some dialects.
A whole new sound law out of nowhere.
Irregular sound changes across the board.
@David
“Irregular sound changes across the board.”
Still better than the current situation: “sporadic” (per Piotr) *sr > str in Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, unexplained Alb vjeherr, unexplained Arm skesur, unexplained -y- in Arm k’oyr ‘sister’, strange semantic extension from ‘sister’ to ‘mother’s brother’ in Arm k’eri (< *swesriyo-), no etymology for the sister and the husband's parent sets.
"A whole new sound law out of nowhere."
Even if I don't postulate it, the phonetic support for *kw in Gk hekyra (comp. kyklos < *kwekwlo-) , Lat socrus, Lith sesuras (comp. -u- in ungurys 'eel' < PIE *H2engwh-), Skrt svasura is strong.
Personally I don’t know about Baltic, but in Germanic and Slavic *sr > *str is regular, as Piotr actually said (scroll up and read again).
(In Germanic it happened after Verner’s law had run its course. The Verner outcome is *r with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel, according to one of Piotr’s recent papers.)
No, kyklos comes from zero-grade *kʷkʷlo-. In Abkhaz, /kʷkʷ/ is not a long consonant, but is pronounced with a voiced sound somewhere around [u] or [w̩] in the middle; unfortunately the website where you could listen to an example seems not to exist anymore.
@David
“No, kyklos comes from zero-grade *kʷkʷlo-.”
Yes. So, -ky- in hekyra can represent zero-grade of *kwe. Also, recall that Slavic strangely has *swekuro- instead of expected swesuro-**. The actual attestation is consistent with a labiovelar, not a palatovelar.
“in Germanic and Slavic *sr > *str is regular, as Piotr actually said (scroll up and read again).”
This is what Piotr actually wrote: “/sr/ > /str/ is common and familiar, but often capricious. It happened in Slavic in inherited *sr clusters, but when such clusters appeared again as a result of yer loss, no regular t-epenthesis was reenacted, though we often find it as a random, sporadic change. For example, PSl. *s(w)orka ‘magpie’ (Cf. Lith. šárka) gives standard Polish sroka (but dialectally sometimes stroka), Bulgarian and SCr. svraka, Slovene sraka, but Czech stráka. The same is true of secondary /zr/ > /zdr/ (sporadic and unpredictable).”
But the assumption of regularity that you’re advocating for here is perfectly consistent with reconstructing PIE *kw between -s- and -r-. This environment may have been conducive to picking a -t- (rather than -p-, for instance) from the 3 options offered by PIE *kw, but there’s nothing causal about making the change sr > str. Also, there are cases in Slavic (e.g., sterna next to serna ‘roe’) where -t- emerges without being immediately followed by -r-.
Another point: consider IE *sreu- ‘flow, stream’. It gives *str- in Slavic, Germanic and Baltic. But if we adduce Gk sporos, sperma, we can reconstruct *skwer- and find -t- corresponding to -p- in Greek, rather than simply emerging ex nihilo between -s- and -r- in Slavic, Germanic and Baltic. Again, an extended cognate set methodology helps establish deep, causal regularity between PIE and the daughter branches not just superficial phoneme co-occurrence within branches.
He wrote it happened twice in Slavic – the first time it was regular, the second time (after new /sr/ clusters had emerged) it happened after Proto-Slavic had split up and ended up irregular. Obviously the “sister” word belongs to the first time, not the second.
Why would we do that??? Why would we try to derive “seed grain” from “flow”???
…
Vladimir: an extended cognate set methodology helps establish deep, causal regularity between PIE and the daughter branches not just superficial phoneme co-occurrence within branches.
Your (actually Dziebel’s) so-called methodology appears to work this way:
1) determine a “deep causal regularity” on the basis of an idiosyncratic perception of a semantic link between two words sharing a very partial phonological resemblance,
2) then hunt for a rule or set of rules attested somewhere (or just invent one for the purpose) that might justify the alleged resemblance.
Neither of these steps can qualify as a “method”, as they are neither systematic nor applicable to a wide range of examples without setting up special cases for each proposed meaning set. They also leave far too much leeway for individual scholars to follow their own interpretation of which meanings are related. This is a recipe for “folk etymology”, not for serious comparative and reconstructive research.
The traditional method (starting from phonological correspondences not just resemblances) discovers “rules” or “laws” that apply between specific languages under specific conditions, regardless of meanings. The validity of these rules is shown by their applicability to cases other than the ones first considered. The words, stems, roots, affixes, etc thus determined to be related allow us to recognize identical meanings in phonologically different lexical elements and also often unexpected meaning shifts which we would not have suspected had we tried to start with our own ideas of what meanings might be related to each other.
As with all scientific endeavours, mistakes made in defining or applying the method are revealed sooner or later, and once such mistakes are corrected they is often a “leap forward” in its results. No such improvements are possible when the so-called method is not methodical at all.
Well said.
Merci David!
Don’t forget step 3: dismantle all existing etymologies that contradict the ad hoc rules made up in step 2 by making up new ad hoc rules to account for them instead. This step can then be repeated ad infinitum.
Indeed TR! the crowning achievement!
@Marie-Lucie
I may be taking the methodology too far when it comes to the concrete etymological proposals, way beyond what Dziebel would be comfortable with, but I disagree with your presentation of how his method works and how the “traditional” method works. Traditional method leaves behind a lot of formal anomalies (just from my last example: Slav *swekuro instead of expected swesuro**, Alb vjeherr instead of vjetherr**, Arm skesur instead of k’ur** and it’s going to be a very long list) and yields no good etymologies, folk etymologies as “one’s own woman” or such bizarre developments as “put > temple > god.” It also leaves a diaspora of isolated isoglosses without any sources or connections to more widely attested sets.
“The traditional method (starting from phonological correspondences not just resemblances)”
One can’t “start” with correspondences: they need to be determined on the basis of a scientific procedure of establishing what belongs in cognate sets. Traditional method works with resemblances and cuts what might be a natural or historical cognate set into what’s “uncontroversial” (often to contemporary observer who assumes that “toe” and “finger” must be different words) from a formal and semantic standpoint. This works but only up to a point. Those initial correspondence sets can be tentatively circumscribed but they shouldn’t be locked in until a search for extended cognates is finished.
“Neither of these steps can qualify as a “method”, as they are neither systematic nor applicable to a wide range of examples without setting up special cases for each proposed meaning set.”
There’s no such thing (in Dziebel’s methodology) as a “meaning set.” There’s a “cognate set” which is a well-established concept. He just tackles the problem of what goes into a cognate set considering semantics, morphology and phonology and conducts both reconstruction and etymology at the same time.
“idiosyncratic perception of a semantic link”
Why is “eat > throat > beard” or “chew > chin > beard” idiosyncratic? It’s natural and well-attested. “Put > temple > god,” on the other hand, is an idiosyncratic development (with no parallels and no cultural context), and it’s produced by the “traditional method.”
“then hunt for a rule or set of rules attested somewhere (or just invent one for the purpose) that might justify the alleged resemblance.”
The way I see it that Dziebel works with well-known IE laws but he concludes that they are sometimes temporally misplaced (labiovelar split is PIE and not Greek-internal) or postulated ex nihilo (s > th in Latin, sr > str in Slavic). It’s a very efficient way of advancing alternatives. It doesn’t mean he’s automatically right about but it’s quite smart.
@David
“Why would we do that??? Why would we try to derive “seed grain” from “flow”???”
You again seem to “jump the gun.” Germanic *strawjan- gave Old High German strouwen, German streuen, Eng strew, Gothic straujan all meaning “to sprinkle, strew”. So, there’s no semantic abyss between scattering (Gk sporein) and flowing. Also note that I attached this meaning to *skwer-, which is a form that preceded its descendant *s(t)reu- (onset simplified, affix -eu- added) ‘flow, stream’ that developed a more narrow meaning restricted to liquids only.
That’s how cognate sets are analyzed. Some of them may need to be killed at a later point when it becomes clear that they are fuzzy sets (sorry, I have a technical mind), but first plausible sets need to be identified on the basis of shared semantics, morphology and phonology.
Eng. strew etc. are from PIE *sterh3- “scatter”, not *srew- “flow”. Of course you can dziebel those roots together, too, but you can’t use that as independent evidence for a semantic shift.
@TR
“Eng. strew etc. are from PIE *sterh3- “scatter”, not *srew- “flow”. Of course you can dziebel those roots together, too, but you can’t use that as independent evidence for a semantic shift.”
I wasn’t really linking those two roots into a set. I just gave an example of how scattering liquid and hard substances can easily be semantically connected, even in modern English and German.
Scattering is not quite the same as flowing. Drops of liquid do not behave like a larger mass.
Vladimir, that’s the kind of thing that makes me think that you and Dziebel don’t really live in the real world.
@Marie-Lucie
“that’s the kind of thing that makes me think that you and Dziebel don’t really live in the real world.”
I don’t know about Dziebel but I think the differences between me and professional linguists have more to do with my pragmatism vs. linguists’ idealism. If I see a pattern, I put it out to test. If it fails, it fails. But you always seem to check every pattern against some kind of ideal reality to which it should apriori conform.
“Scattering is not quite the same as flowing. Drops of liquid do not behave like a larger mass.”
I wouldn’t argue with this outside of language. But language is not always rational or Newtonian in the way it codes reality. That’s why for me it’s a matter of a formal semantic theory (accompanied by morphological and phonetic considerations) that either allows or disallows certain pathways of change. I’m far for from saying that semantics is the basis of a cognate set, but between arguments from subjective incredulity and arguments from formal theory, I choose the latter. If you apriori disagree that in IE languages forms with meaning ‘scatter, sprinkle’ could split-evolve into forms meaning a) ‘stream, flow’; b) scatter, then propose your version of semantic and morphological evolution where rules of change are different from the ones I’m postulating and can better account for observable reality.
Vladimir, pretty soon I won’t have any arms left.
@Marie-Lucie
Same here. I’m already using my shoulders. 🙂
Wait. Are you now trying to derive *srew- from *strew- rather than the other way around?
@David
“Are you now trying to derive *srew- from *strew- rather than the other way around?”
Yes, that’s the hypothesis: the -t- found in Germanic, Baltic and Slavic represents the dental reflex of a PIE labiovelar (not a de novo regional change between -s- and -r-), so we would reconstruct *skwer- > *skwreu-. A labial reflex would be found in IE *sper- (Gk sporos, speiro, sperma). Comp.: Gk ‘esperos, Lat vesperos, Arm giser ‘evening’ but Germ. *west- ‘west’ (an accepted cognate set) with the same alternation of *-sp-/*-st-, only in the medial position.
Same for Slav *sestra ‘sister’ (-t- there would be comparable to -ku- in *svekuro- ‘husband’s parent’).
So, how would this *-t- disappear? Don’t you have to postulate a whole new sound law for this?
What would condition the reflexes of the labiovelars? If we have p in vesper, why do we have t in via strāta “strewn way” > “street” in the same language?
The “evening” word is indeed difficult. Here’s what Piotr thinks about it.
David: via strāta “strewn way” > “street”
Is strata here actually “strewn”? strewn with what? I thought it had to do with “made with/consisting of layers”. The word is a participle, what is the verb, what does it mean?
It’s a participle of sternō, to spread or scatter.
Lazar, thank you, but the participle suggests an infinitive in -are (long a). so why is there an -n- in the present but not in the participle? And again, what is it that is being scattered?
Sand or gravel at first.
The other way around: layers are what you get when you strew different kinds of sand/whatever on the same spot in succession.
All right! But there must be more than one verb stem.
Would I write three gratuitous comments just to snarf comment #1500?
Naaah.
Oh yes I would!
In addition, a printed version of this post would now be over 1000 pages long.
And when it gets to #1504, it’ll be twice as long as the previous longest thread.
Hey, look at that, #1504 is coming up…
…right about…
…now!
@David
“So, how would this *-t- disappear? Don’t you have to postulate a whole new sound law for this?”
I guess *str > ssr > sr looks more natural to me than *sr > str. On a broader scale, the PIE labiovelar split would operate under the following model: PIE *Kw > T before front vowels and r, *Kw > P before back vowels (Gk sporein).
“The “evening” word is indeed difficult.”
The puzzling alternation between Slav veceru, Lith vakaras, Gk hesperos, Lat vesper, Arm giser ‘evening’, Germ *west- ‘west’ could be compared to PIE *kreuH2- ‘blood’, *s(t)reu- ‘stream, flow’ (Lith srava ‘menstrual blood’) and PIE *sper- (Gk sporein).
BTW, if this is plausible, then we could reconstruct Gk ‘ri:gos ‘cold’ as *stri:gos (< *skwriHgo-) and compare it to Germ. *skuraz 'shower, downpour', Lat caurus 'northwest wind', Slav *severu 'north', Lith siaurys 'north wind'.
The post plus comments, but excluding the sidebar and other fixed-size stuff, is almost 188,000 words. That’s the size of a doorstop-type fantasy or science fiction novel nowadays. (Of course, this page would require severe cutting to be published as a book of any sort, other than by a vanity press.)
@marie-lucie: The -n- in sterno is a present-tense marker. In PIE it was an infix, -n- ~ -ne-, appearing before the last consonant of the root, which in this case is a laryngeal: *str-n(e)-h3- >> stern- (the -e- is not regular here but appears to be analogically motivated, though I don’t fully understand the details). In the past participle this infix didn’t appear: *strh3-to- > stra:tus, regularly.
I saw a reference in one of Miguel Carrasquer Vidal’s articles — I’m pretty sure it was his, anyway — to the ‘fact’ that nasal presents originate in a particle / stem extension **-nu- (for “now”) with subsequent metathesis. Is this mainstream?
Also I remember from Ringe’s volume on PIE to PGer that the syllabification rule for resonants (recursively syllabic before ‘consonantals’, consonantal before syllabics) has an exception for this infix — we get *linkʷ- (one syllable) and not *l̩yn̩kʷ- (two syllables) in zero grade. An easy explanation would be that syllabification had been fixed before metathesis of -n-, but I don’t know if the timing fits.
If pressed, I think most Indo-Europeanists would agree that the nasal infix developed out of a metathesised suffix, though the details remain to be reconstructed. It’s my view as well.
Czech středa “middle” and stříbro “silver” disagree with you. This epenthesis is no stranger than *nr > ndr, ns > nts or nʃ > ntʃ.
Oh! Nice! This explains how Greek strot- fits in spite of its different vowel!
@David
“Czech středa “middle” and stříbro “silver” disagree with you.”
Ah, the irregular and the sporadic ones! 🙂
David, στρωτός shows the normal development of pretonic *r̥h₃ in Greek (reflecting the “colour” of the laryngeal. As noted by TR, in Latin the outcome is /raː/ for all laryngeals. The development of accented zero grade is different: /-oro-/ in Greek and /-ara-/ (or whatever comes from it) in Latin. Similarly for syllabic *l and nasals.
The *h3 of this root appears to be some kind of suffix, at least if στρατός “army” (*str-to-) is related. Piotr, any thoughts on that, or on the unexpected -e- of sternere?
The development of accented zero grade is different: /-oro-/ in Greek and /-ara-/ (or whatever comes from it) in Latin. Similarly for syllabic *l and nasals.
Is this right? We have Gk. βάλανος : Lat. glāns “acorn”, and Gk. γάλοως : Lat. glōs “sister-in-law”, both of which seem to show a different treatment of accented *RH.
I’m not sure what your point is.
Oh, so it does have ω after all. I was wondering.
Piotr: If pressed, I think most Indo-Europeanists would agree that the nasal infix developed out of a metathesised suffix, though the details remain to be reconstructed. It’s my view as well.
That is what I remember stated as a general rule, but the -n- in sterno did not look to me like an infix.
Vladimir: I guess *str > ssr > sr looks more natural to me than *sr > str.
On what basis? It may be your own impression, but the sequence sr is not terribly common (unless an intervening vowel has been lost), and *sr > str is well-attested in the history of many languages (along with other examples of epenthesis, as David mentioned above).
No meeting of the minds looks possible in this thread either, though there is not the underlying current of abuse that we saw in The Other Place. Still, I think the Hattics should stop pretty soon now.
@Marie-Lucie
“but the sequence sr is not terribly common (unless an intervening vowel has been lost)”
Well, this seems to support my hypothesis (and not the mainstream view). The mainstream view reconstructs a “not terribly common” sequence *sr-, while I reconstruct an intervening consonant that was lost in some languages after an intervening vowel had got lost (e.g., *skwer- > *skwr > *str > *ssr > *sr) but was retained in others.
@David
“I’m not sure what your point is.”
The correspondence between Germanic, Baltic, Slavic *str (PIE *skwr- in my version) and Greek, Celtic and Latin *sr (PIE *sr in the mainstream version) is regular, according to Piotr (and you), while the late Czech examples attesting for *sr- > str- that you cited are sporadic. This means the former is more frequent, although it does look like both are possible.
Is this right? We have Gk. βάλανος : Lat. glāns “acorn”, and Gk. γάλοως : Lat. glōs “sister-in-law”, both of which seem to show a different treatment of accented *RH.
Both are possible cases of vowel syncope in initial CVR-, see
http://languagehat.com/juglandine-linguistics/#comment-2063389
I should have remembered our discussion of the “acorn” word. Still, how good is the evidence for the Greek and Latin treatments of accented *RH? Words containing that sequence aren’t particularly thick on the ground.
The *h3 of this root appears to be some kind of suffix, at least if στρατός “army” (*str-to-) is related. Piotr, any thoughts on that, or on the unexpected -e- of sternere?
If it’s a suffix, it must have been a fossil one already in PIE (what people call informally a “root extension”). LIV separates (1) *ster- ‘niedestrecken’ from (2) *sterh₃- ‘hinbreiten, ausbreiten’; and to complicate matters further there’s also (3) *streu- ‘streuen’ which is sometimes hard to distinguish from the other two. LIV lists sternō under both (1) and (2), treating it as a merger of *str̥-n(e)u- (with a suffix) and *str̥-n(o)-h₃- (with an infix), and attributing the e-grade to the analogy of the root aorist *ster- (Ved. á-star). Too much of it is arbitrary for my taste, but I can’t say I have a better idea. It’s a messy situation and somebody should do something about it. 😉
TR,
The evidence is good for Greek but scanty for Latin, and pal(*a)ma : παλάμη remains the prime example.
JC, Personally I think I know (and practice) a fair amount about the principles of historical linguistics in general, but I learn a lot of specific IE details from Piotr, David, TR and others who really know about IE and its branches. Most of the comments here are (with few exceptions) about technical details and interpretations based on a long, continuing and evolving tradition, rather than personal opinions.
@Marie-Lucie
“I think I know (and practice) a fair amount about the principles of historical linguistics in general.”
I think you should try and co-author a paper with Dziebel or have a debate in a professional publication to sort all the methodological issues out. As an outsider, I’m rather confused about who is right and who is wrong. With the exception of the “sister=one’s own woman” etymology, you tend to side with fellow linguists. This makes me feel like you may be biased. (At the same time, it’s good that it’s consistent – it means Americanists and Indo-Europeanists draw on the same tradition of analysis.) I do feel like I’ve exhausted all of my options here. I have a lot of passion for IE linguistic material but I don’t have the cache of a professional to convince anybody. At the same time, I’m lacking something (whether knowledge or bias) to be convinced by you or Piotr. I’m just left with the same option as always: learning from all sides and figuring it out on my own.
you tend to side with fellow linguists. This makes me feel like you may be biased.
Hilarious! Is it really a shock to you that linguists side with fellow linguists, physicists with fellow physicists, etc., against amateurs with crackpot theories? You freely admit you don’t have the professional knowledge the linguists do, but you somehow think you can examine your inner feelings and decide “who is right.”
I’m just left with the same option as always: learning from all sides and figuring it out on my own.
You’re never going to figure anything out without professional training, but if this thread hasn’t convinced you of that, nothing will.
@languagehat
“Is it really a shock to you that linguists side with fellow linguists, physicists with fellow physicists, etc., against amateurs with crackpot theories?”
I have enough education and experience to tell crackpots from scientists. Being a linguist without a semantic theory makes one’s linguistic theories vulnerable to critiques by scholars from adjacent disciplines (anthropologists, psychologists, logicians, etc.). Ultimately, it’s one single reality, and linguists have a claim on it only up to a point. Then it starts to hinge on beliefs, professional traditions and ignorance of what neighboring disciplines have established beyond reasonable doubt.
@John Cowan: A typical trade paperback page is about 400 to 500 words, so as a fantasy novel, this thread is only of intermediate length.
I really wouldn’t call that a tradition. It’s based on observations of what has happened in languages around the world, and how often it has happened.
Then start learning.
As long as you don’t understand this subject better than Wikipedia, you won’t figure anything out on your own. You figured out on your own that there’s a problem which Szemerényi’s law explains, but you neither knew about Szemerényi’s law nor figured it out on your own; I’m sure there are dozens more such cases. Read more.
Dr. Dunning, meet Dr. Kruger.
@David
“Dr. Dunning, meet Dr. Kruger.”
Oh, that’s definitely not my case. I can easily see and admit my own ignorance about certain linguistic matters, which I have abundantly admitted in this string. I haven’t seen anyone else in this string do the same. But when it comes to a fundamental distinction between crackpots and scientists, I have no doubt I can tell them apart. What you are missing is a realization that Indo-European linguistics has been done for the past 200 years by hundreds of highly intelligent and knowledgeable scholars. And they have still left a lot to be desired in terms of phonology, semantics, etymology. And there’s no reason to suspect that those problems will ever be ironed out. It means it’s not a matter of knowledge but of methodology. Dziebel has R&D’d a more meaningful methodology, and there’s nothing to be defensive about. A horse may have been transporting people for much longer than a car and has accumulated more observations about roads, but a car is faster.
“You figured out on your own that there’s a problem which Szemerényi’s law explains, but you neither knew about Szemerényi’s law nor figured it out on your own; I’m sure there are dozens more such cases.”
I admitted that I didn’t know about Szemerenyi’s law, so your theory about the applicability of the Dunning-Krueger effect to me has been falsified.
@Vladimir: I have a lot of passion for IE linguistic material but I don’t have the cache of a professional to convince anybody.
You don’t need cachet to convince anybody. You’ve got this cynical idee fixe that linguists accept or reject ideas based on the academic status of their proponents, but you have it the wrong way around: scholars gain status by proposing good ideas. If Dziebel’s theories were worth discussing, he could submit them to journals, get them published, and eventually make a name for himself as a respected Indo-Europeanist. But that will never happen because it’s immediately clear to any professional that the innovative methodology he has “R&Ded”, with its anything-goes phonology, is a step backward rather than forward.
Vladimir:
I think you should try and co-author a paper with Dziebel
You are dreaming!
I don’t have the cache of a professional to convince anybody.
You seem to assume that everyone here is a professional linguist except yourself, but in fact the professionals (those with academic positions) are in the minority. Nobody here introduces themselves by saying something like “As a tenured professor of linguistics at X university …” even if they are, and the majority are not. But some of them are extremely well-informed about both theory and practice and would probably be able to contribute to linguistics at a professional level if they did not have other interests and duties to attend to.
Being a linguist without a semantic theory makes one’s linguistic theories vulnerable to critiques by scholars from adjacent disciplines (anthropologists, psychologists, logicians, etc.). Ultimately, it’s one single reality, and linguists have a claim on it only up to a point. Then it starts to hinge on beliefs, professional traditions and ignorance of what neighboring disciplines have established beyond reasonable doubt.
Scholars from “adjacent” disciplines who criticize linguistics without even a minimal formation in the discipline are rarely able to offer constructive opinions or to establish anything relevant “beyond reasonable doubt”. But you seem to ignore the existence of anthropological linguistics (or linguistic anthropology), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and other specialties straddling the boundaries of two disciplines, which shows you that linguists are not all narrowly focused on just the technicalities of language.
@TR
” it’s immediately clear to any professional that the innovative methodology he has “R&Ded”, with its anything-goes phonology, is a step backward rather than forward.”
@Marie-Lucie
“Scholars from “adjacent” disciplines who criticize linguistics without even a minimal formation in the discipline are rarely able to offer constructive opinions or to establish anything relevant “beyond reasonable doubt”.”
Guys, do you realize that you’re just making ex cathedra assertions unsubstantiated by any reality? I can easily call Schindler’s treatment of thorn clusters, Latin sr > thr, Germano-Balto-Slavic sr > str, etc. an “anything goes phonology.” Why can’t we talk in neutral terms to the effect that there are difficult cases that people try to tackle and then there are easy cases. The likelihood of success is vastly different in both cases, so to label one attempt “anything goes” and another attempt “science’s best effort” is slightly disingenuous.
“You’ve got this cynical idee fixe that linguists accept or reject ideas based on the academic status of their proponents”
I’m just realistic. Yes, in principle, no one would “discriminate” against a smart, curious person who is too busy to get a degree in linguistics but who is a good listener and plays back what he read in textbooks. But I’m not aware of any amateur who proposed an idea, or a law in Indo-European linguistics that would become acceptable to professionals. Scientific credentials are likely good predictors of the likelihood of formulating a phonetic law. (This excludes early Indo-Europeanists who often weren’t professional philologists because philology wasn’t a well-formed career path at that time.) As it often happens, I may be wrong, so please give me an example.
“is a step backward rather than forward.”
By any standard scientific expectations, it’s very obviously a step forward. No one, to my knowledge, has made transparent the principles of cognate set composition, proposed testable hypotheses about the origin of IE words for ‘beard’ or ‘brother’ or of Lat femur and Slavic *bedro, formulated a strict alternative to the mainstream phonological model (e.g., voiced aspirates as derived from clusters, labiovelars as split in PIE times, etc.), filled in distributional gaps with previously unrecognized cognates of isolated isoglosses, etc. And I’m talking about formulating testable hypotheses (all the boxes are checked), not yet assuming that they are correct. In the case of the traditional method, a lot of formulations don’t even meet scientific standards of provability (e.g., -sor- ‘woman’ is not even attested to justify the etymology of ‘sister’ as ‘one’s own woman’; the word for ‘beard’ and ‘brother’ are assumed to be underived within Indo-European (or derived from fantastic notions), with no acceptable cognates on the ever more hypothetical “Nostratic” level, etc.) Unless scholars formulate different hypotheses that meet objective criteria and make them “compete” with each other, no progress of science is possible. Right now, I can see that a lot of what traditional comparative method yields looks like cars that can only be driven by engineers who made them, not by any randomly picked human being who knows how to drive. (Sorry, engineering metaphors keep coming to my mind – as we say in Russian, someone who’s infested with lice can’t stop talking about a bath. 🙂 )
@Marie-Lucie
“But you seem to ignore the existence of anthropological linguistics (or linguistic anthropology), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and other specialties straddling the boundaries of two disciplines, which shows you that linguists are not all narrowly focused on just the technicalities of language.”
Not too many cross-trained scholars exist and not too many of them know something about Indo-European linguistics. (Even fewer of them know Penutian languages.) Some of them did look at Indo-European linguistics, and the outcome is the same as the one expressed by Dziebel. Above I gave an example of an anthropological linguist, Paul Friedrich, criticizing non-anthropological linguist Szemerenyi for fantastic etymologies. Harshly criticizing. Criticizing a prominent linguist who wrote a whole book on Indo-European kinship terms. Truth be told, Friedrich did not propose alternatives, while Dziebel has. Considering that the latter are not acceptable to non-anthropological linguists, there’s still a long way to go before things clear up for everybody.
“You are dreaming!”
I’m shocked by how uncollaborative scholars can be toward each other. I run cross-functional teams in which professionals with one set of skills join professionals with a different set of skills to build whatever we are building for consumers together. Some of them come earlier in the process, others take over mid-way, but it’s one process with a coherent outcome. My worst nightmare, as a manager, is when team members can’t get along or they can only work solo. Luckily, this happens rarely.
I just realized that my posts are getting longer and longer. Let’s just agree to disagree. We all have our day jobs (linguistic or otherwise)… Great discussion, everyone!
Why don’t we let this wind down now that valiant Vlad has finally realized there’s no point sticking his head in the wood-chipper any longer? If you’re curious, I suggest you write Dziebel and ask him, though I doubt the answer is going to provide much enlightenment.
@languagehat
” valiant Vlad has finally realized there’s no point sticking his head in the wood-chipper any longer”
Just a small clarification: I don’t perceive this long exchange as sticking my head into a wood-chipper. I don’t think this wood-chipper exists. I’d love to continue thinking through concrete examples and bouncing around different models. But I don’t want to exchange shrugged shoulders with people, and a collective think is not happening for whatever reason.
Yes, I agree.
(And not to draw out the debate any further — this page is already taking too long to load! — but Vladimir, you might look into Michael Ventris as an example of an outsider who revolutionized an entire subfield of IE linguistics.)
@TR
“You might look into Michael Ventris as an example of an outsider who revolutionized an entire subfield of IE linguistics.)
I’ll read more about him, but what I picked up from David’s favorite source is the following: “Ventris’s initial theory was that Etruscan and Linear B were related and that this might provide a key to decipherment. Although this proved incorrect, it was a link he continued to explore until the early 1950s.”
What a crackpot! 🙂
The difference between you and Ventris is that Ventris was willing to learn from his mistakes. If you had been Ventris, you’d still be maintaining that Linear B was Etruscan, shifting ground every time someone pointed out an absurdity, saying “That’s interesting, I didn’t know that,” but never giving up your idée fixe.
@languagehat
I’m sorry I don’t know what you are referring to as my “idee fixe.” I’m convinced, with Dziebel, that etymology and reconstruction should happen at the same time and that the input (cognate sets) determines the output (sound law). This is just logic. I’m intrigued by his ideas and etymologies that voiced aspirates are voiced stops + laryngeals and that labiovelars (or labiouvulars ?) split in PIE times. Just like Pyysalo, I’m not convinced by Schindler’s treatment of thorn clusters. Following David and Piotr, I don’t think anymore that Gk amelgo comes from *mmelgo. Which idee fixes should I walk away from to look more like Ventris?
Vladimir: You yourself present your (and Dziebel’s) idée fixe:
I’m convinced, with Dziebel, that … the input (cognate sets) determines the output (sound law)
In “mainstream” historical linguistics, “cognate sets” cannot be assembled unless the words in question are shown to be relatable to each other through sound correspondences from which a common ancestor can be reconstructed (at least tentatively, and the correspondences should not be valid just for the set in question). So Dziebel is putting the cart far ahead of the horse by starting with (his idea of) semantic sets. He might have a point if those sets turned out to result in a better, simpler, more ingenious, more logical, more systematic (etc) organization than the traditional phonogically based ones, but that is not what happens, instead the resulting correspondences he finds or invents are usually chaotic.
It is true that not everything in IE (or similar large-scale groups) has been discovered or every problem resolved to every scholar’s satisfaction, and that there is still a lot to be discovered, but this situation is typical of any serious scientific endeavour. Astronomy has been a field of study for thousands of years, and has gone through several “revolutions”, but I don’t think that astronomers are complaining about that.
But perhaps it is indeed time to agree to disagree.
@Marie-Lucie
“So Dziebel is putting the cart far ahead of the horse by starting with (his idea of) semantic sets.”
At this point, I don’t know what the cart is and what the horse is but I agree that it’s the horse that pulls the cart. I’d like to have an opportunity to spend time comparing what happens if we put etymology first (and it includes phonology as an ingredient) and phonology last. The phonology-first model, which is the “traditional method,” etymologies are a problem, phonological irregularities are diffused but pervasive and there does not seem to be a compelling “in” into macrocomparativism (there are no words across the whole Eurasian landmass that can be connected to PIE *pH2ter ‘father’). The etymology-first model has not achieved the degree of generality that the phonology-first model has (I agree with you on that) but it has generated a number of intriguing connections. The reason it has not achieved this generality is partially because it compares cognate subsets with each other, so it’s a different level of phonetic regularity. If you look at the etymology *bhreH2ter br BEFORE a schwebeablaut/laryngeal-throwback kind of shift leftwards from H2 to b+h). A potential new phonetic law is an outcome of the cognate superset composition but the way this cognate superset is assembled already includes phonetic correspondences, morphological parallels and semantic considerations.
So the difference between an etymology first model and the phonology-first model is in the kind of phonetic laws that are proposed and the relative chronology of those laws, but it’s not about a neglect for phonology. The last but not the least.
I’m still waiting for the details on that. Why are there any labiovelars left? Under which conditions did they split on the way to PIE, and under which conditions did they stay intact (mostly all the way to modern Italian)?
How convenient, then, than it has a PIE-internal etymology: the verb root *peh₂- “protect” and the agent-noun suffix *-ter-, which apparently triggers zero-grade in the root.
Theoretically perhaps. In practice, Dziebel and you simply don’t know most of what has been found out about phonology. In trying to solve one problem, both of you create a hundred new ones without even noticing. We’ve gone through example after example in this thread.
@David
“How convenient, then, than it has a PIE-internal etymology: the verb root *peh₂- “protect” and the agent-noun suffix *-ter-, which apparently triggers zero-grade in the root.”
That’s another great example of a folk etymology. Not every Indo-Europeanist subscribes to this etymology of ‘father’ but we all can see how anyone can easily succumb to this thinking. Simplistic phonology goes first, without any concern for semantics, or distribution, but then there’s a strong desire to find at etymology and an artificial bridge is created between two cognate sets (‘father’ and ‘protect’). The two methods are the exact converses of each other: Dziebel carefully builds a cognate set from the beginning before figuring out all the phonological details, while you first lock in phonology but then you add a semantic leap between ‘father’ and ‘protect’ in the end.
Luckily, we have Dziebel’s solution handy, so we can compare the two approaches directly. He compares IE *pH2ter or *paH2ter ‘father’ with Lithuanian tevas, tetis ‘father’, Slav *struju- ‘father’s brother’ (< *tetrujos), Arm yawray 'step-father' ( *ttrujos > *struju (morphologically identical to Skrt pitrvya and Lat patruus ‘father’s brother’ and in terms of the onset similar to OPruss thewis ‘father’s brother’). Compared to the phonetic chain proposed in (Vey 1931), this new one drops the most difficult first step that required the conversion of pt into tt. (See above for the origin of ORuss nestera ‘niece’ from *netetera < *nekw– instead of *neptera.) Similarly, the otherwise-puzzling Arm yawray ‘step-father’ can now be seen as regularly derived from *tatros (comp. Gk patroos). Arm hayr (< *kweH2ter), just like Arm hur ‘fire’ ( f > h) but descends more seamlessly from the labiovelar without the change in the place of articulation. It’s likely that Hitt atta, Slav *otici, Goth atta ‘father’ are also derived from *akwa-, and hence there was only one PIE term for ‘father’ (*kwe-, *akwe-) and not two (*pH2ter and *atta) as presently believed. Interestingly, in Gothic, the form fadar occurs only once, with atta being the main term for ‘father’. If the two forms are linked phonetically, the puzzle of why a PIE term for ‘father’ fell out of favor in Gothic simply disappears. Proto-Germanic *fathoo ‘father’s sister’ (OEng fathe, OFris fethe) is a perfect morphological match for Slav *teta ‘father’s sister’. Unlike *pHter and *te-, which are isolated in a Eurasian perspective, PIE *kwe-, *akwe ‘father’ find plenty of potential cognates in the so-called “Nostratic” or “Eurasiatic” languages (comp. Nostr eka ‘older male relative’ such as ‘father’, ‘father’s brother’, ‘older brother’, ‘grandfather’, etc.).
Vladimir: the difference between an etymology first model and the phonology-first model…
I don’t understand the meaning you give to “etymology”. Usually this word refers to the study of the origin of words and presumably involves phonology, morphology and meaning. So how can you do “etymology” first, followed by phonology, if phonology is a part of etymological study? Unless you mean something quite different by “etymology”?
Some linguists (erroneously in my view or that of most traditionalists) seem to use “etymology” to refer to a “lexical set”, a group of words sharing the same or a similar meaning and also phonological similarity, probably as a preliminary grouping before tackling reconstruction (and presumably sorting out true cognates from borrowings). Is that what you mean too? except that you assume that those similar words are ipso facto “cognate sets” (of words going back to a common ancestor).
@Marie-Lucie
“Usually this word refers to the study of the origin of words and presumably involves phonology, morphology and meaning.”
That’s exactly right. I don’t attribute any other meaning to the word “etymology.” Phonological considerations are only a subset of an overall semantic, phonetic and morphological pattern that constitutes an etymology. The “traditional” method starts with phonology and then adds a semantic link to a different cognate set after the reconstruction had been finished. David just gave a good example of this process with his explanation of PIE *pH2ter ‘father’. And contrast it with Dziebel’s solution to the same word (see above). He takes the whole semantic, morphological and phonological pattern, develops an etymology and provides a potential sound law to explain the phonetic variation.
@David
“I’m still waiting for the details on that. Why are there any labiovelars left? Under which conditions did they split on the way to PIE, and under which conditions did they stay intact (mostly all the way to modern Italian)?”
Marie-Lucie may have had a right insight into this issue. What if we reconstruct labiouvulars for PIE and then postulate a shift to labiovelars for ancestors of those languages that have retained labiovelars into the present? So PIE *labiouvulars split into D-, P, Kw- and then Kw got retained as such in Germanic and Latin/Romance?
@Marie-Lucie
Dziebel’s analysis of IE *pH2ter ‘father’ is a good example how he does not base his cognate sets on idiosyncratic semantic links (while scholars who connect ‘father’ and ‘protect’ do). He stays within the same meaning, monitors morphology: Skrt pitrvya and Slav *struju- ‘father’s brother’ are exactly the same morphologically and semantically. One cannot possibly divorce pitrvya from pita ‘father’. But nobody has been able to explain Slav *s- in relationship to Skrt *p-. Dziebel steps back, takes the whole paradigm of words meaning ‘father’, ‘father’s brother’, ‘father’s sister’ and ‘stepfather’ into consideration, finds several clear morphological matches and formulates a phonological solution killing several birds with one stone: the puzzling Arm yawray (y is the regular Armenian reflex of *t) and Slav *struju- receive good explanations, just like the isolated Germanic words for ‘father’s sister’. The 200-year-old IE problem of having two roots for ‘father’ disappears through a phonological solution.
Yes, it’s easy to find semantic matches if you reconstruct every PIE stop as a wildcard labiovelar that can have a reflex of any of P, T, K, Kw, s.
@Eli Nelson
“PIE stop as a wildcard labiovelar that can have a reflex of any of P, T, K, Kw, s.”
-s- in Slav *struju- is not directly from *kw but by assimilation from *tetrujos > *ttrujos > *strujos. So it’s only labial, dental and velar stops, just like in Greek and some other IE languages. No surprises here.
labiovelars
“Marie-Lucie may have had a right insight into this issue. What if we reconstruct labiouvulars for PIE and then postulate a shift to labiovelars for ancestors of those languages that have retained labiovelars into the present? So PIE *labiouvulars split into D-, P, Kw- and then Kw got retained as such in Germanic and Latin/Romance?”
I vaguely remember something which possibly suggested original labio-uvulars, but not the rest (and it is too far back to search for it). I don’t believe in a split of labio- somethings into P, T, Kw regardless of context, generalized from Greek prevocalic position to the whole (or almost) of PIE.
The 200-year-old IE problem of having two roots for ‘father’
I don’t see why this is a problem. There is no reason why a large superfamily like IE should have only a single root for it. Look at other large families and although roots for “father” and “mother” tend to be conservative, it is not an absolute rule.
@marie lucie
There are no visible pragmatic differences between ph2ter and te- words for father in IE languages. It’s not like one is vocative and the other is for reference only. Both roots are well attested but it’s been puzzling to people to not find p forms in Balto Slavic or in Hittite and to observe that Gothic fadar is only used once, the usual term for father being atta.
@Marie lucie
BTW labial reflexes of labiovelars are attested outside of Greek in italic celtic and germanic languages.
Yes, that is already well-known to scholars of Indo-European. But the conditions are slightly different in each branch. The cognate of Greek bios in English is quick, which shows that the labial reflex in Greek cannot date back to their common ancestor. There is other evidence that the development of labiovelars to labials occured multiple distinct times, such as the split between p-Italic and q-Italic and the split between p-Celtic and q-Celtic.
Even within Greek, βίος is related to ζωός and ζώω, ζῶ, with different conditioned reflexes of a Proto-Greek labiovelar.
Indeed, a change from labiovelars (or labio-uvulars) to labials is attested in a large number of languages, IE or not. The change of labiovelars to dentals is much rarer (and might have had an intermediate step).
I think the problem most of us have with Vladimir’s use of labiovelars is that he derives so many consonants from alleged labiovelars under the most varied conditions.
@Eli Nelson
” There is other evidence that the development of labiovelars to labials occured multiple distinct times.”
This doesn’t seem to be an argument against postulating a labiovelar split in PIE. Also, Dziebel cites cases (*ekwo) where an uncontroversial labial reflex of a labiovelar in Greek recurs in other languages in the same cognate set (e.g., Gk epos ‘word’, Skrt vakti ‘says, Lat vox ‘voice’ but Slav *upeti/*vopiti ‘cry out, yell’, *vopli ‘outcry’, vypu ‘Ardea stellaris’, Latv u:pet, u:peju ‘I cry’ (in reference to owls and wild pigeons), upuot ‘cry, call loudly’, upis ‘eagle owl’, Lith upas ‘echo’, OHG ufo, uvo, ONorse ufr ‘owl’, Avest ufyeimi ‘invoco’). This suggests it was the very same process.
Also, -kw- > -t- can easily be seen in Slav *penti ‘five’, which is part of a conventional cognate set (IE *penkwe-).
@Marie-Lucie
“I think the problem most of us have with Vladimir’s use of labiovelars is that he derives so many consonants from alleged labiovelars under the most varied conditions.”
I think the shock value comes not so much from allowing “varied environments” (IE *te- and *paH2- fit the front vowel-back vowel very neatly; same for IE *tek- ‘bring forth, give birth’ and IE *poti- ‘potent, master, husband’) but that Dziebel makes such a complex sound change PIE in age, rather than just a local development. It’s a big change and people are naturally on the fence about it.
Vladimir: Are you saying that IE *tek- ‘bring forth, give birth’ and IE *poti- ‘potent, master, husband’) are from the same root? and that the semantics are compatible?
@Marie-Lucie
Yes, that’s my own contribution. 🙂 The semantics seems compatible but I’d like to hear your opinion: *pot- (Toch A pats, B pets ‘husband’, Old Indian: páti- m. `master, lord, ruler’; pátnī f. `female possessor, mistress’, Gk pósi-s, -ios m. `Ehemann, Gatte, Gemahl’, pótnia f. `Herrin, Herrscherin (bes. von Göttinnen), Lat potis, -e `vermögend, mächtig’; hospes, gen. -itis m. `Gastfreund’, Lith pát-s (< *patis), `selbst; Gatte, Gemahl', fem. pati, älter vieš-patni; viẽš-pats `(Gott) der Herr; (souveräner) Herr, Herrscher'; pàts 'selbst', Gothic: bruɵ-faɵ-s (-ɵ-) m. (i) `bridegroom' ) ~ IE *tek- (Gk tíktō `gebären, erzeugen'; tékos n. `Kind, Junges', tékno-n n. `Kind, Tierjunges, Spross', tokeus 'parent', Skrt takman 'offspring', Old High German thegan `Knabe, Diener, Held'). The unifying concept seems to be "to give birth, procreate" from which an extension goes to 'potency, power'. The t- set focuses on 'offspring' (the product of power) but Gk tokeus is 'parent', while the p-set focuses on the source of power. Both sets have a shared connotation of 'belonging to the house' (Gk posis, potnia, Lat hospes vs. OEng thegn 'servant') and of 'family member' (child, parent, husband, housewife).
The "trick" with this cognate superset is that it fits a two-labiovelar mold, so we have to reconstruct *kwekw-, which I understand makes it more difficult to accept than a one-labiovelar root.
Incredible.
Isn’t *kwekw the same form you’re reconstructing for “cook” (standard *pekʷ- ), “flow” (standard *tekw-), and “fly” (standard *peth₂-)?
Eli, yes, I had a distinct impression of having seen *kwekw before, more than once even.
Just derive everything from *kwekw; it will make life so much easier! Even easier than the former gold standard of sal, ber, yon, and rosh.
I contemplated mentioning Marr but decided not to bother 😉
@Languagehat
I can’t seem to get my response displayed. Please allow me to respond. Thanks.
@Eli, @Piotr
I don’t think your objection or your comparison to Marr is valid. Pokorny in his Indo-European dictionary has no fewer than 7 (seven) roots *bher- (And it happens to be one of Marr’s favorite roots!). Would you be interested in comparing Pokorny to Marr? I think it’s not about how many homophonous roots we can reconstruct from the data, but whether the procedure that we’re using is valid.
I can’t seem to get my response displayed. Please allow me to respond.
It’s nothing I’m doing; the software sometimes eats comments for no apparent reason. E-mail me the text of the comment (languagehat AT gmail) and I’ll post it for you. (I’ve had to do that for Piotr quite a bit, for some reason.)
LH, could that be because of the various fonts they use?
The comment box ignores the fonts you use and only responds to the actual content of the text, though it allows any Unicode character and a subset of HTML markup (inside < and > brackets).
The 7 IE *bher- roots (coded by Pokorny as bher-1, bher-2, bher-3, bher-4, bher-5, bher-6, bher-7) can be found at http://dnghu.org/indoeuropean.html.
To summarize: *kwekw-1 ‘bake, cook’ (Lat coquo, Lith kepu, Gk pesso, etc.), *kwekw-2 ‘flow, fly’ (IE *tekw- ‘run, flow’ but *pet-/*pot- Hitt piddai ‘run, flee, fly’, Gk petomai ‘fly’, poteomai ‘hover’, pipto ‘fall’, Skrt patati ‘flies, hastens, falls’), *kwekw-3 ‘give birth, being potent’ (Lat potis, Gk posis, Gk teknon, tokeus, etc.).
Thanks, Steve, for posting on my behalf. I think the link may have been an issue.
Typical Pokorny: no laryngeals, and generally outdated by half a century.
bher-1 is fine.
bher-2 comes with the comment: “also as heavy basis bherǝ- : bhr̥̄-, bh(e)rēi-, bh(e)rī̆-.” Obviously, this is *bʰerh₁-, not *bʰer- at all.
bher-3 is given several times as “*bhr̥ḫ“-. Now, this “ḫ” also occurs in Sanskrit forms, so it’s clearly a miscoding (the whole page is full of miscodings). Judging from those, however, it’s probably the combination of a macron with an accent. The “long syllabic consonants” of prelaryngeal times are today interpreted as clusters with laryngeals. In short, bher-3 isn’t *bʰer-.
bher-4 seems legit.
bher-5 is probably an erroneous conflation of several roots including bher-1.
bher-6 appears to be an abstraction that only actually occurs as *bʰerǵ-.
bher-7 confuses me, but could be a conflation of *bʰh₂er- and *bʰh₂erw-; note that the one Lithuanian reflex which has its intonation spelled out has an “acute”, which is often derived from a laryngeal.
So, instead of seven homophonous roots, there are apparently only two, and one of them is obviously onomatopoetic.
I have much more to say on recent comments, but no time.
@David
“So, instead of seven homophonous roots, there are apparently only two, ”
I stripped the three *kwekw- roots off laryngeals as well, for simplicity, but one or two of them could have laryngeal root-extensions, too, just like the *bher- forms.
On a separate note, just came across the dual meaning of Gk θέναρ ‘palm of the hand, sole of the foot’. An exact parallel to palec ‘finger, toe’.
Are you hopping mad?
Laryngeals aren’t some kind of abstract ornamentation. They’re actual consonant phonemes. Try stripping Russian of every х, ш and ж and see what you get!
Did they, or did they not? Root extensions are actual consonants that leave actual traces.
BTW, has anyone told you yet that PIE is not supposed to have had any roots with two identical consonants? The only possible exception, *mems- “meat”, is suspect – it could be a reduplication of some kind of **mes-, or it could be onomatopoetic (OM NOM NOM NOM), or both.
Laryngeals aren’t some kind of abstract ornamentation. They’re actual consonant phonemes.
The spelling conventions of PIE certainly do give the impression of abstractness, which is why it would have been better to settle on specific consonant letters without subscripts, even if they turned out to be wrong — it’s less misleading. But too late now, I suppose.
@David
“Did they, or did they not? Root extensions are actual consonants that leave actual traces.”
Like you said, it’s taken Indo-Europeanists 50 years to begin seeing differences between what Pokorny coded as homophonous roots. Some of those differences come after the second root consonant, so it’s likely they are root extensions. PIE *petH2- ‘fly, fall’ has -H2- which may have been added since the breakdown of those two-labiovelar roots. One of the labiovelars could have been a palatalized labiovelar.
There’s e/o ablaut in all of the kwekw- forms, which could imply a laryngeal. It is possible that one or two of those roots had an original shape of *kweH3- (hence the ablaut), so they were one-labiovelar roots with two different (dental vs. velar) affixes. Similarly, Dziebel analyzes IE *gwelH2- ‘acorn’ (Gk balanos) and *der- ‘tree, oak’ as, respectively, *gwe-l-H2 and *gwe-r.
So, for me, again, it’s a matter of methodology, not the exact phonetic details. It objectively takes time to figure them out. By “objectively” I mean it’s been happening in Indo-European studies all the time and it’s necessary part of the scientific process. Grimm’s law existed for some time with exceptions until Verner explained them through a different phonetic law.
What is the other option? Keep those individual etymons distinct, you will answer. But then what? Nostraticists offered a bunch of “cognates” for those roots (e.g., p(h)a(t)- ‘fly, flutter’). Why are they not accepted? Because if one’s trying to keep the phonetic and the semantic side similar for the sake of “credibility”, there’s no room for a phonetic law or semantic change to operate. That’s how we get to Merritt Ruhlen’s proto-World ideas. It’s *pet- ‘fly’ all the way down, like the turtles.
“BTW, has anyone told you yet that PIE is not supposed to have had any roots with two identical consonants?”
Why not? “Not supposed to” sounds strange when it comes to language.
David,
It isn’t quite clear if the prohibition against two identical consonants was absolute. We have the widespread root *ses- ‘sleep, be at rest’ (forming a root present, paired with the root aorist *swep-). But at any rate no roots with two identical stops are attested, let alone putative homonymic sets of many such roots.
@Piotr
“But at any rate no roots with two identical stops are attested, let alone putative homonymic sets of many such roots.”
Well, if you don’t reconstruct them, they are not going to be reconstructed. Roots with two voiced aspirates are not really attested in IE languages either (there are some exceptions in Greek such as khthon), but they are reconstructed en masse for PIE.
Roots with unambiguous reflexes of two voiced aspirates can be found in any language that distinguishes the three phonation types and has no Grassmannian dissimilation rule. Germanic, in particular, has plenty of them, as in English bed, bind, bide, borough, borrow, blend, dough, delve, drag, yard etc.
(Gk. χθών is different; it shows oblifgatory assimilation in a stop cluster. We don’t know if the first consonant was originally aspirated, though it’s usually reconstructed as such.)
PIE roots, like Semitic roots, seem to largely obey some version of the Obligatory Contour Principle, a constraint against adjacent identical elements. Of course the -e- with which we conventionally write PIE roots is not really part of the root, but part of an ablaut template, so a root like “*sed-” is actually lexically /s-d/; and roots of the form C₁-C₁ appear to be strongly disfavored in PIE, just as they are in Semitic.
Piotr: <i.We have the widespread root *ses- ‘sleep, be at rest’ (forming a root present, paired with the root aorist *swep-)
Are these supposed to be the same root, or suppletive roots?
“Suppletive” in the sense that their meaning is approximately the same and they differ only in their “lexical aspect” or Aktionsart, but they have a different etymology. PIE had many such pairs, and they sometimes produced mixed, suppletive paradigms in the daughter languages, e.g.
*h₁es- (present) : *bʰuH- (aorist) > Eng. is, be, Lat. ist, fuit, Gk. ἐστί, ἔ-φῡ, etc.;
*bʰer- (present) : *telh₂- (aorist) > Lat. fert, tulit.
Thanks Piotr. I am familiar with “suppletive” forms, as in Latin fero, tuli, latum as I was taught many years ago, but “ses” could have been some form of truncated reduplication (if that was possible in PIE), that’s why I wanted to check.
@Piotr
“Roots with unambiguous reflexes of two voiced aspirates can be found in any language that distinguishes the three phonation types and has no Grassmannian dissimilation rule. Germanic, in particular, has plenty of them, as in English bed, bind, bide, borough, borrow, blend, dough, delve, drag, yard etc.”
How can they be “unambiguous reflexes of two voiced aspirates” if neither of them are voiced aspirates in Germanic languages? You may be thinking about a model as if it were a fact but models and facts are very different.
marie-lucie,
Whatever the “ultimate” origin of *ses-, if functioned as an unanalysable root in PIE. For example, the Hittite present seszi, sasanzi and Vedic sásti, sasánti follow the pattern of ordinary root presents (*sés-ti, *s˚s-énti) rather than reduplicated verbs.
How can they be “unambiguous reflexes of two voiced aspirates” if neither of them are voiced aspirates in Germanic languages? You may be thinking about a model as if it were a fact but models and facts are very different.
Let’s go back to the basics.
For PIE, conventionally three stop series are reconstructed, let’s call them 1, 2, and 3. This is done because there are correspondences between IE languages that can best be explained by assuming these 3 series. As IE linguistics (a) originally assumed that PIE was much like Sanscrit, where the reflexes of these series are 1 = unvoiced stops (tenues), 2 = voiced stops (mediae) and 3 = aspirated voiced stops (mediae aspiratae) and (b) the reflexes in most other IE languages konwn at the end of the 19th century are 1 = tenues, 2 = mediae, 3 = either mediae, aspiratae, or fricatives, a similar system 1 = tenues, 2 = mediae, 3 = mediae aspiratae was reconstructed for PIE. (The classical “Brugmannian” system also assumed tenues aspiratae as in Sanscit, but these are nowadays explained as a separate Indo-Iranian development.)
Now, in the current state of IEan linguistics, this interpretation of the three series is not taken as granted anymore, mostly because systems consisting of tenues, mediae, and mediae aspiratae are rare. Most scholars accept that there were three series, but either have other ideas about the articulation (e.g. the glottalic theory that posits glottalized stops for series 2) or simply are agnostic about the exact articulation. But the terms “media aspirata” or “voiced aspirates” are used to refer to the three series, because each IEan scholar then knows what series is meant, independent of their personal interpretation. So, I don’t remember which interpretation of the system Piotr prefers, but when he says that Germanic has “unambiguous reflexes of two voiced aspirates”, he means that Germanic shows the consonants that are the usual reflex of series 3, nothing more.
Argh, still no time for more than this:
Quite the contrary: most, perhaps all languages have phonotactics. For example, I’m sure you’ve noticed that English allows a lot fewer consonant clusters at the beginning of a word than Russian does; this goes so far that ps-, pt-, ct-, x- in technical terms derived from Greek are pronounced as /s/-, /t/-, /t/- and /z/- in English, and people have real trouble even trying to do otherwise. Many puns rely on this!
Indeed. Though these things partly happen because we borrow words in their foreign spellings and then guess at pronunciations for them, complete with Great Vowel Shift. In some cases it’s even worse, like ginkgo. Or ptarmigan < Sc. Gaelic tàrmach (origin and meaning uncertain) + -an, a diminutive ending, which was respelled in English as pseudo-Greek.
@Hans
“when he says that Germanic has “unambiguous reflexes of two voiced aspirates”, he means that Germanic shows the consonants that are the usual reflex of series 3, nothing more.”
Yes, I know what he’s referring to (the model in which b/d/g in Germanic is seen as reflexes of PIE bh/dh/gh). What I meant to say is that people have no problem reconstructing roots with two voiced aspirates, although there are very few if any instances of two voiced aspirates cooccurring in a root in attested (!) IE languages. Greek and Sanskrit have known restrictions on this cooccurrence described by Grassmann’s Law. And Germanic has no voiced aspirates whatsoever. To use a language with zero aspirates as “proving” the existence of voiced aspirates in PIE sounds illogical. I’d say Germanic evidence is “consistent” with the model but does not provide the best proof for it. My ultimate point was that reconstructing roots with two labiovelars on the basis of what’s postulated as their reflexes in daughter languages (p before back vowel, t before front vowel, etc.) is a perfectly natural methodological move.
This said, there’s an argument to be made that only *kwekw- ‘bake, cook’ is a valid candidate for being a bi-labiovelar root because it’s actually attested as such in Lat coquo. (This still makes Dziebel right that labiovelars (or labiouvulars) split in PIE times hence Slav has *peku, while Lith has kepu and Gk has both pesso and arto-kopos.) The pairs *pot-/*tek- ‘give birth, being potent’ and *pot-/*tek- ‘flow, run, fly, fall’ may need to be reconstructed as *kwe-t-/*kwe-k- or *kweH3-t-/*kweH3-t- because they don’t turn up forms similar to Lat coquo.
@David
“most, perhaps all languages have phonotactics.”
Yes, now I know what you mean. But we’re talking about a reconstructed language. So we don’t get those phonotactics observed in vivo. We ourselves build a model that either has a phonotactic constraint on two identical consonant in a root or it doesn’t. Not postulating a constraint does not mean that those roots were plentiful. They may have been rare due to their peculiar shape but I wouldn’t use abstract phonotactics as a hard argument against reconstructing a handful of those roots.
Yes, I know what he’s referring to (the model in which b/d/g in Germanic is seen as reflexes of PIE bh/dh/gh). What I meant to say is that people have no problem reconstructing roots with two voiced aspirates, although there are very few if any instances of two voiced aspirates cooccurring in a root in attested (!) IE languages. Greek and Sanskrit have known restrictions on this cooccurrence described by Grassmann’s Law. And Germanic has no voiced aspirates whatsoever. To use a language with zero aspirates as “proving” the existence of voiced aspirates in PIE sounds illogical.
As I said in that post you quote, almost nobody maintains today that the series labelled “voiced aspirates” actually phonologically were voiced aspirates. It is clear from the Germanic and Armenian evidence that PIE allowed two stops of that series (let’s call it series 3) in the root, and when Greek and Indo-Aryan turned series 3 into aspiratae (unvoiced in Greek, voiced in Indo-Aryan), Grassmann’s law started to work (the evidence quite clearly shows that Grassmann happened independently in Greek and Indo-Aryan and isn’t of PIE age). So what Piotr is saying that the evidence shows that PIE allowed two stops of series 3 (generally labelled “voice aspirates” for historical reasons) in a root, but not necessarily that these stops were realised as voiced aspirates.
Also, in terms of roots with two identical consonants, how about *koks- ‘thigh, underarm’ (Lat coxa, Skrt kaksa, Toch B kektsene, OHG hahsina)?
Also, in terms of roots with two identical consonants, how about *koks- ‘thigh, underarm’ (Lat coxa, Skrt kaksa, Toch B kektsene, OHG hahsina)?
This is no root, but a word derived from a root (with suffix -s-). The -s- causes devoicing of a preceding voiced stop, so the root doesn’t have to be *kek-, but could as well be *keg- (the root IEW 537/38, denoting crooked and curved objects, would fit quite well semantically).
@Hans
“As I said in that post you quote, almost nobody maintains today that the series labelled “voiced aspirates” actually phonologically were voiced aspirates. ”
Although Piotr specifically referred to “voiced aspirates,” I understand your point. But regardless of what phonetic value people assign to the third stop type, the actual direct evidence has either one such consonant in a root (Sanskrit, Greek, Italic), no such consonants at all but a tripartite division of stops (Germanic, with th, t and d) or no such consonants and no tripartite division of stops (e.g., Balto-Slavic). No IE language actually has bi-aspirate roots, with the exception of Gk cases such as khtho:n that Piotr interprets as assimilated *ktho:n.
Methodologically, the latter situation is interesting. In the actually attested bi-aspirate roots such as khtho:n, Piotr suggests assimilation, while situations in which bi-aspirate roots are not attested at all, he suggests the loss of aspiration from one of them (in accordance with Grassmann’s Law). Why not align interpretation with the actual evidence: why not suggest that bi-aspirate roots (whether Gk khtho:n, ikhthus, ophthalmos, or Germanic *bardaz, *bi:dan and suchlike), are products of independent assimilation that affected the original PIE one-aspirate roots in Greek and Germanic?
@Hans
“This is no root, but a word derived from a root (with suffix -s-). The -s- causes devoicing of a preceding voiced stop, so the root doesn’t have to be *kek-, but could as well be *keg- (the root IEW 537/38, denoting crooked and curved objects, would fit quite well semantically).”
It’s a valid point but at face value it’s a *kok- root until an extended cognate set methodology finds proof that it must be reconstructed as *kog-. Root *keg- (IEW 537/38) has known extensions into the body-part domain and it’s ‘nail, claw’, not ‘thigh, underarm’. In any case, *koks- < *kog-s or *kok-s is attested with two identical consonants in Tocharian, Germanic, Indic and Italic and can easily be used as evidence *next to the Hittite-Indic isogloss *ses- 'sleep') that two identical consonants in a root were not disallowed in PIE. If they were at least one of those descendant languages would have maintained this original constraint and we would have seen forms such as *oks- or *kos-.
Vladimir: why not suggest that bi-aspirate roots (whether Gk khtho:n, ikhthus, ophthalmos, or Germanic *bardaz, *bi:dan and suchlike), are products of independent assimilation that affected the original PIE one-aspirate roots in Greek and Germanic?
Assimilation typically affects segments in immediate contact with each other, such as nasalization of vowels in contact with nasal consonants, or in the Greek examples with -khth- and -phth-. In your Germanic examples the relevant consonants are clearly separated from each other and there is no reason to suspect assimilation in their case.
@Marie-Lucie
“Assimilation typically affects segments in immediate contact with each other, such as nasalization of vowels in contact with nasal consonants, or in the Greek examples with -khth- and -phth-. In your Germanic examples the relevant consonants are clearly separated from each other and there is no reason to suspect assimilation in their case.”
Yes, it’s a valid theoretical distinction. (In practice, though, people postulate distant assimilation left and right as in the case of Lat coquo assimilated (in mainstream thinking) from *poquo.) My hypothesis of an assimilation from bhed- or bedh- to bhedh in Germanic comes not from the khtho:n type of words in Greek (it’s just an example showing that assimilation does work in original monoaspirate roots) but from the fact that in languages in which voiced aspirates are actually attested (Greek and Indic) bi-aspirate roots are prohibited, so the evidence from languages in which aspirates are not attested (Germanic) should/could be interpreted as favoring (distant) assimilation in those languages, rather than dissimilation in the languages in which voiced aspirates are attested.
@Vladimir: As long as you keep talking about the PIE series that is labelled voiced aspirates as if they arevoiced aspirates, we’ll talk past each other.
We know that there was a dissimilation in Greek, because the Dissimilation also works on /h/ from PIE */s/:
e.g. Greek ekho: “have” < Proto-Greek hekho: < PIE *segh- (again, /gh/ is just conventional notation, not implying that this stop was actual a voiced aspirate) vs. aorist eskhon “stop, grip” < Proto-Greek e-skh-on < PIE *(H1e)-sgh-om. We also know that the dissimilations in Greek and Sanscrit are independent of each other, because their results are the specific Reflexes of series 3 in each language minus the aspiration: the 3rd series is repesented by voiced aspirates in Vedic, so the result of the dissimilation is a voiced stop; the 3rd series is repesented by voiceless aspirates in Greek, so the result of the dissimilation is a voiceless stop. If you assume assimilation in Germaic (and Armenian), you’d have to assume a 4th series that became a voiceless stop in Greek, a voiced stop in Indo-Aryan, and was assimilated everywhere else, and only existed root-initially. It seems more reasonable to assume dissimilation in Greek and Indo-Aryan than to assume such a 4th series with a limited distribution.
why not suggest that bi-aspirate roots (whether Gk khtho:n, ikhthus, ophthalmos, or Germanic *bardaz, *bi:dan and suchlike), are products of independent assimilation that affected the original PIE one-aspirate roots in Greek and Germanic?
Because those “double aspirates” in Greek are found only in clusters (when the two aspirates are not separated by a vowel, and aspiration is a property shared by the whole cluster), while Germanic distinguishes reflexes of *dʰ_gʰ, *d_gʰ and *dʰ_g.
the root doesn’t have to be *kek-
In fact, Avestan kaša- ‘armpit’ points to *koḱso-, with non-identical dorsal stops.
@Hans
Can we just go with PIE voiced aspirates for the sake of the argument? Hypothesizing that the 3rd series was another kind of phoneme that got expressed as voiced aspirates in Sanskrit, voiceless aspirate in Greek and Latin and plained voiced stop in Germanic and Armenian is a higher level discussion, which may not need to be had while we are talking about the assimilation vs. dissimilation alternatives.
“We know that there was a dissimilation in Greek, because the Dissimilation also works on /h/ from PIE */s/.”
I see it as evidence that there was no dissimilation in the original bi-aspirate roots because, the moment s turned into h in Greek, one of the aspirates in the original s..kh roots got immediately disallowed. An attested language that has aspirates and disallows bi-aspirate roots is evidence for the same situation in PIE.
“We also know that the dissimilations in Greek and Sanscrit are Independent of each other”
Let’s analyze this a bit. I agree that they are “independent.” But I see them as independent attestations that bi-aspirate roots were disallowed in PIE, not that the bi-aspirate roots got dissimilated twice (or 3-4 times if Tocharian and Latin evidence is included). Just because we need to explain something in the languages (Germanic and Armenian) that don’t have aspirates at all, we can’t read more into what the languages that have the stops in question and the constraint in question actually show.
@Piotr
“In fact, Avestan kaša- ‘armpit’ points to *koḱso-, with non-identical dorsal stops.”
Reconstructing a distinct palatalized velar (on the strength of just one language) in a position preceding s (stable across all the forms) seems wobbly. Why not reconstruct assimilation of -ks- to -š- for Avestan?
As long as you keep talking about the PIE series that is labelled voiced aspirates as if they are voiced aspirates, we’ll talk past each other.
You’ve been talking past each other — or, more accurately, Vladimir and the assembled group of people who are part of the reality-based community have been talking past each other — for essentially the entirety of the thread (since he came aboard). I’m glad everyone seems to be having fun, but I confess my pedagogical urge gave out several hundred comments ago (over 1,600 comments now!). I’m deeply impressed with other people’s patience and tolerance; this is (one reason) why I never became a professor!
@Piotr
Sorry, just saw it: “Because those “double aspirates” in Greek are found only in clusters (when the two aspirates are not separated by a vowel, and aspiration is a property shared by the whole cluster), while Germanic distinguishes reflexes of *dʰ_gʰ, *d_gʰ and *dʰ_g.”
This is the strongest argument in favor of bi-aspirate roots in PIE. Dziebel chips it away by suggesting that g- in PGerm. *gastiz ‘guest’, b- in *bardaz ‘beard’ or b- in *brothar ‘brother’ go back directly to, respectively, PIE *gw (Greek basko, Skrt gacchati), *gw (Greek barathron) and *mr- (Latv marsa), while their counterparts in Lat hostis, barba (already without aspiration) and Lat frater/Gk frate:r acquired aspiration from a voiced stop+laryngeal cluster.
The point being that it’s potentially misleading to use a language without attested aspirates as evidence for aspirates in PIE and of how aspirates behaved in PIE.
@languagehat
“this is (one reason) why I never became a professor!”
I never became a student for precisely the same reason! 🙂
@hat, here’s my survival strategy: I let David and marie-lucie read everything and pick out the interesting questions, and then I read Piotr’s answers to those questions.
I’m thankful to Vladimir, David, marie-lucie and Piotr for bringing up and shedding light on so many questions at such a rapid rate!
Why not reconstruct assimilation of -ks- to -š- for Avestan?
Because PIE *ks and *kʷs yield Avestan xš. Yawn.
@Piotr
But we would also expect palatalized s in sanskrit kaksa but instead it’s a plain velar there.
@Vladimir Diakoff:
Who is “we”? I don’t know the relevant sound changes from PIE to Sanskrit, and I doubt you do either. But I’m sure plenty of Indo-European scholars are aware of the development of these sounds; you aren’t likely to discover new exceptions or problems that everyone else has somehow overlooked. For what it’s worth, Wiktionary says that Sanskrit अक्ष ákṣa (cognate to Latin “axis”) and दक्षिण dákṣiṇa (cognate to Latin dexter) also show Sanskrit kṣ as the reflex of PIE *ḱs, which suggests to me that it was regular.
Eli Nelson,
Precisely. The difference is preserved in Iranian and lost in Indo-Aryan. The same goes for the “thorny clusters”.
@Eli Nelson
“Wiktionary says that Sanskrit अक्ष ákṣa (cognate to Latin “axis”) and दक्षिण dákṣiṇa (cognate to Latin dexter) also show Sanskrit kṣ as the reflex of PIE *ḱs, which suggests to me that it was regular.”
I can see that these are similar contexts but I still don’t understand why “we” can’t reconstruct *ks following the agreement between Skrt (satem) and Latin (centum) languages and postulate a change to sh in Avestan (or in Lith ashis ‘axle’ in the axle set)?
@Vladimir:
“Because PIE *ks and *kʷs yield Avestan xš.” –Piotr
Do you want to know all the example words in Avestan that show a distinction between xš from *ks and š from *ḱs? I found some discussion of this difference on a Wiktionary talk page: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix_talk:Proto-Indo-European/peyḱ-
Ah, I found the PDF mentioned there. Relevant changes discussed on page 15: http://attach.matita.net/caterinamauri/sitovecchio/655984700_Avestan0a.pdf
@Eli Nelson
Thanks. The contrast between k’s and ks in Avestan does seem legit, although there are many more examples of k’s > sh than of ks > xsh. The latter is also imbricated in the thorn cluster solution, which I’m not convinced by. Avestan also has weird clusters (e.g., xshuuash ‘six’ next to IE *swek’s-), so I don’t see a clear pattern. In any case, this discussion started with two-identical consonants, and *koks- is well attested in several languages, which means PIE may have been immune to identical consonants in a root.
@Lars
“I’m thankful to Vladimir”
Thank you for saying so. Finally, someone thank me, too, and not only Piotr the Great. 🙂
basket, curve, etc
Way back when (around the end of January) we discussed words for basket, harp and others. Today while looking for I forget what in this thread I reread a long post by David, which included this sentence:
David: German Kerbe f. “notch” and English kerf are not discussed, presumably because they’re semantically too far away.
Perhaps they are not so far away after all.
Suppose you want to make a circular (or partly-circular) object and you only have a straight and narrow piece of wood. In addition to making it more flexible by heating it (with hot water or fire), you also need to make a series of notches close together in order to remove some wood on the inner side of the desired curve, which will make is possible to bend the piece of wood into the proper shape.
You do the same thing to a piece of fabric when making a garment, to shape the armholes in order to allow the wearer ease of movement, especially if it has sleeves: the fabric in the underarm area needs to be trimmed and notched after the seam is done, so as to reduce bulk in that area. This aspect of garment construction is not obvious on a finished garment, since the rough edges are carefully hidden by extra fabric (of the same kind if thin, as for a shirt, of a thinner, smoother kind for the lining of a heavier garment such as a winter coat.
Kerfing is a somewhat similar technique for creating an object with angles rather than curves: it uses extended notches straight across a thin board, removing the extra wood so as to be able to fold the board to make an angle. I was not familiar with either the word or the technique before I saw the almost cubic traditional wooden storage boxes of the Northwest Coast, for which the vertical sides were traditionally made that way: three notches across a board, fold to form a square, trim the ends, then (originally) sew the ends together with sinew thread, before adding a bottom piece.
Ah, that explains a few things… like half of this thread!
That’s simply because *ḱ was much more common than *k in all environments.
It does. IIRC, a change *šw > xšw has been proposed.
Very good points, thank you!
More later; I have to go, but I’ll be back, as a more famous Austrian once said. 🙂
Twice said, at least. I assume the quote in Terminator 3+ as well as 1 and 2, but I’m not going to watch them to check.
David: [in Avestan “6”] a change *šw > xšw has been proposed.
What? I don’t know Avestan, but could it be just a case of analogical reformation rather than true phonological change?
@David
“That’s simply because *ḱ was much more common than *k in all environments.”
Depending on the protolanguage model that people use, PIE only had k’ and kw and no plain k (hence it’s so rare and Dziebel cites cases when plain /k/ alternates with /s/). So, taking Avestan as an indication of PIE *kok’s-, while we don’t even know if it wasn’t *k’ok’-s in the first place, requires too many assumptions.
“Ah, that explains a few things… like half of this thread!”
It was a joke! And the grain of truth that exists in every joke is that I don’t have enough patience to become a student of a discipline that’s built on too many assumptions. Like the other half of this thread!
@Marie-Lucie
“but could it be just a case of analogical reformation rather than true phonological change?”
My tacit point was that one can’t safely use Avestan because it has completely unexplained clusters.
Vladimir: one can’t safely use Avestan because it has completely unexplained clusters.
I read somewhere that the astonishing similarity between Avestan and Sanskrit (neither of which I know) probably came from the fact that whoever “translated” the Sanskrit texts basically “transcribed” them according to their local language, exaggerating the similarities and analogizing the differences. If so, the scribe would probably tend towards hypercorrection. In the case of *šw > xšw, if there was a popular tendency (if not an actual rule) to simplify clusters (thus merging the descendants of *šw and *kšw), the scribe may have intended to “restore” the original cluster in words that never had it.
I see it as evidence that there was no dissimilation in the original bi-aspirate roots because, the moment s turned into h in Greek, one of the aspirates in the original s..kh roots got immediately disallowed. An attested language that has aspirates and disallows bi-aspirate roots is evidence for the same situation in PIE.
Different languages allow and disallow different things. And suddenly starting to disallow things that were allowed or or allowing things that were not allowed is is exactly what language change is about. Proto-Slavic dissallowed closed syllables, a state that is still reflected in Old Church Slavic, while PIE had them; then came the fall of the weak yers, and after that the modern Slavic languages are full of closed syllables again. Greek and Vedic are not PIE, they have different rules and constraints. So on one level, Greek and Indo-Iranian dissmilating aspirated stops doesn’t say anything about PIE.
Now, if you want to use Greek and Vedic as proof that languages that have aspirated consonants don’t allow a sequence of two aspirated consonants in general, you need to look at a bigger sample than just those two families. I don’t have time to do that, but I also don’t assume such a rule. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that your rule is valid; in that case, there are these logical possibilities:
1) PIE had voiced aspirates and Grassmann is of PIE age. In that case, why is the dissimilation result in Greek a voiceless aspirate and a voiced aspirate in Vedic? The results should be the same in Greek and Vedic.
2) PIE had voiced aspirates, but no roots with two in a row, and the situaton in the languages that show two continuants of voiced aspirates in such roots is due to assimilation (= the variant you are proposing), Then why do Vedic and Greek disagree on the quality of the first stop (voiceless in Greek, voiced in Indo-Aryan)? And as you generally deny that two voiced aspirates can happen in a root, this assimilation cannot have happened in PIE, but must have happened in each individual family, so you need to show the path how it happened in each of them, and why (e.g.) in languages that merged the voiced aspirates with the voiced stops it worked only in roots that had a voiced aspirate as second root stop and not in roots that had a voiced stop (like *teg-).
3) PIE didn’t have voiced aspirates as third series, but something else, and so the dissimilation started only when Greek and Indo-Aryan started to develop aspirates. This last proposal is something that, to my knowledge, a lot of contemporary IEanists could live with.
Further food for thought – while classically, Indo-Iranian and Greek were seen as independent branches that were, due to their age, closest to what PIE looked like, with the discovery of Anatolian and Tocharian there is no consensus any more on that, and there are good arguments to assume that both languages formed an areal grouping that shared several innovations, especially in the development of the verbal system, but also elsewhere (the so-called Graeco-Aryan grouping). in that case, the development of aspiration and subsequent dissimaltion may be a feature of this group only.
Because not only different outcomes but different starting conditions [hey, because + NP can be clearer as well as terser!], Gʰrassman’s Law really should be split into two separate laws, one for Gʰreek and one for Indic.
The idea that the Avestan texts are actually Indic (with an Iranian accent) rather than Iranian fails to explain the Indic/Sanskrit innovations that are absent in Avestan. Piotr has mentioned a few above; another is that Vedic -e- (always long /eː/) corresponds to both -aē- ( < PIIr. *-ai-) and -az- ( < PIIr. *-as- in front of a voiced plosive) in Avestan, so that an attempt at such an adaptation into Avestan would have to involve plenty of guesswork – yet, the Avestan forms are etymologically correct every single time.
I would rather expect something like the only known manuscript of the Hildebrandslied, a partial and bad translation from Old Bavarian to Old Saxon. The translator was of course aware of the High German consonant shift, but hadn’t grasped that it had turned short plosives into long fricatives, so he wrote tt where Old Saxon actually had t at least twice, and also r for initial wr at least once.
David M. (upthread): German Kerbe f. “notch” and English kerf are not discussed, presumably because they’re semantically too far away.
marie-lucie: Perhaps they are not so far away after all.
Suppose you want to make a circular (or partly-circular) object and you only have a straight and narrow piece of wood. […]
Kerfing is a somewhat similar technique for creating an object with angles rather than curves: it uses extended notches straight across a thin board, removing the extra wood […]
Now, this is semantics! I suppose ‘curve’ would be from a zero-grade form with resultative or perfective meaning: “the kerfed”.
For possible root cognates, ON kerr “thicket” is (following Bjorvand & Lindemann) from Gmc. *kerzó:-, related to words for twisting, leading to a *kérsa- “twisting -> wickerwork -> materials for wickerwork”. That would point to basketmaking as the unifying idea,
However, I also want to throw in ON ker “(wooden) tub; abutment, dam; (blood) vessel”, with bucketmaking another instance of making curves by cutting. But according to B&L this word is of non-IE origin: The Germanic cognates point to *kása-/*kasá- “tub” with similar forms in Semitic. Probably not then, unless the Gothic form is unrelated.
Gʰrassman’s Law really should be split into two separate laws, one for Gʰreek and one for Indic.
And possibly another one for Tocharian (as originally proposed by Winter and accepted by Ringe, among others), though the evidence is meagre: the Tocharian loss of phonation contrasts wiped out most of it, except for the different reflexes of root-initial *d (whether original or Grassmannian) and *dʰ.
By the way, anyone unfamiliar with Hermann Grassmann’s biography should take a look at this Wikipedia article. If Grassmann were alive today, he would make a perfect Hattic. It’s a shame linguists and/or mathematicians from the modern University of Szczecin missed the opportunity to commemorate his 200th birthday in 2009. I am afraid very few people there are aware that he lived and worked in Stettin, even if the name is vaguely familiar to some.
@Hans
Thanks for a thoughtful post! It’s very helpful.
1. “PIE had voiced aspirates and Grassmann is of PIE age. In that case, why is the dissimilation result in Greek a voiceless aspirate and a voiced aspirate in Vedic?”
Yes, I read Paul Kiparsky’s attempt to push GL to PIE times and Gary Miller’s response. I agree with GM who makes your kind of argument against it. (Interestingly, Dziebel studied with Kiparsky, so I wonder if his connection of Gk barathron with IE *bhardeH2- was meant to vindicate Kiparksy’s theory of the PIE age of Grassmann’s Law.)
2. “PIE had voiced aspirates, but no roots with two in a row, and the situation in the languages that show two continuants of voiced aspirates in such roots is due to assimilation (= the variant you are proposing), Then why do Vedic and Greek disagree on the quality of the first stop (voiceless in Greek, voiced in Indo-Aryan)?”
Why would it matter in this case? Greek has a law of the devoicing of voiced aspirates that Skrt did not have. I guess the problem that does exist is why are there forms such as Gk pentheros ‘wife’s father’ next to Skrt bandhu ‘kinsman’. If the first consonant never had aspiration, then Greek must have gone from *b to p (devoicing of a plain voiced stop). But this would run into a number of examples in which voiced stops did not devoice in Greek.
If Dziebel is right about the origin of IE *bhreH2ter from the underlying *mer-, then Gk parthenos ‘virgin’ (< *bhrgwheno-) can be connected to Lith merga ' girl' (< *mergwheH2) with the PIE root reconstruction being *mrH2gwH2-, with two laryngeals but no voiced aspirates. IE *bhreH2ter gives Gk frate:r, so in the absence of a second voiceless aspirate, the first one is still fr- < *phr- < *bhr- (and potentially *mrH2-), so assimilation from the second aspirate to the first one in parthenos (or pentheros) could not have happened. So we're left a) assimilation from first consonant to the second one (incoming through affixation); or 2) with two voiced aspirates developing from a cluster voiced aspirate+laryngeal independently in the onset and in the middle of the word but the rule of "bi-aspirate avoidance" wouldn't allow them to stay in the root together, so they got dissimilated the moment the affix *gwhen- got added to the root *merH2-.
3. "PIE didn’t have voiced aspirates as third series, but something else, and so the dissimilation started only when Greek and Indo-Aryan started to develop aspirates. This last proposal is something that, to my knowledge, a lot of contemporary IEanists could live with."
Dziebel's hypothesis is a version of this one because he treats voiced aspirates as clusters of voiced stops + laryngeals.
"while classically, Indo-Iranian and Greek were seen as independent branches that were, due to their age, closest to what PIE looked like, with the discovery of Anatolian and Tocharian there is no consensus any more on that, and there are good arguments to assume that both languages formed an areal grouping that shared several innovations, especially in the development of the verbal system, but also elsewhere (the so-called Graeco-Aryan grouping). in that case, the development of aspiration and subsequent dissimaltion may be a feature of this group only."
Yes. That's a great point. However, with recent strong genetic evidence against the Anatolian homeland of Indo-European languages, the assumption of Anatolian as the earliest branch separating from PIE (hence, the oldest attested version of PIE) may be erroneous. I recently debated this issue in Russian with а Russian archaeologist Lev Klein (http://xn--c1acc6aafa1c.xn--p1ai/?page_id=6727&cpage=1#comment-2465) who believes that Indo-Europeans came from north-central Europe (!). This would make languages without voiced aspirates (Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and Baltic) geographically the least removed from the homeland of Indo-Europeans, while languages with aspirates (especially Sanskrit) as the most removed.
Trond, thanks for the comment on “kerf”, etc.
David, thanks for explaining the Avestan problem. That’s the type of thing I wanted to check with a knowledgeable person.
What… no. This is not how logic works.
The hypothesis – not a mere assumption! – that Anatolian is the sister-group of the rest of IE wasn’t even proposed by proponents of an Anatolian homeland. Historically as well as logically, these two hypotheses have nothing to do with each other.
Yeah, well, he’s wrong – according to the genetic evidence you cited, together with the archeological evidence that is usually cited with it.
Well, it has been mainstream for a really long time that the PIE homeland wasn’t in India or anywhere near. 😐 It is actually pretty common for archaisms to be preserved by emigrants. The only “German” “dialects” that preserve [w] and the late Old and Middle High German transient voicing of short fricatives are spoken in Italy; the only Bavarian dialect that remains fully rhotic is spoken in Ukraine; some features of 16th-century Croatian survive only in eastern Austria…
Kerf is also the width of the groove cut by a saw in wood, which obviously is not less than the thickness of the saw blade, but can be much more.
Thanks JC. I know the word only from seeing it in descriptions of the aboriginal box construction.
@David
“The hypothesis – not a mere assumption! – that Anatolian is the sister-group of the rest of IE wasn’t even proposed by proponents of an Anatolian homeland. Historically as well as logically, these two hypotheses have nothing to do with each other.”
The amateur that I am, I could never understand why divergence in linguistic family trees should mean greater age and not greater distance from the homeland? There are still some understated, shared understandings that only the academic crowd has. For me it’s still an assumption, not even a hypothesis. The structure of the IE tree is such that there’re several uniquely divergent branches (Hittite, Tocharian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian – all spread out, all looking a lot like isolates), and then there’s a big cluster, which is continuously spread geographically, with minimal divergence in-between (the rest including Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic). The least divergent nodes of the IE family tree may just as well be the most stable.
“Yeah, well, he’s wrong – according to the genetic evidence you cited, together with the archeological evidence that is usually cited with it.”
Well, Klein’s point is that archaeologically there’s very little in Pontic Kurgan cultures that can be seen spreading further out west. He didn’t cite any genetic evidence to support his (and others’) hypothesis of a north-central European homeland for Indo-European, although I pressured him a couple of times.
@Piotr
“By the way, anyone unfamiliar with Hermann Grassmann’s biography should take a look at this Wikipedia article. If Grassmann were alive today, he would make a perfect Hattic. It’s a shame linguists and/or mathematicians from the modern University of Szczecin missed the opportunity to commemorate his 200th birthday in 2009. I am afraid very few people there are aware that he lived and worked in Stettin, even if the name is vaguely familiar to some.”
I read the article (and I read Grassmann’s linguistic writings before in an English translation) – thanks. For once, I’m with the majority – I didn’t know he lived in what’s now Poland. I wonder if his linguistic law was influenced in any way by his mathematical background. There’s a certain love for symmetry and for changes from symmetrical (two-aspirate roots) to asymmetrical structures (one-aspirate roots, with deaspiration mostly affecting the first consonant) that make his law look mathematical or geometrical to me.
The amateur that I am, I could never understand why divergence in linguistic family trees should mean greater age and not greater distance from the homeland?
Languages change over time. That may or may not correlate with distance – even speakers of a language that stay close to each other will develop diverging dialects. Now, if members of language family stay near each other, they can stay more similar because of areal effects. But in any case, Anatolian branching off first is both compatible with an Anatolian homeland (= all other IE languages moved away) and with a non-Anatolian homeland (= the Anatolian languages left first and ended up in Anatolia).
The structure of the IE tree is such that there’re several uniquely divergent branches (Hittite, Tocharian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian – all spread out, all looking a lot like isolates), and then there’s a big cluster, which is continuously spread geographically, with minimal divergence in-between (the rest including Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic).
Hittite and Tocharian are the ones that are really different from the core. Armenian looks strange due to areal influence, but if you go back reconstructing, it’s quite compatible with the old Brugmannian model, and like Greek it shares many developments with Indo-Iranian (most prominently, the augment). It’s part of the Graeco-Aryan core group, while Italic, Celtic, Balto-Slavic and Germanic are more loosely attached to that core.
I’ve wondered if Armenian is descended from the language of the Cimmerians of the Pontic Steppe.
@Hans
“But in any case, Anatolian branching off first is both compatible with an Anatolian homeland (= all other IE languages moved away) and with a non-Anatolian homeland (= the Anatolian languages left first and ended up in Anatolia).”
Yes, this flexibility makes more sense. But I was under the impression that linguists universally assume that the homeland of a family is located where the most divergent languages are historically found. And the argument for an Anatolian homeland of Indo-European languages used the topology of the Indo-European linguistic phylogeny as an important piece of evidence. It sounded strange to me because the origin of a trunk was judged by the position of one of its most distantly located branches.
linguists universally assume that the homeland of a family is located where the most divergent languages are historically found.
That is a useful assumption, but by no means universally true. It is true of English, for example, where the area of greatest diversity relative to its size is England, which we know to be the origin point of the language. But Corsican varieties of Romance are extremely diverse, and the diversity is ancient: nevertheless, we know that the Romance languages did not originate on Corsica (though at a higher level, the high diversity of Italian varieties does show that they originated in Italy). Sometimes a peripheral area can preserve ancient diversity lost elsewhere, which is an example of (if I understand correctly) what biologists call “incomplete lineage sorting” (David?).
@John Cowan
” It is true of English, for example, where the area of greatest diversity relative to its size is England, which we know to be the origin point of the language.”
But isn’t American English just a subset of English dialects? In the case of Indo-European, extra-Anatolian languages are not a subgroup of Anatolian languages but a bush of different subgroups. Also, Yamnaya must have had its own (likely IE) language and considering that it was older than Hittite it was probably even more divergent. We were just lucky to recover Hittite but not so lucky with recovering Yamnese.
-linguists universally assume that the homeland of a family is located where the most divergent languages are historically found
I guess the homeland of Turkic languages was in frozen tundra of Yakutia then…
linguists universally assume that the homeland of a family is located where the most divergent languages are historically found.
This doesn’t mean “the most divergent variety”, but “groups of dialects / daughter languages that are very divergent from each other but still in the same area”. So, in the example of English, the group of dialects of English that diverge most from each other in one area can be found in Britain.
This approach doesn’t work if a language has been replaced in its original area or if one variety has replaced all the other varieties in the original area; if we assume the Pontic steppes for PIE, there have been several waves of migration and replacement (PIE by Iranian, Iranian by Turkic, Turkic by Russian / Ukrainian), not allowing IE languages to quietly split into many diverging dialects in that area.
No; incomplete lineage sorting is when a diverse gene pool, in which each gene has its own phylogenetic tree, splits in two without winnowing down the diversity so that each allele becomes restricted to one branch. The split into North and West Germanic seems to be such a case.
The cautionary example I always bring up about inferring geographic origins from present diversity are the parrots. Today, they have three centers of high diversity in South America, Africa and Australia, and people used to argue which one was the homeland. It turns out Europe and North America used to be full of parrots in the Eo- and Oligocene, some 50 to 25 million years ago… either parrots are fundamentally northern, or they’re simply pantropical.
(Similar things hold for the songbirds, which have recently been recognized as the parrots’ closest living relatives!)
Perhaps. On the other hand, the language spoken there may simply have been Proto-Non-Anatolian.
Of course, many of the unexpected features of Anatolian in general and Hittite in particular are simply innovations. Younger languages are more divergent, unless a lot of contact has been going on.
That would be East Turkic; you didn’t take Chuvash into account. 🙂
(Apparently there are Middle Chinese loanwords in Proto-Turkic, arguing for an origin in *handwave* Mongolia or thereabouts.)
So, finally:
You have overlooked the obvious: lots and lots of languages, not just IE ones, have two words for “mother” and for “father”*, one more formal, the other more like a nickname.
The exact difference in usage varies between languages, but its variation over time tends to go in the same direction: socially upward – the “nickname” form becomes usual in more and more contexts, till eventually (sometimes) the formal form dies out altogether. (Sometimes a new “nickname” form is innovated later.) You can see this happening right now in various Western languages. You can also see different stages in different languages at different times: there are more situations in which it’s normal to say “my dad” in English than mein Papa in German, and in Mandarin the normal way to say “my parents” today is wǒ bàba, māma rather than the formal wǒ fùmǔ – where fù and mǔ are regular developments of earlier *pa and *ma!
Obviously, what happened is that this process eliminated *ph₂tēr from (Island?) Celtic and nearly eliminated it from Gothic. With Anatolian it’s harder to tell: the same may have happened there, or *ph₂tēr may be an innovation of the non-Anatolian branch, created as a formal term and later generalized.
This creation of “protector” as a formal term for “father”, whenever exactly it happened, may be reflected in the Latin term pater familias, which must be very old because a-declension nouns don’t otherwise have a genitive in -s in Latin or even in Italo-Celtic generally. Keep in mind that familia didn’t have its modern meaning, but was more like “household” (it famously included the slaves).
Finally, the biggest problem with Ringe’s reconstruction of *átta is that this *tt would be the only long consonant in the entire language. Languages don’t have one-word phonemes unless (sometimes) if they have really, really large numbers of consonant phonemes to begin with.
* Sometimes also for other relatives; and sometimes even for other common words like “water”.
Re: Yamnaya language
Professor Klein who was bothered by Vladimir Diakoff online (please don’t do that again. He is 90 years old, for god’s sake!), believes that Yamnaya was the culture of Proto-Indo-Iranians, so presumably they spoke Proto-Indo-Iranian or the dialect of PIE which evolved into Proto-Indo-Iranian.
He is probably the most qualified person in the world on the subject
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Klejn
@David
“You have overlooked the obvious: lots and lots of languages, not just IE ones, have two words for “mother” and for “father”*, one more formal, the other more like a nickname.”
That’s what I meant by “pragmatic” distinctions. AFAIK, no IE language has a reflex for *pH2ter for ‘father’ and atta for ‘dad’. (In Slavic, papa ‘dad’ is a recent French borrowing, while older tiatia ‘dad’ is of the same origin as the formal Slav *otici ‘father’). In Gothic, the only recorded usage of fadar is vocative. I understand that vocative usage and “babywording” is not the same thing (we also say ‘father, who art in heaven’ and not ‘dad, who art in heaven’), but there’s just nothing that would indicate the co-presence of *atta and *pH2ter in PIE along the lines you suggested. Plus you need another theory to go with it, namely that *pH2ter got completely lost from Balto-Slavic and Anatolian, while reflexes of *atta and *te- have lost or became marginalized elsewhere. The key phonetic indicator of a PIE labiovelar, namely p- before back vowels and t- before front vowels neatly explains the presence of *pa- and *te- forms for ‘father’ in each and every IE language without speculative theories.
“This creation of “protector” as a formal term for “father.”
Kinship terms are relational, not absolute nouns. It’s unlikely that they would carry an absolute meaning. “To beget” may be the only verb that makes sense as a source for a (parental) kinship term.
“The cautionary example I always bring up about inferring geographic origins from present diversity are the parrots. ”
This is very neat!
Obviously, what happened is that this process eliminated *ph₂tēr from (Island?) Celtic
Specifically British. Irish still has athair, and cf. Gaulish gutu-ater “voice-father,’ i.e. ‘spokesman.’
splits in two without winnowing down the diversity so that each allele becomes restricted to one branch
Well, just so: Corsican Romance is a one-sided variety of this. Much of the ancient diversity of Romance vowel systems survived in Corsica while being winnowed down in the mainstream branches, so that of the five systems mentioned by Etienne, two survive solely on Corsica, one on Corsica and Sardinia only, and the other two in Eastern and Western Romance respectively.
Languages don’t have one-word phonemes
Well, technically /tː/ wouldn’t be a phoneme unless there was a contrasting morpheme ata, so the ban on geminates is really a phonotactic rather than a phonemic restriction. But there are other similar anomalies: in some kinds of Australian English, gone uniquely has /ɔː/ (vowel length is phonemic in AusE, as in cup /kap/ vs. carp /kaːp/), and it’s not uncommon for anglophones to have /x/ solely in Bach or loch. My mother’s German had /ã/ uniquely (I think) in Chance. And of course there is PIE /b/, with only two decent roots.
@SFReader
“Professor Klein who was bothered by Vladimir Diakoff online (please don’t do that again. He is 90 years old, for god’s sake!)”
I don’t discriminate scientists on the basis of age or gender. I bother everybody. 🙂
@Rodger C, @David
“Specifically British. Irish still has athair, and cf. Gaulish gutu-ater “voice-father,’ i.e. ‘spokesman.’”
Old Welsh has edrydd ‘paternal kin’ (comp. Old Irish aithre ‘same’).
@JC, incomplete lineage sorting would be more like an isogloss that occurs in both Italian and Spanish, e.g., but in a completely ‘unconnected’ way — maybe it’s Sicilian and Galician that share a feature — because the change had been spreading across the lexicon in common Romance and both Proto-I and Proto-S inherited a mix of forms.
(Since presumably PI and PS had separate geographical ‘centers’ the distributions between affected and unaffected forms would have been different, but they both had a mix).
And then each regional language in Italy and Spain resolves the conflict one way or the other, very likely by spreading from a center, and we get the ‘same’ change in two relict areas.
And since everything you can think of seems to have happened at least once in some language, I’m sure somebody will be along with an actual example any minute now.
@Rodger, David, all
““Specifically British. Irish still has athair, and cf. Gaulish gutu-ater “voice-father,’ i.e. ‘spokesman.’”
BTW, how do we know that OIr athir is from *pH2ter and not from *ater? Shouldn’t we expect it to be hathair** if it’s from a form with initial p-?
Shouldn’t we expect it to be hathair** if it’s from a form with initial p-?
Jesus Christ, don’t you even realize *p disappeared in Celtic? It didn’t go to h, it went to zero. If you don’t know one of the most famous facts about Indo-European, you don’t know enough to even have thoughts about the things you’re arguing about. Once again, I’m amazed that people are willing to spend their time trying to explain things to you when nothing anyone says makes any impact. You just say “that’s interesting!” and say another silly thing that has to be refuted.
Vladimir: how do we know that OIr athir is from *pH2ter and not from *ater? Shouldn’t we expect it to be hathair** if it’s from a form with initial p-?
Surely the word for ‘father’ is not the only *p- initial word that Irish inherited from PIE, so the rule according to which it ended up with zero consonant instead of p- does not depend on this word alone.
I am not very familiar with Celtic history, but is quite likely that initial *p became h in all suitable words (probably with an intermediate step such as f), and that this h was later deleted by a separate rule attested in many other languages.
It looks like LH and I wrote at about the same time.
Once again, Vladimir’s emphasis on meaning leads him astray in phonological matters.
My suggestion for the evolution of *p is just that, it seems to me probable but I am not trying to go against traditional interpretation.
We’ve been here before. The only recorded Celtic word that preserves a nonzero reflex of IE *p is “Hercynian.” (Initially, I mean. There are also words like seacht ‘seven.’)
@languagehat
“Jesus Christ, don’t you even realize *p disappeared in Celtic?”
I’m honored to be referred by this name but I do know that /p/ disappeared in Celtic. I’m just wondering if this happened in the word for father as well. At some point in the past people thought that OIr (h)aue ‘grandson’ actually represents *pawe- (comp. Gk pais ‘child’, Lat puer), but then they began deriving it from *H2euH2o- ‘grandfather’ (Hitt huhhas). But the origin of Welsh wyr ‘grandson’ remains controversial because it can be from *pwyr (Lat puer) or it can be from *H2uer. So, my question is not as fortuitous as you may think. When you have Slav *otikos ‘father’, Hitt atta ‘father’, Goth atta ‘father’, you don’t really know if OIr athir is from *pH2ter and not from *ater. The affix would favor the former, but affixes are only circumstantial evidence for roots.
@Marie-Lucie
“Once again, Vladimir’s emphasis on meaning leads him astray in phonological matters.”
No, I’m just trying to think without assumptions about what semantics and phonology should look like.
The photo on Wikipedia shows him at age 88, and he doesn’t look the least bit tired 🙂
So? That doesn’t mean we can’t reconstruct such a situation. The nickname-like forms are replaced often enough.
(Often enough, in fact, that I’m not at all certain any such form should be reconstructed for PIE.)
*sigh* I wrote explicitly that Anatolian may never have had it in the first place.
You’re right that I do have to postulate that it was completely lost from Balto-Slavic. That happens. It has also been lost from Welsh, for example, where “father” is tad in isolation, and “the land of my fathers” (the beginning of the national anthem) is hen wlad fy nhadau, nh (voiceless [n]) being the appropriate mutation of t.
That happens. 😐 You just cited what happened in Russian: a French borrowing swept through, and now Russian has papa while all other Slavic languages seem to have tata. In Mandarin, too, bàba is an innovation; diédie was the normal form 100 years ago and may not yet be extinct, never mind the reconstructed origin of fù from some kind of *pa.
BTW, where are you taking “*te-” from? A PIE noun root that doesn’t end in a consonant would be very strange.
Back vowel? What back vowel? *h₂ wasn’t a vowel, it was a consonant.
That’s why its Indo-Iranian reflex is not a, but i: Vedic pitá (regular loss of final *-r in this environment), Avestan accusative pitarəm.
The whole idea here is that it didn’t start out as an actual kinship term, but as a term for the social function of, well, pater familias, and only became a (formal) kinship term later (and quite possibly not in all branches).
Oh yes, I forgot!
How on the planet do you get from *at(t)a to *ater???
(Does Irish have a thick fat substrate of time-traveling hypercorrecting New Englanders? 🙂 )
No; *p was already gone from Proto-Celtic. It is quite likely that this loss went through [h] as an intermediate stage, but such a stage is not attested in Old Irish or even Gaulish, where the reflex of PIE *p is simply zero (except in certain consonant clusters).
(The Hercynian forest, which is the only candidate for an attestation of the [h] stage, has the big problem of having had to somehow miss the Italo-Celtic change of *p…kʷ to *kʷ…kʷ, which happened in the “oak” word otherwise. Did the boukolos rule strike, and no analogy leveled it out? Wikipedia doesn’t tell, but does mention the problem.)
You’re making tons of assumptions about what semantics should look like; I’m responding to one of them in this comment.
You’re not making enough assumptions about what phonology look like! That’s because you don’t know enough about comparative and historical phonology. 🙂 You’re in a bit over your head.
@David
“So? That doesn’t mean we can’t reconstruct such a situation. The nickname-like forms are replaced often enough.”
But that’s not enough. You need to show evidence that they did in Indo-European. In English, it’s a pragmatic pair ‘father-dad’. ‘Father’ is formal, ‘dad’ is informal. You need to show that that was indeed the case in some ancient IE dialects, too. Not every language, I’m sure, has nicknames for parents either. It may very well be late development in some IE dialects.
“I wrote explicitly that Anatolian may never have had it in the first place.”
Yes, but that’s just a wild guess. How about the standard Palaic term papas ‘father’?
“The whole idea here is that it didn’t start out as an actual kinship term, but as a term for the social function of, well, pater familias, and only became a (formal) kinship term later (and quite possibly not in all branches).”
Again, no evidence for ‘protector’ > ‘father’ has been presented. Just like for ‘milker’ > ‘daughter’.
“How on the planet do you get from *at(t)a to *ater???”
*atta > *Slav *otikos, *atta > Celtic *ater. In both cases an affix got added to the root. I’m not saying this is exactly what happened, I’m just looking for phonetic reasons why this could not have happened.
“Back vowel? What back vowel? *h₂ wasn’t a vowel, it was a consonant.”
In all IE dialects there’s a vowel after p: pate:r, pita, pater, fadar, etc. Some scholars reconstruct *paH2ter. Kin terms typically have a shape pa-, ma-, not *pC-.
“BTW, where are you taking “*te-” from? A PIE noun root that doesn’t end in a consonant would be very strange.”
That’s fair. But it’s just a placeholder to account for variation in such forms as Lith tevas, Hitt atta, Lyc tedi, Slav *otikos, etc.
“You’re not making enough assumptions about what phonology look like! That’s because you don’t know enough about comparative and historical phonology. 🙂 You’re in a bit over your head.”
Yes, it’s (still) a bit over my head. But, no, I’m just not allowing myself to go on wild guesses about “dads” and “protectors” in PIE and about lexical losses of parental terms just to keep PIE around *pH2ter at all costs. I’m carefully examining the evidence from semantic, morphological and phonological standpoint. Everything should be given its due, you know. Every word has a form, a structure and a meaning.
No; *p was already gone from Proto-Celtic.
I wouldn’t say so. It was probably still something like [ɸ ~ ʍ] in Proto-Celtic, with a tendency to be lenited further into [h], but not yet lost. Note such Celtic developments as:
*ɸ > *x/__{*t, *s};
*ɸ > *β/__{*r, *l};
*ɸ > *w/{*a, *o}__*n;
*sɸ > Goidelic /s/ (/f/ when lenited), Brittonic /f/.
Lepontic v is a consonantal reflex of *ɸ in some positions, and there is some evidence of /h/ in early Old Irish before vowels other than /a/ (it seems early Celtic h-dropping took place most readily before *a, as in athir).
The name of the Helvetii is usually derived from *pelh₁u- ‘many’.
@Piotr
“and there is some evidence of /h/ in early Old Irish before vowels other than /a/ (it seems early Celtic h-dropping took place most readily before *a, as in athir).”
Do you have some other examples of PIE *p- > Old Irish 0a- handy?
Also, what’s your take on OIrish (h)aue, Welsh wyr ‘grandson’? Could it be from *pawe-, *pwe:r?
@David
“It has also been lost from Welsh, for example, where “father” is tad in isolation.”
Again, I haven’t found any evidence that Welsh tad is an innovation or that it’s an isolated form. It’s attested in Welsh from 12th century on, and in Cornish tat is known since at least 1050. Old Irish has forms dait, data, aite, aitte meaning ‘foster father, godfather’, which are clearly related.
Semantically, it’s possible that the PIE contrast was between two different logical categories – ‘birth father’ and ‘foster father’ (rather than between formal and casual ways of saying ‘father’), but the example of Arm hayr ‘father’ and yawray ‘step-father’ (clearly related, comp. Gk pate:r and patruios with the same meanings, but phonetically regular only through Dziebel’s interpretation *paH2ter vs. *tetros) may just be what we have going on in Old Irish between athair ‘father’ and data/aite/daite ‘foster-father’.
In all IE dialects there’s a vowel after p: pate:r, pita, pater, fadar, etc. Some scholars reconstruct *paH2ter. Kin terms typically have a shape pa-, ma-, not *pC-.
On paH2ter: This would have given e.g. *pa:ter (with a long /a:/) in Latin instead of the attested pater; *fo:đer- in Germanic instead of the attested fađer-, *pa:tar- in Vedic instead of the attested pitar-, etc. And the correspondence /a/ in Non-Indo-Iranian IE to /i/ in Indo-Iranian is diagnostic for a syllabic laryngeal. So PIE before the split-off of the individual languages clearly had *pH2ter-. This may well go back to a **paH2ter in some previous, pre-ablaut stage of PIE, but that’s internal reconstruction and not recoverable from the individual languages.
Do you have some other examples of PIE *p- > Old Irish 0a- handy?
Anything containing Proto-Celtic *ɸari- < *pari- < *pr̥Hi- (OIr. air ‘before’).
For initial h- in early Old Irish, see Schrijver (1997).
OIr. aue (Ogham AVI, gen.sg.) seems to reflect *h₂aw(h₂)jo-. No reason to stick a *p into it. The etymology of Welsh wyr is uncertain. A connection with aue, proposed by Peter Schrijver, runs into formal difficulties. *pwV- would surely have developed initial gw- in Welsh.
@Vladimir, “‘father’ is tad in isolation” means that tad is the unmutated quotation form. As opposed to for instance nhadau, mutated and declined, in the next line of the post you quoted. It has no bearing on whether it has cognates in other languages.
@Lars, Hans, Piotr
Thank you! BTW, can anyone explain to me why -i- in Skrt pita and other forms is interpreted as a reflex of a syllabic consonant?
@Piotr
“OIr. aue (Ogham AVI, gen.sg.) seems to reflect *h₂aw(h₂)jo-.”
Why is it sometimes spelled (h)aue as if h- is attested in certain recorded versions of the word? The only doubt I have is that ‘grandson’ is the only lower-generation meaning associated with PIE *H2euH2o-. Hitt huhhas ‘grandfather’, Arm hav ‘same’ (also compatible with *paw-), Lat avunculus ‘mother’s brother’, Slav *uji ‘same’ (same affix as you reconstructed for OIr aue < *H2eu(H2)yo-), Lith avynas 'same', Germ. *awa-haimaz 'same', OIr amnair (< *abnair < *awnair) 'same'. Dziebel thinks it's not a problem because words denoting grandparent and grandchildren are often self-reciprocal, but it's still strange that it's the only attestation of the meaning 'grandson' in this cognate set. When you get to Welsh wyr, it's affixation is clearly the same as Lat puer.
@Hans
Another thought: *pH2ter is not attested in Anatolian. The only form that approximates it is Palaic papas ‘father’. But Palaic reflects laryngeals as /h/ (Palaic ha:ri ‘be hot’ < PIE *H2eHtr-). At least in some environments (I don't know about others). In any case, papas has pa- just like pate:r, fadar, pater, hayr. That's why I go back to my question: why does everybody think that -i- in Skrt pita must indicate a syllabic laryngeal?
why -i- in Skrt pita — because basically everything else vocalic turns out as -अ/आ- (-a/ā-) in संस्कृतम्, and -इ- (-i-) appears in paradigms where a zero-grade form is expected, in roots where the full grade is long and sometimes colored (in other languages).
(Vocalic resonants give -अ- in zero grade and retain the resonant in full grade — if I remember correctly — roots with just -*e- in full grade have zero in zero grade. So something else must be going on in the ones with -इ- and -आ-. This was evidence that Saussure’s coefficients sonantiques were actual consonants, back when the laryngeal theory was born).
(The oldest reconstructions of PIE have been characterized as ‘essentially Sanskrit with (ancient) Greek wovels’ because the inherited vowels all went to -अ-, but the rest of the system looked to be older than anything else — this was before Hittite and Tocharian were known, of course).
Vocalic resonants give -अ- in zero grade
This is true of syllabic nasals (as in Greek); syllabic liquids give Skt. ṛ (or, in one probably dialectal case, ḷ).
The oldest reconstructions of PIE have been characterized as ‘essentially Sanskrit with (ancient) Greek wovels
The oldest ones had essentially Sanskrit vowels as well. It was the discovery of “the Law of Palatals” in the mid 1870s that revolutionised PIE vocalism.
Why is it sometimes spelled (h)aue as if h- is attested in certain recorded versions of the word?
It’s a long story. In a nutshell — because the grapheme H was extremely capricious in Old Irish. It was often “mute” and unetymological, and, conversely, a phonetic aspirate was often not marked orthographically.
@Lars
” because basically everything else vocalic turns out as -अ/आ- (-a/ā-) in संस्कृतम्, and -इ- (-i-) appears in paradigms where a zero-grade form is expected, in roots where the full grade is long and sometimes colored (in other languages).”
Do we have Anatolian evidence for those specific syllabic laryngeal cases where Skrt has -i- (like pita, duhita)? You look at Palaic papas and its pa-, you look at Lyc cbatra ‘daughter’ and it’s -a- again.
Do we have Anatolian […]
I have no Anatolian, sorry.
@Lars, @Hans
“I have no Anatolian, sorry.”
That’s what I thought. I don’t have it either. Maybe Piotr does but I doubt it. So, why can’t it be an Indo-Iranian development that has nothing to do with PIE. Tocharian has pa:cer ‘father’ (vowel length is by analogy with ma:car ‘mother’), Palaic has papas, so if the two most divergent branches have forms with /a/, wouldn’t that mean that -i- in Skrt pita ‘father’ is a late, local development and PIE simply had *pater (let’s leave the labiovelar interpretation aside for a second but a back vowel is important in this reconstruction) because of Pal papas, Gk pater, Arm hayr, Toch paca:r, Lat pater, Germ fadar, OIr athair?
Hans, as you said above, the discovery of Hittite and Tocharian displaced Sanskrit as the most conservative IE language, or in this case a language that’s directly informative of the PIE condition.
L’étymologie (as you try to practise it) est une science où les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose. Never let a /p/ stand in your way if you might expect /t/. They both come from *kʷ anyway. Indo-Iranian should have /a/ in ‘father’, but it has /i/ (alternating with zero in Iranian)? So what? It’s a mere “local development”. It doesn’t matter that there are many other words showing the same correspondence (Indo-Iranian /i/ versus /a/ or zero elsewhere) AND independent evidence of a laryngeal. Science is about patterns, not about just-so stories made up as you go along.
@Piotr
“AND independent evidence of a laryngeal.”
Do you have direct, Anatolian evidence for a syllabic laryngeal to account for -i- in Skrt pita and duhita?
” It’s a mere “local development”.”
There’s nothing “mere” about “local development.” It’s just as important as PIE developments.
“/i/ (alternating with zero in Iranian)”
Well, it doesn’t alternate with anything else outside of Indo-Iranian. It’s /a/ from China to Ireland and from Turkey to Sweden. So, I just conclude that it must be Indo-Iranian specific, not PIE. What is wrong with this logic?
Do you have direct, Anatolian evidence for a syllabic laryngeal to account for -i- in Skrt pita and duhita?
There is no reflex of *ph₂ter- in Anatolian (the “papa” words don’t qualify). For ‘daughter’, no Anatolian evidence is needed: Vedic h shows aspiration triggered by *h₂ (when vocalised in Indo-Aryan, it developed an anaptyctic /i/ following the laryngeal). This aspiration is a perfectly tangible phonetic effect, just like a separate segment. In most other branches (except Greek and Tocharian) we have a null reflex: the laryngeal did not receceive an epenthetic vowel and it eventually disappeared (which also shows that we are not dealing with an original vowel: PIE *a does not disappear just like that). By the way, you are wrong about ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in Tocharian. Toch. A/B ā is the regular reflex of both PIE *a and a vocalised laryngeal. It’s the ‘mother’ word which was analogically affected by ‘father’ in Tocharian A, not the other way round.
What is wrong with this logic?
I repeat: the fact that this is not an isolated “exception” but part of a robust pattern of correspondences which demonstrably involve laryngeals.
@Piotr
You were right about Toch ma:cer and pa:cer. The latter influenced the former.
But…
“For ‘daughter’, no Anatolian evidence is needed: Vedic h shows aspiration triggered by *h₂ (when vocalised in Indo-Aryan, it developed an anaptyctic /i/ following the laryngeal).”
1. So, -i- in duhita and -i- in pita are of different origin? The latter is a reflex of a syllabic laryngeal, and the former is an epenthetic vowel?
2. If *pH2ter had indeed a laryngeal after p-, Skrt would have had aspirated *ph- and a form phita** (instead it has pita) just like H2 made *g aspirated into -h- in duhita.
“(which also shows that we are not dealing with an original vowel: PIE *a does not disappear just like that).”
Well, it didn’t in all of the forms for ‘father’ (pa:cer, hayr, pate:r, pater, fadar, athair, etc.) but Avestan pta-.
“I repeat: the fact that this is not an isolated “exception” but part of a robust pattern of correspondences which demonstrably involve laryngeals.”
It may have “involved laryngeals” but I’m still missing the regularity in those correspondences that you are advocating for. And you need direct attestations. Lyc cbatra doesn’t have a laryngeal. Palaic papas doesn’t have it either. You can dismiss papas because it doesn’t have the same affix but you gotta show something material to consider a postulated development proven. It’s the same as with the thorn clusters.
As other examples show (see the discusson in Byrd 2015), the treatment of word-initial *CHC clusters was as follows. A weak epenthetic schwa-like vowel (let’s symbolise it °) was inserted after the first C if another consonant, usually a liquid or a nasal, followed (*C°HCR-). If a vowel followed, the cluster was simplified by laryngeal deletion if the result was a “legal”, i.e. phonotactically acceptable biconsonantal cluster (*CCV-); otherwise epenthesis took place (*C°HCV-). Since *pt- was legal, the phonetic realisation of underlying //ph₂-ter-// in the parent language is likely to have been,
The weak schwa was not a fully phonemic vowel, and it was not lengthenable (compare non-rhotic English bird, with a long vowel, with the first syllable of perform). After the loss of laryngeals, it fell together with short *a in most branches, but was raised in Indo-Iranian, together with new schwas inserted after surviving word-medial laryngeals in interconsonantal positions (this is a characteristically Indo-Aryan development; the treatment of such laryngeals in Greek is also branch-specific, not a PIE phenomenon).
The mismatch between the strong and the weak cases caused the former to be reformed in most branches by restoring the *°h₂ sequence (it may have been optional in “marginally legal” clusters anyway). We only have the evidence of Avestan and some derivatives of ‘father’ (such as the compound meaning ‘paternal uncle’) as scattered examples of the reduced cluster.
I could go on, and on, and on, but I’m sick of this game. We don’t need direct attestation of every bloody thing we propose. Indirect evidence also counts as evidence, in every branch of science. No physicist has ever seen a quark, a black hole or even an electromagnetic wave (and let’s ignore the philosophical and semantic question whether we “directly see” anything at all). We don’t have to (and we can’t) drill a hole into the Earth’s core to learn what’s inside. A doubting Thomas who says, “You haven’t been there; you have no samples to show; you can’t know it’s mostly iron–nickel and not green cheese, as per Dziebel”, shows either ignorance or inability to understand the evidence presented to him.
I have once again broken my vow not to return to this viciously circular discussion. I apologise and withdraw.
Piotr, thanks for the link to the paper on Old Irish h! That’s fascinating. And while I remembered some of the nonzero developments of *p in Celtic at the last minute (which is why I edited in “except in certain consonant clusters”), I didn’t know all of them. Interesting about the Helvetii.
No. Both are regular epenthetic vowels. In reality, there was no such thing as a syllabic laryngeal, just like there was no such thing as a syllabic *s; “syllabic laryngeal” is just short for “laryngeal between two consonants”.
By the way, the sound written as ā in Tocharian clearly wasn’t long; it was the only vowel written as long in the whole language. More likely, a was some kind of [ə], ā was simply [a], and ä was [ɨ] or something.
I’m wondering about this myself.Edit: the position of the epenthetic vowel in *p°h₂trés seems to explain it, given that the Indo-Iranian development of word-internal clusters with laryngeals in them was a separate, later development.
Stop insisting that papas is cognate with the “father” word. It’s not! That’s obvious!
No single language is on its own automatically “directly informative of the PIE condition”. No language just stays in a freezer and stops evolving. The PIE condition consists of hypotheses that account for all observations of IE languages; sometimes when two hypotheses compete, one language can falsify one of them, but that’s not always the same language.
And BTW, the older Anatolian languages can’t tell us much about consonant clusters – because they were written in cuneiform. Cuneiform has characters for V, CV, CVC and VC syllables, so it can write (at least some) clusters of two consonants between vowels – that’s it. If Hittite had any clusters of three consonants (including syllabic ones), or any word-initial or word-final clusters, we can only infer them from grammar, inconsistent spellings and to some degree etymology.
I’m wondering about this myself.
It’s just the question of where exactly the epenthetic vowel was inserted, *p°h₂t- (in PIE or maybe Proto-Core) vs. *-gH°t- or *-tH°w- (in Proto-Indic). Indo-Iranian *ɨ is the colour of this “schwa secundum” next to any laryngeal, either preceding or following.
@Piotr
“I could go on, and on, and on, but I’m sick of this game.”
I’m sorry, but you started your post in a thoughtful and careful manner trying to explain a rather difficult case. But your explanation became so convoluted and tiring that you got frustrated. I can easily understand and relate.
“We don’t need direct attestation of every bloody thing we propose. Indirect evidence also counts as evidence, in every branch of science. ”
Saussure’s ideas were dusted off only after actual attestations of his coefficients sonantiques in Hittite had been discovered. That was the old school. I’m not a fan of radical demands myself but actual attestations would make your life easier and relieve you of the need to postulate “*pter as a phonetic realization of PIE *pH2ter,” a “schwa as a not fully phonetic vowel” that, according to David, prevented p- to get aspiration from the following laryngeal,” the restoration of a not-fully-phonetic vowel followed by a laryngeal from weak cases to strong cases in ALL the languages outside of Indo-Iranian. Attestations are just an economy of thinking. You are very bright, very knowledgable, very hard-working, Piotr. I admire you. But just let the evidence do some of the work.
@David
“Stop insisting that papas is cognate with the “father” word. It’s not! That’s obvious!”
I f…love science! You are ready to create an etymological Jurassic park out of “protectors” and “dads”, but when it comes to a simple and obvious connection between Anatolian *papas ‘father’ (Palaic Tiyaz papaz, which is exactly like Zeus pate:r, Skrt Dyaus pita), on the one hand, and Toch pa:car, Arm hayr, Gk pate:r, Lat pater, Goth fadar, etc., on the other, you are hollering a resounding “NO.” You know, words have roots, which are stable, and then there’re affixes that vary. You need to be open to recognizing that the same root can come with different grammatical elements. And I’m willing to suspend my belief that Palaic papaz (without a laryngeal in a language that has laryngeals written as /h/) is related to what’s currently reconstructed as *pH2ter. My point was that there needs to be an attempt by multilaryngealists to find attestations for their reconstructions, and in the case of Gk -a- ~ Skrt -i- (pita: vs. pate:r, duhita: vs. thugate:r) there’s just no direct or indirect evidence for a laryngeal-between-consonants (or a consonant cluster involving a laryngeal) in Anatolian or Tocharian (Lyc cbatra, Luw duuttari/duwatra, Toch tka:cer, pa:cer). There’s direct evidence for -a- in Lyc cbatra < *dugatra (Pal papaz), Luw duwatra, Gk thugater (pater), Toch tka:cer (pa:cer). There's indirect evidence for a laryngeal as -h- in duhita (I agree with Piotr, and according to Dziebel, also as -h- in thugater). There's evidence that this latter laryngeal was lost in Germ. *doxte:r, Lith dukte, Slav *dutji, Arm dustr, etc. There's further evidence for a consonant cluster in Lyc cbatra, Toch tka:cer, Arm Gen. dster 'daughter' but that's a different cluster than what you and Piotr are trying to postulate. That's all that, as far as I can see, is uncontroversial. The rest is a valiant but stubborn attempt to answer all the questions in the world on the basis of very limited material and the rejection of an evidential minimum, all coupled with militant resistance to expand this material, entertain alternative hypotheses or follow an Occam's Razor in interpretations. And, speaking about the "regularity principle," it's a very regular practice in Indo-European linguistics (also seen in Schindler's treatment of thorn clusters that you and Piotr endorse).
I’m sorry, but you started your post in a thoughtful and careful manner trying to explain a rather difficult case. But your explanation became so convoluted and tiring that you got frustrated. I can easily understand and relate.
The case is difficult because it’s rather complex. We are dealing many several palimpsestic layers of phonetic and analogical changes, and you can’t expect the outcome to be simple. My frustration is not with the complexity of the material and its interpretation (thank you for your sympathy, but I am accustomed to that); it’s with your unreasonable expectation that I should be able to enlighten you fully in a few blog comments. If I could do that on the internet, we would need no universities in the real world. To understand this stuff you have to do some work on your own (like reading the relevant literature as the basic requirement). I really don’t want to prolong this, so please excuse my leaving this thread for good.
Byrd 2016: €126 for the e-book. I’m reading his thesis instead.
@Piotr
“We are dealing many several palimpsestic layers of phonetic and analogical changes, and you can’t expect the outcome to be simple.”
We’re dealing with 90% of vowel /a/ attestations in a cognate set that means ‘father’ in a family of languages with a deep written record and multiple subbranches. And linguists still find a way to postulate a palimpsest of unattested consonants, clusters of unattested sounds and irregular changes. (I can only imagine what kind of challenge is in front of Marie-Lucie in reconstructing poor Penutian.) And they don’t have the time or the space to explain it all to a very willing student. Evidently, the science of simplicity is the hardest of all.
I really would like you to stay, but I don’t know how to make you stay. I guess I’m just going to say “thank you for your time, it was well spent.”
@Lars
Thanks! I canceled my order of Byrd’s book and am going with the dissertation. I don’t think between 2010 and 2015 he corrected the following unswallowable proposal (p. 54): “Secondly, *#C@HC arises when the laryngeal was reinserted into the cluster via analogy: *ph2ter- > *pter- → *p@h2ter- > Gk. patér-. Crucially, when a laryngeal was restored analogically it was also accompanied by schwa epenthesis – otherwise it could not have been syllabified.”
Vladimir: I can only imagine what kind of challenge is in front of Marie-Lucie in reconstructing poor Penutian.
Clarification: I am not “reconstructing poor [Proto-]Penutian” at this point. I think it will be done at some point, but I am working on the preliminaries. Linguists in the 19C were writing “comparative grammars” of the various IE families. I am not quite doing that, but looking at common morphological features, many of which are hidden by morphophonemic rules. In order to study morphology, you need to look at words, hence to accumulate vocabulary. Morphophonemic rules show you internal phonological changes, hence reveal sound laws for the languages in question, some of which might be thought odd or implausible when found between languages. Thus far this approach has served me well over the last 20 years or so.
My reconstructive work, which I started long before I looked as “Penutian”, concerns Proto-Tsimshianic. The affiliation of the small, isolated family, which Sapir included in his expanded definition of “Penutian”, was once considered “problematic”, “the weakest link in the chain”, but Tsimshianic turned out to be crucial for Penutian comparison as it preserves demonstrably archaic features which are vestigial or lost in other Penutian languages. Most of its roots also correspond to Penutian ones.
Palaic Tiyaz papaz, which is exactly like Zeus pate:r, Skrt Dyaus pita),
It’s not “exactly like” – the father word at least doesn’t have the same suffix. This differently formed Palaic word can simply be the usually baby talk word that can be innovated anytime anywhere, and it then was substituted in the formula “heaven / daylight father”.
@ kbatra: In his etymologial dictionary (pp. 1042-44, pdf “Full Text” here ), Kloekhorst argues that the /a/ here doesn’t go back to the laryngeal at all. He states that intervocalic H was lost in Anatolian (examples for Hittite on p. 101) and posits that PIE had an ablauting formation *dhwégH2tr- / *dhugH2tr-, of which the full grade *dhwégH2-tr- is continued in Lycian kbatra and Luwian tuwa/itara/i- (so the /a/ in kbatra continues PIE /e/, not /H2/), while the zero grade *dhugH2tr- is continued in Hittite duttariyata/i- (designation of a female functionary) and was generalised through the entire paradigm in non-Anatolian PIE.
I don’t remember whether anyone has already mentioned this during this now already very long discussion, but it looks promising to assume that we have a suffix -H2ter- here, that was added to simple words in the pre-ablaut stage of PIE. We would have:
pre-ablaut: *pV-H2’ter- / *pV-H2ter-és- > post-ablaut (and pre-break-up PIE) *p-H2’ter- / *p-H2tr-és “father”
pre-ablaut: *’mV-H2ter- > post-ablaut *’mVH2-tr- “mother” > pre-break-up PIE *maHtr-
pre-ablaut: *’bhV-H2ter- > post-ablaut *’bh-H2tr- “brother” > pre-break-up PIE *bhraHtr-
pre-ablaut: *’dhweg-H2ter- / *dhweg-H2ter-és- > post-ablaut (and pre-breakup) *’dhweg-H2’ter- / *dhug-H2tr-és “daughter” (using Kloekhorts’s reconstruction here).
-és stands in for any stressed ending, while V is an undetermined vowel. What this vowel would look like depends on your view what vowel system pre-ablaut PIE had. But I at least wouldn’t exclude that it was /a/ in at least the words for “father” and “mother”, so that could be the “baby talk” words *pa-, *ma- plus suffix -H2ter- (the element *bhrV- in “brother” doesn’t look like a baby talk word to me). So the analysis of “father” as “protector” would only be a folk etymology.
The difference between this analysis and yours, as far as I understand it, is that you assume that /a/ was present in the immediate ancestor of the attested IE “father” words, while this analysis assumes that the “father” word had lost the original /a/ due to ablaut and the vowel we find in the attested word goes back to a laryngeal that was originally part of the suffix.
@Hans
“It’s not “exactly like” – the father word at least doesn’t have the same suffix.”
By “exactly like” I meant the collocation with ‘God’ in a stable phrase. Grammatically it’s surely different but I believe (and it is a belief) that that’s enough to consider Pal papaz as an Anatolian cognate of *pH2ter (potentially from the time prior to the emergence of the *-H2ter affix on IE kinship terms).
“it looks promising to assume that we have a suffix -H2ter- here, that was added to simple words in the pre-ablaut stage of PIE.”
That’s a great reminder to everyone. I always found the affixation *-H2ter compelling to explain the origin of a laryngeal here.
“The difference between this analysis and yours, as far as I understand it, is that you assume that /a/ was present in the immediate ancestor of the attested IE “father” words, while this analysis assumes that the “father” word had lost the original /a/ due to ablaut and the vowel we find in the attested word goes back to a laryngeal that was originally part of the suffix.”
Yes, that was was missing from Piotr’s analysis to me. I’m very open to this interpretation. Can there be a middle ground between the two options, namely that only Indo-Iranian “allowed” the laryngeal from the suffix to interfere with the normal transition from PIE *a to PIIr *a? The rest of the dialects “absorbed” the laryngeal into /a/ and kept the original vowel intact. Again, even the Tocharian attestation of -a- in pace:r should be enough to make this possibility a frontrunner because Tocharian is the second most divergent language in PIE, hence it inherited the state that preceded what’s attested in Skrt and Avestan.
@Hans
“Grammatically it’s surely different but I believe (and it is a belief) that that’s enough to consider Pal papaz as an Anatolian cognate of *pH2ter (potentially from the time prior to the emergence of the *-H2ter affix on IE kinship terms).”
To add: Anatolian kinship terms tend to be monosyllabic or reduplicative. Morphologically complex IE kinship terms (*pH2ter, sweso:r, bhreH2ter, etc.) are not attested in Anatolian (cbatra and duwatra are exceptions). This increases the chances that Pal papaz is a cognate of *pH2ter. If Palaic had a full reflex of PIE *pH2ter and it was typical for Anatolian languages to have those complex kinship terms, then papaz would look like it may be unrelated.
@Marie-Lucie
Your project is absolutely fascinating and I regret I don’t know Tsimshianic or Penutian. (Well, it may be a good news to you that I don’t know anything about Penutian. 🙂 ) Everything that I learned about it from this string (the role of morphology and morphophonetics) is interesting to me methodologically. Reading Piotr and those who he reads just makes me scared sometimes because the complexity and obtusity of the phonological solutions proposed by the methodological trendsetters such as Indo-Europeanists who are “rolling” in actual data may set up wrong expectations for the rest of the linguistic community, who don’t even have the data depth and richness of Indo-European and who have to work with highly complex phonological inventories, as to what constitutes the “right” historico-linguistic analysis.
@Hans
“@ kbatra: In his etymologial dictionary (pp. 1042-44, pdf “Full Text” here ), Kloekhorst argues that the /a/ here doesn’t go back to the laryngeal at all. He states that intervocalic H was lost in Anatolian (examples for Hittite on p. 101) and posits that PIE had an ablauting formation *dhwégH2tr- / *dhugH2tr-, of which the full grade *dhwégH2-tr- is continued in Lycian kbatra and Luwian tuwa/itara/i- (so the /a/ in kbatra continues PIE /e/, not /H2/), while the zero grade *dhugH2tr- is continued in Hittite duttariyata/i- (designation of a female functionary) and was generalised through the entire paradigm in non-Anatolian PIE.”
I read it. Thanks. It’s interesting but it sounds like Kloekhorst himself is not sure about it. It could be that but it doesn’t have to be. IE -u- does come from either diphthong -eu- or the full-grade -we-, so it’s quite possible that K. is right. But then why is the full grade so poorly attested? The loss of -g- is not strongly supported and remains a puzzle (comp. Osc fu:trei ‘daughter’ instead of expected *fuhtrei). I suspect that there were two separate suffixes in the daughter word: the root *dheu- or *dhwe- got enlarged with affix -g- and then with *-H2ter, but in Lycian -g- got skipped and *-H2ter was added straight to *dheu- or *dhwe-.
Dziebel is of course an original again, so he proposed that the protolinguistic root was *gweH2- and that it yielded both the ‘daughter’ forms and the ‘woman, wife’ forms (Gk gyne, Slav *zena, Skrt jaini, Luw wana < *gweH2-neH2- simplified to *gweneH2-). The onset and the vocalism of Lyc kbatra and Osc fu:trei is, in his view, a direct continuation of PIE *gweH2- (sort of like Kloekhorst meeting Speirs), hence kb=gw in Lycian, the long vowel in Oscan, -a- in Lycian and no -g- in either. The dh- forms for 'daughter' are derived from a palatal reflex of a labiovelar, namely *dheuH2-.
How is any of this obvious or simple? You have to postulate a bizarre spontaneous development of *a to i in just this one word, not to mention the losses in Avestan pta and fta; nothing is simple or obvious about this – you just haven’t noticed.
When will you learn that the argument from personal incredulity is a logical fallacy?
Yes, it is. I can confirm this as a phylogeneticist in biology.
And if you take a look at the comments in this thread where Piotr has corrected me, you’ll always find that I made things too simple.
This doesn’t explain why the suffix is sometimes stressed and sometimes unstressed. (I’m tempted to postulate phonemic tones, but that would be circular at this stage.)
Why assume a pre-ablaut stage? Ablaut could be much older than PIE; Afro-Asiatic and Kartvelian have it, and it’s also all over East and West Caucasian. Anyway, a *-h₂ter- suffix has indeed been assumed, and it has been explained as follows, as I mentioned way, way above:
1) The root *pah₂- “protect” (morphophonemic *peh₂-) is combined with the agent noun suffix *-ter-, which triggers zero-grade in the root, giving a morphophonemic *ph₂ter-.
2) Following application to the pater familias, this is folk-etymologically reinterpreted as *p-h₂ter-, with *p- (or rather *p°- perhaps) as some kind of zero-grade of the baby word *pa followed by a wholly new suffix.
3) This suffix is interpreted as indicating kinship terms, and spreads to several others: *má-h₂ter- (from the baby word *ma), *bʰrá(H)-h₂ter-, *dʰwég-h₂ter-.
(Because **bʰra is obviously not a baby word, I assume it must have been a regular PIE root instead, and that should mean that it ended in a consonant. Because there’s no evidence for one in the attested “brother” words, I have to assume one that would disappear in this position; AFAIK, that would mean *h₁ or *h₂, *h₃ being less likely.)
It’s certainly evidence, but it’s not as decisive as you assume. Stable phrases are more stable than many other things, but not absolutely stable; their components do get exchanged sometimes. Right now on the English-speaking Internet, you can find one and the same (German ein- und dasselbe) > one in the same, toe the line > tow the line, and even for all intents and purposes > for all intensive purposes.
But PIE *ah₂ becomes PIIr *ā in every other word, and PIE *h₂a becomes PIIr *a in every other word. PIIr *i is only seen for *°h₂ between consonants. You’re proposing a completely irregular development here.
This, too, gives *ā, not *a; you can see this in “mother” and “brother”.
First, let me repeat that the Tocharian a evidently wasn’t [a] at all; it was [ə]. Tocharian had an [a] sound, and that was ā. Keep in mind that Tocharian was written in scripts developed for Indic languages, so this was the simplest solution to write a language with an /ə/ and without phonemic vowel length.
Second, yes, the Tocharian family is the sister-group to the rest of IE except Anatolian. This says nothing about the mere number of its innovations; that number is very high, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.
Why can’t it simply be a case of a “nickname” form replacing the formal form, like what has happened in Welsh?
It’s only science. We can’t have metaphysical certainty anyway.
Both *-ew- and *-we- are full grades; the zero grade of both is *-u-.
I don’t know what the regular outcome of *-kt- in Anatolian is; is it *-tt- by any chance?
Does Oscan have any -ht- clusters at all, or do they all become -t- with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel? (I don’t know that either.)
So where are the **gʷān forms? Why isn’t **ā, as the usual reflex of *eh₂ (phonemically ah₂), all over the place?
The mainstream reconstruction for the “woman” word is an abstract *gʷen-eh₂- with one laryngeal. In the nominative, this gives us morphophonemic *gʷen-h₂, which became *gʷēn by Szemerényi’s law; in some other cases, like the genitive, it gives us the zero-grade *gʷn-h₂-és, phonetically *gʷ°nh₂as. In short, we get a pretty complex paradigm, like for the “father” word.
Greek generalized the zero-grade and added the usual feminine nominative ending, yielding *gunā: *gʷ°n-h₂ > *gʷuna > *guna by the boukólos rule > *gunā by replacement of the unexpected short *a by the usual long one.
The exact same thing, except without the reinterpretation of *gʷ° as *gu, gives us the Avestan forms gǝnā and γnā and the Vedic gnā. In addition, however, Indo-Iranian had forms derived from the e-grade with the feminine suffix *-jah₂: *gʷn-(h₂)-ih₂ > Vedic jánī.
Balto-Slavic and Celtic also added the usual feminine nominative ending, but to the e-grade. Unlike Balto-Slavic, Celtic kept the alternation between the e-grade and the zero-grade, giving the nominative ben and the genitive mná in Old Irish (mná < *bna-h < *bna-s < *gʷ°n-as < *gʷ°nh₂-és.
The Balto-Slavic solution is also found in Gothic qino. The other Gothic form, qens, continues the original nominative *gʷēn with a mistakenly restored nominative ending *-s.
Find more here.
Isn’t *dʰw- > *tw- > *kʷ- > kb- regular in Lycian? And *dʰ- > f- is regular in Italic; if you want to derive the f from *dH or *gʷH, the laryngeal is on the wrong side of the vowel to lengthen it.
See above for the other features in Oscan and Lycian.
@David
“When will you learn that the argument from personal incredulity is a logical fallacy?”
Well, I was actually the one who introduced this critique into the present discussion. More specifically, it was meant to counter Marie-Lucie’s incredulity arguments against semantic connections such as chew > chin > beard.
But the problem with Piotr’s and your defense of *pH2ter > *pter > *p@H2ter > *pater is “excessive personal credulity,” while I’m just asking for attestations to support such a convoluted argument.
“1) The root *pah₂- “protect” (morphophonemic *peh₂-) is combined with the agent noun suffix *-ter-, which triggers zero-grade in the root, giving a morphophonemic *ph₂ter-.”
But how is it different from what Hans and I (with some minor disagreements) have proposed: *pa- + H2ter > *paH2ter > *pater or *pH2ter (in Indo-Aryan)?
“And if you take a look at the comments in this thread where Piotr has corrected me, you’ll always find that I made things too simple.”
Yes, I agree it need to be simple enough but not too simple.
“But PIE *ah₂ becomes PIIr *ā in every other word, and PIE *h₂a becomes PIIr *a in every other word. PIIr *i is only seen for °h₂ between consonants. You’re proposing a completely irregular development here.”
No, I meant that PIIr inherited *pH2ter from PIE *paH2ter, while extra Indo-Iranian languages inherited *pater from *paH2ter.
“It’s certainly evidence, but it’s not as decisive as you assume.”
When we assemble forms into cognate sets, we need to have reasons to put a form in or not. I don’t see any reason to exclude Pal papaz (we can’t exclude it because it’s morphologically distinct because we’re talking about a root etymology) and I have 4 reasons to include it: 1) the onset; 2) the meaning; 3) the monosyllabic/reduplicative nature of Anatolian kinship terms; 4) the collocation attestation.
“Why can’t it simply be a case of a “nickname” form replacing the formal form, like what has happened in Welsh?”
I don’t think this happened in Welsh. See above.
“First, let me repeat that the Tocharian a evidently wasn’t [a] at all; it was [ə]. Tocharian had an [a] sound, and that was ā. ”
Sorry, I misled you: Tocharian A is pa:car, Toch B is pa:cer. So it’s /a/.
“I don’t know what the regular outcome of *-kt- in Anatolian is; is it *-tt- by any chance?”
No.
“Does Oscan have any -ht- clusters at all, or do they all become -t- with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel?”
No. It’s supposed to be fuhtrei**. Per Andrew Byrd above, with further references being Untermann 2000 and de Vaan 2008.
“So where are the **gʷān forms? Why isn’t **ā, as the usual reflex of *eh₂ (phonemically ah₂), all over the place?”
Simplified/dissimilated to *gweneH2- from *gweH2neH2-. The -neH2- ending is relatively late and specific to the ‘woman, wife’ form. But Goth qino is from *gwe:na:. Never previously explained, now explained.
“Isn’t *dʰw- > *tw- > *kʷ- > kb- regular in Lycian?”
The correspondences between dw and kb (kbi ‘two’) and between sw and sb (esbe ‘horse’) are recurrent, but if kb=gw in cbatra, then the IE word for ‘two’ can also presuppose *gwe-wo- with subsequent contraction to *deuo *dwo-. This would explain Arm erku ‘two’ better than anything else: it’s -ku- that corresponds to *duwo-, not er-. Er- is something else added to the inherited PIE *gwe-wo- ‘two’.
“And *dʰ- > f- is regular in Italic”
Just like *gwh > f.
@Piotr Gąsiorowski: I think no scientist has ever seen anything but electromagnetic waves.
Brett: “I refute [Berkeley] thus” (kicking a large stone so that [Johnson’s] foot rebounded from it).
Correction: “But Goth qino is from *gwe:na:” > A Lengthened grade *gwe:ni- is recorded in Avest/Skrt ja:ni, OEng qwe:n, ONorse kvaen, Goth qens.
@David
” This says nothing about the mere number of its innovations; that number is very high, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
This observation does not apply to cases when Tocharian shows agreement with the vast majority of other branches. Again, papaz (?), pa:car, hayr, pate:r, pater, athair, fadar. Indo-Iranian is the only outlier (Skrt pita, Avest pta), so it’s most reasonable to postulate an innovation that occurred only in this latter branch.
Vladimir: I don’t know anything about Penutian.
The main reason I am not “reconstructing Proto-Penutian” is that “Penutian” is not a generally accepted genetic group like Indo-European, it is still generally considered as hypothetical. Only a few groups of two or three component families are currently recognized as probably related, the rest being considered isolates. So before even thinking of reconstructing proto-languages for groups other than very obvious families, let alone one for the whole ‘phylum”, it is imperative to demonstrate that the languages included in it are indeed genetically related rather than just sharing a few typological features. That’s what I am working on, concentrating on a few languages (or small families) or a few features at a time. I think that most of the relevant families are related, but for one or two the evidence thus far is still doubtful: many of the languages are extinct or severely endangered, few linguists have studied them, and for some of them the records are scanty.
@Marie-Lucie
“The main reason I am not “reconstructing Proto-Penutian” is that “Penutian” is not a generally accepted genetic group like Indo-European”
Yes, I knew this all along. I was just using a shorthand.
” it is imperative to demonstrate that the languages included in it are indeed genetically related rather than just sharing a few typological features.”
I meant to ask you this long time ago, but you’re probably tired of answering the same question coming from different people. Does linguistic structure have any impact on the decay of linguistic kinship? I mean: is there something about the structure of American Indian languages (grammar, morphology, phonology) that makes them change faster, become quickly unrecognizably related because of phonetic inventory complexity or something along those lines.
I mean: is there something about the structure of American Indian languages (grammar, morphology, phonology) that makes them change faster, become quickly unrecognizably related because of phonetic inventory complexity or something along those lines.
Not at all. It’s simply that we have a few hundred years of data at most, much of it very fragmentary and low-quality, with no hope of ever collecting any more. This is very different from the situation of much of Indo-European and Afroasiatic.
There are definitely several major groups in American Indian languages (probably on the order of Sapir’s 6 phyla), but not as many as are currently accepted (mostly small families and isolates).
The major comparative-historical study of Algonquian languages was done by the great linguist (originally a Germanist) Leonard Bloomfield, who demonstrated that the “comparative method” developed with IE languages was indeed applicable to American Indian languages too, in spite of the obstacles of short history, few documents, etc.
From what I have seen with Penutian studies, in addition to unavoidable obstacles such as lack of source material and of historical depth, much of the problem lies in the poor training of most (not all) linguists in historical linguistics. For instance, as I said above I am not trying to reconstruct a proto-language for a group of languages not yet demonstrated to be related. But some linguists in that field think that one should attempt reconstruction in order to demonstrate whether languages in a given group are related or not. So, since proto-language reconstruction typically concentrates on reconstructing vocabulary, the first step is to “assemble cognates” (something impossible if the definition of “cognates” as “words descended from a common ancestor” is respected). This method of “lexical-phonological comparison” is only valid in cases of closely related languages, which not only share a lot of related words (differing mostly in some low-level phonological correspondences) but also very similar morphology. The major IE language groups (or major subgroups within them) fit this description (eg Romance, Slavic, etc). But starting with lexical comparison while paying little or no attention to very different morphological structures is bound to result in frustration. It has often been remarked that comparing English and French on that basis would result in reconstructing a “Proto-Anglo-French” with very little in the way of common morphology, leading to unresolvable problems in deciding whether this proto-language should be classified as Romance or Germanic. (The answer, of course, lies in recognizing the crucial importance of basic morphology).
Also, as Etienne pointed out some time ago, in an introductory course the regularity of sound change, etc is presented with simple, obvious examples, while the reality of other language families can be much less obvious, if the languages are less closely related, and some actual phonological correspondences may not be noticed at all because they look too different from those existing in the language(s) known to the student. Finally, from a semantic point of view the connection between formally similar words may not be recognized because of the linguist’s cultural or personal preconceptions. For instance, a well-known linguist (who shall remain nameless) once criticized someone else’s pairing of words meaning respectively “boys” and “male animals”, claiming that these meanings were much too different for the words in question to be related!
@David
“if you want to derive the f from *dH or *gʷH, the laryngeal is on the wrong side of the vowel to lengthen it.”
I don’t know how Dziebel explains this, but I did find in his writings an interesting proposal to derive the isolated Lat uxo:r ‘wife’ from *vexo:r < *gweg'Htor (I assume it's *gwegH2tor). The onset is perfectly regular (venio: < IE *gwem-). This form has the morphology of Germ. *doxte:r, Iran *duxthri, Gaul. duxtir 'daughter' but the meaning in common with IE *gweneH2- 'woman, wife'. Unlike Osc fu:trei or Gk thugater but similarly to Skrt duhita:, the onset of *gweg'H2tor is unaspirated, while the inlaut has a laryngeal-carrying cluster -x- (also necto > nexus, nexi, plecto: > plexi, plexus). He uses it as an example of how aspiration derived from a laryngeal could have appeared on either of the two consonants in a root, morpheme or segment, always on one of them (by analogy with the Greek pair thriks but trikhos ‘hair’) but never on both of them at the same time.
Importantly, neither the PIE ‘daughter’ word nor the PIE ‘wife, woman’ word were so far detected in Latin, and Dziebel’s solution seems to hit two birds with one stone.
–neither the PIE ‘daughter’ word nor the PIE ‘wife, woman’ word were so far detected in Latin
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cunnus#Etymology
m.-l., I notice that Catherine Callaghan, who has dedicated so much of her life to demonstrating and reconstructing Utian, is treating Yok-Utian tentatively still, more as a working hypothesis than an established relationship. From what I have seen of the evidence she has presented, that’s how I would treat it too. Doesn’t this argue that even that smaller part of Penutian is intrinsically a hard problem, harder than IE, and not just an issue of a lack of attention by skilled linguists?
@Piotr Gąsiorowski: I think no scientist has ever seen anything but electromagnetic waves.
Good point 🙂
No, I meant that PIIr inherited *pH2ter from PIE *paH2ter, while extra Indo-Iranian languages inherited *pater from *paH2ter.
Do you have any other example for such a split? “mother” (Late PIE *maH2ter-) and “brother” (Late PIE *braH2ter) don’t split that way. Again, a development of H2 to /a/ (or its equivalents) or zero between stops is typical for all non-Anatolian and non-Indo-Iranian languages. Why can’t you accept that it was *pH2ter- in late PIE from an original pre-ablaut *paH2ter-? Do you think “father” words always need to have an /a/ that can never change?
I wrote:
We would have:
pre-ablaut: *pV-H2’ter- / *pV-H2ter-és- > post-ablaut (and pre-break-up PIE) *p-H2’ter- / *p-H2tr-és “father”
pre-ablaut: *’mV-H2ter- > post-ablaut *’mVH2-tr- “mother” > pre-break-up PIE *maHtr-
pre-ablaut: *’bhV-H2ter- > post-ablaut *’bh-H2tr- “brother” > pre-break-up PIE *bhraHtr-
pre-ablaut: *’dhweg-H2ter- / *dhweg-H2ter-és- > post-ablaut (and pre-breakup) *’dhweg-H2’ter- / *dhug-H2tr-és “daughter” (using Kloekhorts’s reconstruction here).
David wrote;
This doesn’t explain why the suffix is sometimes stressed and sometimes unstressed. (I’m tempted to postulate phonemic tones, but that would be circular at this stage.)
True, this doesn’t explain it, but it has no bearing on this proposal*), as the different accent patterns (barytone for “mother” and “brother”, hysterokinetic for “father” and “daughter” (or amphikinetic for the latter if we follow Kloekhorst) are also not explained by the traditional model or the model of a re-analysis of a *peH2-ter- “protector”.
*) It is not my personal invention anyway – I read it somewhere. My problem is that my brain is full of factlets about PIE that I have learnt so long ago that I don’t remember the sources. 😉
Correction: “But Goth qino is from *gwe:na:” > A lengthened grade *gwe:ni- is recorded in Avest/Skrt ja:ni, OEng qwe:n, ONorse kvaen, Goth qens.
Your own examples show that qino cannot come from *g_we:na, as Gothic “i” goes back to PIE */e/ (or to PIE */i/, but that isn’t likely in this word), while PIE */e:/ results in Gothic “e” (as in qens). So qino can go back only to *g_wen-eH2-.
On Dziebel’s etymologies: as long as he works with labiovelars that can show up as labiovelars, dentals, velars, and labials without any discernible rule in all of the daughter languages, I’m not going to discuss any details. With this method, he can derive anything from a labiovelar, just because he likes the semantics. It’s basically irrefutable, and therefore useless.
On uxor: in Latin, velar or labiovelar plus /t/ gives /kt/ (“ct”). The examples with “x” that you give are all due to further suffixation of this cluster with /t/ or /s/ (plexus is from plect-tus as actus < ag-tus or dictus < dic-tus; plexi is from plect-si as intellexi is from intelleg-si and dixi is from dic-si. (There’s also the issue why the suffix is -or-, not -er-, while in the other names of relatives Latin has kept PIE -er-).
Just so much for now:
You seem to believe that *dw > rk only occurs in this one word. If so, you are mistaken; it is a regular correspondence that occurs at every opportunity. And here’s how it works; it’s considerably less strange than it looks at first glance.
It’s not that simple.
First, not all these cases of a are independent. You cite Italic, Celtic and Germanic separately, but the evidence for an Italo-Celtic branch is pretty good, and there’s some evidence that Germanic is its sister-group; there may well have been an a already in Proto-Italo-Celtic, if not “Proto-West-IE”, in which case three of the cases you cite are actually just two or a single one. You also cite Greek and Armenian separately, but there’s pretty good evidence for a Greek-Phrygian-Armenian branch (to the extent that Phrygian is documented at all); so these two examples may be just one, too.
Second, sometimes, it’s impossible to come up with an innovation that makes any sense. In such cases you have to turn things upside-down and assume a retention instead. Before the 1870s, as mentioned above, people believed that the Sanskrit a-i-u vowel system was the original PIE one, and that the e and o found outside of Indo-Iranian* were an innovation of the “European branch”; after all, the e and o of Sanskrit itself are transparent innovations (from *ai and *au, as a quick glance at Sanskrit morphology or noun compounds or sandhi will show). Then people noticed that this amounted to assuming an unconditioned split: no conditions could be found under which this “PIE” *a would have become e or o. Since then, IEists have assumed that things went the other way around: e and o merged into a in Indo-Iranian, the “European” five-vowel system has to be projected all the way back to PIE and left unexplained there, and there’s in fact no evidence for a “European branch”.
* I don’t know if Indo-Iranian was recognized as a branch yet. It was occasionally doubted till much more recently.
Well, you can’t do comparative morphology on languages that don’t have morphology (isolating languages). This is a problem in parts of Southeast Asia and West Africa. However, regular sound correspondences in basic vocabulary are still available, so the comparative method has been applied with some success, even though not as much success as in IE.
Isolating languages are not common in the Americas; polysynthetic ones are.
Reconstructing the basic vocabulary of such a “language” would be rather hard, because English has very few French loans there.
Congratulations to Dziebel for reinventing the square wheel. *slow clap*
What you’re presenting is a small part of the material from which Grassmann’s law was deduced. Like Dziebel, you have not noticed the evidence for its being a very late change in Greek, later than the change of *s > h for instance.
Try to pronounce [kʰs], and to keep it distinct from [ks]. You are bound to fail. The Pre-Greeks failed, too (indeed the speakers of PIE already did); this is why the Greek alphabet doesn’t bother trying to distinguish |gs|, |ks| and |kʰs|. So, even before Grassmann’s law, /tʰriks/ only had one aspirate, and there was nothing for Grassmann’s law to work on. Conversely, */tʰrikʰos/ had two aspirates, and Grassmann’s law eliminated the first one as always.
BTW, is vowel length in Oscan known at all? How was it written?
What is “laryngeal-carrying” about Latin x?!?
Not having seen any of the data, I can of course only comment in principle…
…and in principle the answer is no.
– How much time has Callaghan been able to devote to this problem, and how many other people (other than m-l) have even tried?
– Many subbranches of IE are harder problems than IE itself. Part of this is exaggerated by lack of attention, but that’s not the whole story; the exact position of Albanian in the tree is anyone’s guess, and yet its membership in IE is plain obvious.
– The more languages you compare (or species in biology), the better. This is obvious if they’re all inside your branch of interest: trying to reconstruct PIE from just modern English and modern Hindi would be really hard, yield a small vocabulary and practically no morphology, while if you added German, Italian, Russian, Greek and Kurdish, you’d be going somewhere. If some are outside the branch of interest, which in the Penutian case you don’t know beforehand, good; you need them to root the tree and to reconstruct the character states at the root correctly.
But *ph₂-ter-, with zero-grade in the root, only has a single (unreduced, stressable) vowel. Which accent pattern would we expect for its paradigm?
Hysterokinetic (pH2tér- vs. pH2tr-´-), as is attested? Or perhaps I don’t understand your question?
Y:
I have met CC and talked with her a number of times. She has done a huge job with Miwokan languages, which are half of the “Utian” group, the other half being Costanoan. A strong resemblance between the two groups had already been identified by Dixon & Kroeber, as part of the original (California) “Penutian” group. CC was one of Mary Haas’s students at Berkeley and swears by her teachings, such as “start with two languages at a time”. Not too long ago she said to me “You should have picked one language to compare with Tsimshianic, and stuck with it”. I was tempted to say “If you will only tell me which one to pick …”. I have not looked at the “Yok-Utian” data lately, but it is quite possible that that Yokutsan is not the closest group to associate with “Utian”. The families are longtime neighbours, so that shared vocabulary with phonological correspondences is not unexpected. But Sapir, having worked intensively on Takelma (Southern Oregon, crossing into California), was moved to expand “Penutian” outside of California by similarities he noticed between Takelma and Yokuts. Indeed the verbal system and other details suggest a relationship, which I intend to investigate further.
David: (Proto-Anglo-French) Reconstructing the basic vocabulary of such a “language” would be rather hard, because English has very few French loans there.
Indeed no properly trained linguist would propose such a proto-language, but I read somewhere that some people had argued that English should be classified as a Romance language.
Exactly. I started on Penutian because I was trying to find out whether Tsimshianic had any relatives, and Sapir had proposed the affiliation. Since no single Penutian language (family) seemed to be closer to Tsimshianic than another, I had to look at all of them. Since most of them seemed quite different from Tsimshianic, I thought at first that Sapir must have been mistaken, and set out to prove it, or at least to strongly oppose his hypothesis. To my surprise, I had to conclude that Sapir was right. Since then I have been working on various problems of Penutian-internal classification, mostly in the languages North of California.
Not too long ago she said to me “You should have picked one language to compare with Tsimshianic, and stuck with it”.
That just sounds like standard academic advice: find a hole and spend your entire life digging it deeper, until you are either the best or the only expert or (best of all) both, so that no one can touch you (except, of course, populist politicians protesting the purloining of public pelf[*]). Of course, I am all in favor of finding out all about something if it’s something you love. But from a more utilitarian perspective, the chief use of holes is to hold posts that support bridges.
I was very struck by your remark in the 1997 IJAL article (for which, by the way, much thanks; I want to quote a big section of it at some point) to this effect: you can’t look for typically Penutian features in Tsimshianic, since nobody knows what a “typically Penutian” feature even is — but you can look for typically Tsimshianic features, especially archaic ones, in other Penutian languages.
[*] Pelf, no doubt, is that which is pilfered, and the words come into English from (Anglo-)Norman, but after that the trail leads nowhere: etymology completely unknown. The OED suggests a connection with modern Normand peuf(f)e ‘old clothes, rubbish’, but that’s all.
The OED suggests a connection with modern Normand peuf(f)e ‘old clothes, rubbish’
Piffle.
(I swore I wasn’t going to comment in this thread any more, but I couldn’t resist.)
JC: Thanks!
“You should have picked one language to compare with Tsimshianic, and stuck with it”.
I don’t think that was just typical academic advice, CC was criticizing my pan-Penutian approach, which was the opposite of that of Mary Haas.
typical Penutian features
Actually Sapir produced a list of such in his short description of the 6 phyla, but in addition of being quite general, hardly any one of them applies to Tsimshianic as they are based on the California languages. So I pretty much had to develop my own approach to the data.
Piffle
The OED thinks it’s a mixture of piddle and trifle, or possibly from imitative piff! plus frequentative -le. Quod absurdum est.
“If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle”, said Harriet, severely.
@Hans
“Why can’t you accept that it was *pH2ter- in late PIE from an original pre-ablaut *paH2ter-? Do you think “father” words always need to have an /a/ that can never change?”
Because I don’t see it attested anywhere outside of Indo-Iranian (I treat pa:cer and papaz seriously). It’s just /a/ all over. And pa- tends to be the baby form, too, so Indo-Iranian is an exception from all perspectives. And considering that it occurs in the context of an affix *H2ter, I’m looking for a solution there.
“Do you have any other example for such a split?”
No. IE *dhugH2ter is an obvious choice but it’s full of its own problems. Still, my goal is to define the problem in a correct way first and then find a solution. PIE (late or early) *pH2ter still follows the Indo-Iranian lead and it looks like it’s putting a cart before the horse.
“as long as he works with labiovelars that can show up as labiovelars, dentals, velars, and labials without any discernible rule in all of the daughter languages, I’m not going to discuss any details.”
It’s pretty well defined as far as I can see. Just like in Greek it depends on the quality of the following vowel. It may have been a labiouvular consonant, though, that shifted ti labiovelar in some dialects and hence we sometimes see it maintained as a labiovelar into modern times.
“On uxor: in Latin, velar or labiovelar plus /t/ gives /kt/ (“ct”).”
That’s why he thinks there was a laryngeal there and the velar was palatalized.
“(There’s also the issue why the suffix is -or-, not -er-, while in the other names of relatives Latin has kept PIE -er-).”
Influenced by soror ‘sister’.
@David
“You seem to believe that *dw > rk only occurs in this one word. If so, you are mistaken”
I do know that. But a phonetic principle works across all the words, so it should be the same.
“What you’re presenting is a small part of the material from which Grassmann’s law was deduced. Like Dziebel, you have not noticed the evidence for its being a very late change in Greek, later than the change of *s > h for instance.”
There’s evidence for Grassmann’s Law in Latin (see Sihler on glaber and gradior). This would be a separate development from Greek and Sanskrit. Dziebel, however, thinks that there was avoidance of two aspirates in a root, and it was PIE in age, hence we see it in Skrt, Greek, Latin and Tocharian.
David: Callaghan has worked on Utian for the last 50 years or so, starting with some papers in the early 1960s. Her magnum opus on Utian (and Yok-Utian) came out two years ago, and I believe she’s still working at it.
m.-l.: indeed, Yokutsan may not be the closest surviving relative of Utian. What I meant was that: you can recognize IE fairly confidently based on, say, modern German, Italian, Russian and Farsi. Miwokan-Costanoan has been compared, roughly, to Romance-Germanic, in terms of internal diversity and the distance of the two groups. So if Penutian or some large part of it was about as diverse as IE, anyone with the talent of Jones or Rask should be able to make a correct first approximation to confirming the relationship of these languages, and to identify some salient common features. That is not the case, which is why I’m thinking Penutian is a harder problem than IE, even given good historical linguists working on it. It may well be older than IE, but not old beyond recognition as a genetic grouping.
Y: Miwokan-Costanoan has been compared, roughly, to Romance-Germanic, in terms of internal diversity and the distance of the two groups.
I will have to read the book. It does not seem to me that the distance between the M and C group is as great as that between the two IE ones. I have heard CC mention an estimate of the age of the proto-language as approximately that of Proto-Germanic, but I am not convinced by estimates which do not have a real world basis (such as dated archeological sites and historically known cultures).
So if Penutian or some large part of it was about as diverse as IE, anyone with the talent of Jones or Rask should be able to make a correct first approximation to confirming the relationship of these languages, and to identify some salient common features.
I think that Penutian is more diverse than IE. Most of it is located in a North-South coastal area limited on its Eastern side by mountains, with an East-West mountain chain also separating the Northern and Southern components (North and South Penutian each have identifiable features). In Johanna Nichols’ terms, it is therefore in a “refuge” zone rather than a “spread” zone. Penutian does not occupy the whole area, the Penutian languages are interspersed with members of several other language families, and it is likely that the “phylum” gained speakers who switched languages in the past.
As I said above, Sapir identified some salient characteristics of Penutian based on the California languages first grouped under that name, although the other languages do not necessarily match those characteristics (for instance, “true nominal cases”).
In terms of actual data, Sapir’s identification of Tsimshianic as Penutian relied on only TWO morphemes: the very common n-initial 1S pronoun (also very common world-wide), and the homophonous ‘senior kin’ prefix also found in Yokutsan, Wintun and perhaps one or two other Penutian languages. Apart from those two actual morphemes, he seems to have relied on a kind of ‘sixth sense’ intuition based on familiarity with a very large number of languages.
In the 1997 article mentioned by John Cowan above, I identified 34 grammatical morphemes common to Tsimshianic and (for each of them) at least 4 other Penutian languages comprising at least one from the North and one from the South. (The mountain barrier between Oregon and California is also a linguistic barrier, probably a “mini refuge zone”, and the people of the mountains speak non-Penutian languages).
That is not the case, which is why I’m thinking Penutian is a harder problem than IE, even given good historical linguists working on it. It may well be older than IE, but not old beyond recognition as a genetic grouping.
Indeed, Penutian is a harder problem, and thus far I am not aware of other linguists currently working on it as a whole, as opposed to individual languages or smaller groups considered independently of their possible Penutian affiliation. As for its age compared to IE, I don’t feel competent to offer even a tentative estimate.
@Y: It’s a bitter reality that a Rask or a Jones (the latter, incidentally, failed to perceive the genetic relationship between Sanskrit and present-day Indo-Aryan languages) would not be in a Department of Linguistics today: even in those relic areas of academia where historical linguistics is not yet dead the surviving scholars who practice historical linguistics are ones whose (tenuous) survival is due to their working on established language families, not to their exploring possible connections between languages not known today to be related. Indeed, I was quite saddened recently when I found out that a scholar who as a grad student had published some excellent work on a possible language family does not, at present, have an academic position.
As for the Miwokan-Costanoan relationship being analoguous to Romance and Germanic: the difficulty here is that Miwokan and Costanoan are both spoken over such a small area that most or even all speakers of the various languages could have been bi- or multilingual in one or more or their neighbors’ languages over centuries, perhaps even millennia. Meaning that the two language families might originally have been far more profoundly unlike one another than what the situation today might lead us to believe.
@Marie-Lucie: it seems to me that you and CC could have met half-way and could have directly compared Tsimshianic and either Miwokan or Costanoan. The geographical distance would exclude any possibility of recent language contact being to blame for whatever similarities you might find.
languagehat: (I swore I wasn’t going to comment in this thread any more, but I couldn’t resist.)
There’s nothing wrong with commenting on this thread. It’s just futile to keep responding to Vladimir. But there’s some interesting real discussion going on too, even if cued by an annoyance. (It probably helps that I’m well beyond reading Vladimir’s contributions, but I do read everything else.)
a scholar who as a grad student had published some excellent work on a possible language family does not, at present, have an academic position
All too common. But can you say who, where published, and which family? Such things are not (as far as I can see) a case for discretion, but for shouting it from the rooftops, or at least the top of the hat.
Etienne: it seems to me that you and CC could have met half-way and could have directly compared Tsimshianic and either Miwokan or Costanoan.
When I decided on researching Penutian I first set up a series of files labelled “Tsimshianic -X”, with notes on each language X’s morphology, pronouns, and lexical resemblances with Proto-Tsimshianic roots, so I did have a “Tsimshianic-Miwok” file. After assembling a number of these individual files I realized that most of my morphology notes were very repetitive, so I collapsed the separate files into more general ones including all the relevant data I found (and I continue to add more data as I review and correct earlier files or access additional materials). I also started vocabulary files according to themes, eg “Humans”, “Body parts”, etc (subdivided according to more specific meanings), each listing words in as many as possible of the 15-odd relevant families (and also some neighbouring ones, to check for possible borrowings). At some point CC wrote to me criticizing a paper I had presented, and I replied not only with an explanation of my approach but with several pages of apparent Tsimshianic-Miwok correspondences together with possible cognates in a few other languages. However, concentrating on Miwok would have given the impression that there was a special relationship between the two families, which does not appear to be the case at all.
Thus far I have found similarities in (given sufficient data) almost all the languages and families labelled as Penutian, but no single language or group appears significantly closer to Tsimshianic than the others, although resemblances are (relatively speaking) more obvious with the Northern languages.
The geographical distance would exclude any possibility of recent language contact being to blame for whatever similarities you might find.
This is the case for all Tsimshianic-X similarities: the family is on the Canadian West Coast, close to the tip of the Alaska panhandle, and the nearest Penutian family is Chinookan, on the Lower Columbia River. This isolation means not only that recent contact can be ruled out, but that the language has preserved demonstrably archaic features which show up as puzzling irregularities in a few of the other languages, especially Takelma.
@Trond
“There’s nothing wrong with commenting on this thread. It’s just futile to keep responding to Vladimir. But there’s some interesting real discussion going on too, even if cued by an annoyance. (It probably helps that I’m well beyond reading Vladimir’s contributions, but I do read everything else.)”
You are funny: your only contribution to this thread is an announcement that you are not reading what I write.
John Cowan: I won’t give further details on this scholar. Normally I’d agree with you that there would be no harm in doing so, indeed that drawing attention to first-rate diachronic work should be encouraged, but in this particular instance…speaking as an interested outsider who has peeked into the work of many a scholarly school/group, I must say that in this particular instance the “community” of scholars who work on these languages appears to be a VERY messed-up and divided group, even by academic standards (hard to believe, I know…).
Indeed a serious and respected scholar among them has a University position a continent away from where these languages are spoken, apparently (or so I was told) because they had inadvertently stepped on a TGP’s (Tenured Grand Poobah’s) ideological toes and as a result was banned from academic positions anywhere near communities of speakers of these languages (whose study remains said scholar’s specialty).
And as far as the historical linguist whose work I praised is concerned, I have no idea how an outsider’s praise would affect this scholar’s standing among their peers and superior, and cannot be certain it would have a positive impact.
Under these circumstances I hope you will understand why I wish to be discreet.
Tired. Just so much now:
The question was how agent nouns in -ter- were stressed, and if the stress pattern of *pH2tér- is consistent with its being such a thing. (You can probably tell I’ve never learned Greek or Sanskrit.)
Here, my question was how long she has been working on Yok-Utian, not on Utian alone.
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
No, it does not just follow the Indo-Iranian lead. It’s an attempt to account for the facts that, in every branch except Tocharian, “father” and “mother” have different vowels in the first syllable, and that all those branches that retain evidence of PIE stress point at initial stress in “mother” but final stress in “father”.
I still don’t understand what a laryngeal is supposed to have to do with any of this.
David: my question was how long she [Catherine Callaghan] has been working on Yok-Utian, not on Utian alone.
I met her in 1994 (at the Penutian Workshop in Eugene, OR) and I think that’s when I heard about Utian and Yok-Utian. She circulated a typewritten document with lists of potential cognates for Yok-Utian, which was probably the first draft of her 1997 article (in the same IJAL issue as mine).
@David
“It’s an attempt to account for the facts that, in every branch except Tocharian, “father” and “mother” have different vowels in the first syllable, and that all those branches that retain evidence of PIE stress point at initial stress in “mother” but final stress in “father”.”
But why would we expect the ‘father’ and ‘mother’ words to have exactly the same phonetics? One could have been *paH2ter (< *pa-), the other one *me:H2ter (< *me:-). OHG muoma 'mother's sister' shows a long vowel in a reduplicated root, while Greek mamma shows a short vowel. Those forms very well may have been in free alternation in PIE. Suffix *-H2ter got added to two different bases. "I still don’t understand what a laryngeal is supposed to have to do with any of this." A laryngeal as part of a consonant cluster is reconstructed for PIE - *dhug'H2ter 'daughter'. This difficult cluster created *dujhita and then *duhita in Skrt, while in Latin, per Dziebel's hypothesis, it resulted in -x- in uxo:r. If it were a laryngealless cluster *gt, then Latin would have had uctor**, but the laryngeal "lengthened" the neighboring consonant, so the cluster became *-k'tt- or *-kkt- > *-ktt- and then -ks- = x. So, basically there were two kinds of daughter forms: *dugH2ter (Skrt duhita and Lat uxo:r) and *dH2ugVter (Gk thugater and Osc fu:trei). The loss of -g- in fu:trei suggests that -g- was intervocalic (< *fugatrei > *fugutrei > *fuutrei) (otherwise it would have been fuhtrei**).
Thanks Steve. That’s was from me, David.
To add: The closest parallel I could find to the intervocalic loss of -g'(H2)- in Oscan is Osc mais, maimas (= Lat maximae, Gk megas, Skrt mahi) < *magis, *magemas < *meg’H2- 'great'.
I haven’t tackled the CC article yet, but I will. I think rather than putting a chunk of your article into a comment as I had wanted to do, I’ll type it up and send it to His Hatness with my commentary to run as a guest post (if he’s willing to do so, and if you don’t mind). I have in mind parts of sections 2, 6, and 7, nothing that could possibly be called out of date.
But since we are talking of Penutian, I want to pick out this bit from Anthony P. Grant’s article “Oregon Coast Penutian” in the same issue, from section 4:
Isn’t that just amazing? I can hardly imagine that there are any other two most-closely-related languages of which this could be said. I wonder if this was somehow consciously performed, where one group decided to use jargon like Boontling, which then became the natural language of the community.
I’ll type it up and send it to His Hatness with my commentary to run as a guest post (if he’s willing to do so, and if you don’t mind).
Fine with me; it will at least split the discussion and perhaps slow the kudzu-like growth of this thread.
LH, JC: I will be an honour! but can I see the post first?
Coos: Hanis and Miluk
Hanis Coos is known from a grammar and texts by Frachtenberg, both commissioned and published by Boas, but for Miluk there are only manuscript sources apart from a few pages of Hanis vs Miluk words in the volume of texts. Someone got a PhD recently claiming that Miluk was definitely a separate language and deriving a number of its words from Salishan ones. I was not totally convinced, especially by the hypothetical Salishan connection when some of the words in question had analyzable cognates in several other Penutian languages. But apart from reading the thesis and consulting the bilingual or bidialectal word list I am not familiar enough with the Miluk situation to make an informed comment on Anthony Grant’s statement.
@David: ‘all those branches that retain evidence of PIE stress point at initial stress in “mother”’
Doesn’t Germanic point toward stress on the last syllable, with Verner’s Law voicing of the middle consonant?
Sanskrit too shows suffixal accentuation, mātár-, though Greek has root-accented μήτηρ. This Wiktionary page is quite informative (and concludes that the original accentuation was on the root, though I’m not sure the argument is that strong). Too bad we’ve lost Piotr.
A problem that I’m seeing with the reconstruction *meH2ter is similar to the one I see with *pH2ter: a postulated laryngeal is not attested in Anatolian. Anatolian languages have completely different ‘mother’ words. What’s interesting about *meH2ter, though, is that it’s likely related to Goth me:gs ‘son-in-law’, Celtic *makwo- ‘son’, Lith masa ‘husband’s sister’, OPruss moazo ‘mother’s sister’, OHG muoma ‘mother’s sister’, Alb motre ‘sister’. Anatolian has absolutely no trace of any of those words.
If it were a laryngealless cluster *gt, then Latin would have had uctor**, but the laryngeal “lengthened” the neighboring consonant, so the cluster became *-k’tt- or *-kkt- > *-ktt- and then -ks- = x.
Any other examples for such a development? If not, it’s just another case of postulating something just in order to justify one pet etymology.
Because I don’t see it attested anywhere outside of Indo-Iranian (I treat pa:cer and papaz seriously). It’s just /a/ all over. And pa- tends to be the baby form, too, so Indo-Iranian is an exception from all perspectives. And considering that it occurs in the context of an affix *H2ter, I’m looking for a solution there.
I sketched a possible solution for you that both takes care of the Indo-Iranian situation and keeps the link with the baby talk form. /a/ vs. Zero vs. /i/ is what we expect if there was a laryngeal; *pH2tér- is what we would expect from a pre-ablaut **paH2tér-. Tocharian /a:/ is the regular outcome of laryngeal between stops, as generally in the Non-Anatolian and Non-Indo-Iranian IE languages, so no need to assume /a/ here. Palaic papa- is a different formation (reduplicated instead of suffix -(H2)ter- ), so it must have had a different history. So all your resistance seems to be based on a conviction that /a/ in baby talk words must always be preserved, but then Vedic pita: or French père show that it isn’t; shortenings like English Grandpa to gramps show that the vowel can be elided in such words when in an unaccented syllable. Or you seem to think that languages never can go via a ciruitous route – a majority of IE languages has /a/, it orginally was baby talk “pa”, so it must have been “*pater” all the time. But languages do go through circles: Older Greek /u/ became /y/ in Classical Greek and then went back to /u/ in the Athenian dialect of Modern Greek; PIE /*o/ became Balto-Slavic /*a/, then went to Slavic /o/, and this became again /a/ in unaccented syllables in Modern Russian and Belorussian.
It’s pretty well defined as far as I can see. Just like in Greek it depends on the quality of the following vowel. It may have been a labiouvular consonant, though, that shifted ti labiovelar in some dialects and hence we sometimes see it maintained as a labiovelar into modern times.
Did Dziebel define the rules somewhere and discusssed all the examples and exceptions?
@David: The question was how agent nouns in -ter- were stressed, and if the stress pattern of *pH2tér- is consistent with its being such a thing. (You can probably tell I’ve never learned Greek or Sanskrit.)
On Vedic, let me quote McDonnell (Appendix III §9 A d, p. 453): “Stems formed with tar generally accent the root when the meaning is participial, but the suffix when it is purely nominal; e.g. dá:tar giving (with acc.), but da:tár giver.” Greek has agent nouns in -τήρ (accent on the suffix) and -τωρ (accent on the stem). I don’t know if the Vedic rule is supposed to be of PIE age; if yes, that could be one source of the two Greek types; another one could be abstraction of the -τωρ type from compounds (see pairs like πατήρ – εὐπάτωρ); but it’s also possible that both Greek types are of PIE age and Vedic created a functional distinction between these two types.
@Hans
“Any other examples for such a development? If not, it’s just another case of postulating something just in order to justify one pet etymology.”
I added one more example above: “The closest parallel I could find to the intervocalic loss of -g'(H2)- in Oscan is Osc mais, maimas (= Lat maximae, Gk megas, Skrt mahi) < *magis, *magemas < *meg’H2- 'great'."
There are not too many cases like this in the first place, so I wouldn't call a "pet" etymology. Dziebel's solution to uxo:r is head and shoulders over what the "traditional method" yielded, namely uxo:r < *uk-sor "she who gets accustomed" or "bull-woman." It checks all the boxes for me and if there're phonetic questions, that's also a sign of a healthy etymology. Otherwise, all the Indo-Europeanists would be out of work by now.
"I sketched a possible solution for you that both takes care of the Indo-Iranian situation and keeps the link with the baby talk form. /a/ vs. Zero vs. /i/ is what we expect if there was a laryngeal; *pH2tér- is what we would expect from a pre-ablaut **paH2tér-."
Don't take me wrong – I get it and it makes sense on some level. And yes I agree that reversals are possible as well. The problem is that the pre-ablaut stage is well attested, while the post-ablaut stage is much less attested (Indo-Iranian only). There's just nothing in Anatolian or Tocharian to even remotely suggest that *pH2ter with a consonant between p- and -t- is a real protoform that actually existed. If post-ablaut also means post-Anatolian, then why reconstruct a laryngeal in the first place?
Attestations are a broader problem. Even in the *megH2- example above Hitt has me:g without a laryngeal. And I understand that we can’t have attestations for every single thing but it’s important to be keenly aware of what the evidential basis of our reconstructions is.
@Hans
For me it’s also a matter of properly defining the cognate set to solve a problem. Narrowly focusing on one form with the meaning ‘father’ is risky. Why don’t we expand it into the ‘father’s brother’ and ‘stepfather’ territory. If Indo-Iranian developments in the ‘father’ group of words are indeed rooted in a PIE reality, then other languages should also show interesting anomalies. Avest tu:iriya ‘father’s brother’ shows a consonant loss (presumably p- from *pturiyos), which was precipitated by the laryngeal loss in PInIr. Slav *stryji ‘father’s brother’, *pastroku ‘stepfather’ shows a p-less onset as well. Arm yawray ‘stepfather’ (vs. hayr ‘father’) usually reconstructed as *patros has an unexplained y- in it (also occurring in yisun ’50’ vs. hing ‘five’), so again the onset has an intriguing aspect to it.
Coos: Hanis and Miluk (update)
I made a mistake about the location of the Miluk word-list: it is not in Frachtenberg’s volume of Coos texts but in his volume of Siuslaw texts (Siuslaw is another, poorly documented Penutian language once spoken North of Coos). The list is only two pages long and gives both Hanis and Miluk words, plus numerals, and pronominal endings on the following page, and then a few pages of notes about a few differences with Hanis.
Without doing more research, I get the impression that one or the other of the two varieties must reflect the influence of a different language, which might have been a substrate or just a neighbour. But the recent proposal of Salishan influence and borrowings still looks very doubtful: perhaps a few borrowings, but nothing as massive as the author suggested.
(more update)
I should have looked at Wikipedia first. There are volumes of Coos texts by Melville Jacobs, which I should try to get hold of, and apparently some more manuscript notes have been collected.
…Oh. Oopsie. I managed to forget that the middle consonant was in fact voiced.
Interesting, though, that Greek disagrees.
To explain the correspondence between IIr *i to non-IIr *a, which is regular for *h₂.
Also, the “mother” word has a Balto-Slavic “acute” on its first syllable. Do you know what that is?
Interesting, though, that Greek disagrees.
One might make an argument that the Greek accentuation must be original because the change to a hysterokinetic paradigm is easily accounted for by the analogy of the “father” word, while a change in the other direction would be harder to justify. But then, maybe the (initial-accented) vocative could have played a part in such a change.
I don’t think the Balto-Slavic accentuation can tell us anything in this case, unfortunately, because of Hirt’s Law (accent in B-S retracts onto a syllable with a laryngeal in the coda).
@David
“To explain the correspondence between IIr *i to non-IIr *a, which is regular for *h₂.”
There’s no such thing as Indo-Iranian vs. non-Indo-Iranian. It’s not like Anatolian vs. non-Anatolian, which is a phylogenetic distinction. So, basically what you are saying is that we are trying to explain a “correspondence” between PIE and Indo-Iranian, which means a > i.
“Also, the “mother” word has a Balto-Slavic “acute” on its first syllable. Do you know what that is?”
Yes, I know that it’s interpreted as another sighting of a laryngeal. I just don’t see it in vivo. Maybe it’s a yeti. 🙂
Do you know why it’s interpreted as a sighting of a laryngeal?
…I can now answer my own question about the Oscan “daughter” word: Byrd’s thesis (p. 40) says the long vowel is spelled double, fuutreí (dative singular), and confirms that the regular outcome of *-kt- is -ht- in Oscan, not -t- with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. I can only guess that we’re looking at a dialect which happened to have such an innovation.
@David
According to Kortlandt, when a laryngeal or a glottal stop come in touch with a vowel, acute accent arises. But it’s not the only interpretation of the origin of the acute accent in Balto-Slavic.
For Coos language issues, there’s the wonderful Shichils’ Blog, by a very persistent philologist, who is Coos herself. She also publishes the equally wonderful Notes on ethnobotany in western Oregon.
Guiilaume Jacques recently wrote in his blog about the sorry state of Siuslaw documentation. The bulk of the texts in the language were produced in Chinook Jargon, translated into English, edited, then retranslated into Siuslaw by a non-native speaker.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming not-IE Penutian guest blog in which to continue this.
From what I’ve read, the accute accent comes from:
1) laryngeals;
2) Winter’s law (for Kortlandt, as a glottalist, that’s the same thing as 1));
3) long vowels that arose on the way to Proto-Balto-Slavic as a product of new or extended morphological processes.
2) and 3) aren’t options for the “mother” word.
On the “father’s brother” word, see footnote 48 (on pages 52 and 53) of Byrd’s thesis.
@David
“2) and 3) aren’t options for the “mother” word.”
Why can’t it be a vrddhi-derivative of *mater?
“On the “father’s brother” word, see footnote 48 (on pages 52 and 53) of Byrd’s thesis.”
Yes, I saw it. I just don’t buy Kortlandt’s arguments, which Byrd endorses, against Slav *stryji ‘father’s brother’, *pa-stroku ‘stepfather’ being essentially the same forms as Skrt pitrvya, Gk patro:os, Lat patruus, OHG fatureo, etc. There’s clearly something we don’t understand about how these forms came about (pt ~ st is also in ORuss nestera ‘niece’), but simply re-assigning Slav *stryji to an isolated Balto-Slavic isogloss (poorly attested Lith stru:jus ‘grandfather, old man’, strujus ‘uncle’) is an empty gesture.
And what would that be? What reflexes of “*mater” are attested anywhere, and why would that word need a derivative?
There’s also, as the footnote says and I think you have mentioned before, Younger Avestan tūriia- “father’s brother”. Take that, add an s mobile, and you’ve got the Balto-Slavic form, right?
And Byrd doesn’t say that’s completely separate from the “father” word. Quite the opposite. Apparently you haven’t read the most important part of the footnote, so I’ll quote it here:
“Note, however, that there is no trace of *p in YAv. tūriia- ‘father’s brother’; this suggests that the form should be derived directly from *(p)tr̥u̯i̯o- (cf.Hoffmann & Forssman 2004:94), with the expected simplification of a bipartite obstruent onset before a syllabic resonant (*#PPR̥ > *#PR̥; see Schindler 1977b:31f.). Perhaps *h₂ was deleted by rule (26), producing a legal onset *pt-, which was subsequentally reduced by the rule *#TTR̥ > *#TR̥: *ph₂tr̥u̯i̯o- > *ptr̥u̯i̯o- > *tr̥u̯i̯o- > tūriia- (cf. Mayrhofer 1986:138^172). I am indebted to Marek Majer for references and helpful discussion on the Slavic material.”
Rule (26) is also on p. 52. It is simply:
“Conditions for PIE Laryngeal Cluster Repair:
Delete a laryngeal in a bad cluster if the result would produce a legal consonant sequence; otherwise, insert a schwa.”
The rest of the thesis tries to define “bad cluster” and “legal consonant sequence”. 🙂 The “schwa” is Piotr’s *°.
@David
“And what would that be? What reflexes of “*mater” are attested anywhere, and why would that word need a derivative?”
The pre-vrddhi form could have been *ma- or *mater. The former is attested everywhere and the latter in Tocharian. You may assume that ‘mother’ is a semantic universal but anthropologists have described many different ways of coding for ‘mother-like’ figures. Above I quote a myriad of IE forms with very different meanings that may point to a concept that predated ‘mother’. The standardized affix -ter found across so many kinship terms suggests that there was a systemic change across this class of nouns, and that a different one used to be in place before. PIE *mater could have meant ‘grandmother, mother, older female relative, mother’s sister, etc.’ and then *ma:ter was a vrddhi derivative meaning ‘mother’ only.
“There’s also, as the footnote says and I think you have mentioned before, Younger Avestan tūriia- “father’s brother”. Take that, add an s mobile, and you’ve got the Balto-Slavic form, right?”
S-mobile is an IE phenomenon, not Slavic, so you wouldn’t find only Slavic forms with an s-mobile.
“And Byrd doesn’t say that’s completely separate from the “father” word. Quite the opposite.”
He’s talking about Avest tu:riia, not Slav *stryji. Nobody denies that Avest tu:riia is related to *pH2ter, but Slav *stryji is a controversial cognate of *pH2ter. Byrd’s point is that tu:riia must be a late formation because it doesn’t come from *pH2ter, but already from post-laryngeal *ptar. But the fact that, as he says, there’s no trace of p- in this word may suggest that it was something else but p- there. For comparison there’s an exact parallel in Slavic where Sorbian tryk ‘father’s brother’ comes from *stryk and not from *ptryk. Dziebel suggests that Avest tu:riia comes from *teturiia or *tituriia, a common protoform behind the aberrant Slav *stryji, Arm yawray and Avest tu:riia.
It’s way too late for me to get into details, but you have massively misunderstood Byrd. He’s not at all talking about post-laryngeal stages, but about the synchronic state of morphophonological alternations in actual PIE.
That’s not right… that’s not even wrong.
@David
“He’s not at all talking about post-laryngeal stages, but about the synchronic state of morphophonological alternations in actual PIE.”
His writing is ambiguous in this regard. You may be right about his intentions to address PIE, but when he uses Avestan only (refuses to use Slav *stryji) and postulates Avest tu:riia from *ptruiio- (no laryngeal), I have no other option but to conclude that forms such as Skrt pitrvya, Lat patruus, Gk patro:s, etc. (discussed by Schmidt), which have the p- intact must go to an earlier *pH2ter and not represent analogical restorations of a vowel from *ptruiio-.
@David
“That’s not right… that’s not even wrong.”
Please provide examples of an s-mobile occurring exclusively in the Slavic material.
I added one more example above: “The closest parallel I could find to the intervocalic loss of -g'(H2)- in Oscan is Osc mais, maimas (= Lat maximae, Gk megas, Skrt mahi) < *magis, *magemas < *meg’H2- 'great'."
It is well known that /g/ sometimes is dropped in Italic, especially before /i/ or /j/. I was talking about your proposal that a laryngeal caused the lengthening of a stop and the cluster /ks/ instead of the expected /kt/. Do you have examples for that?
On Slavic stryj- – do we have any indication that PIE * /#pt(r)V-/ and */#pH2t(r)V-/ would give anything else but /#st(r)V-/ in Slavic?
The problem is that the pre-ablaut stage is well attested, while the post-ablaut stage is much less attested (Indo-Iranian only). There’s just nothing in Anatolian or Tocharian to even remotely suggest that *pH2ter with a consonant between p- and -t- is a real protoform that actually existed. If post-ablaut also means post-Anatolian, then why reconstruct a laryngeal in the first place?
Let’s check: 1) we don’t have either *paH2ter or *pater or paH2ter in Anatolian. We only have Palaic papa-, which is a different formation and therefore has no direct bearing on the reconstruction of this specific formation. It may (a) have nothing to do with it and just be a replacment of *pH2ter- by a baby talk word, or (b) be a reduplicated formation of a baby talk`*pa- that also was the basis of pre-ablaut *paH2ter-; in any case, Anatolian doesn’t have that specific formation and so cannot tell us anything about whether there was a vowel or a laryngeal in that specific word *p??ter-. Tocharian is compatible with /a:/, /a/, and a laryngeal between stops (> schwa indogermanicum); Germanic, Latin, Greek etc. are compatible with short /a/ and a syllabic laryngeal between stops, on the other hand, Indo-Iranian /i/ or zero is not compatible with /a/ or /a:/; if words like stryj- (with *str- from *ptr- from *pH2tr-) belong here (which I assume), they are also evidence for a laryngeal, because laryngeals do frequently drop out like this in Slavic, while PIE /*a/ doesn’t; so there’s evidence for a laryngeal, but no evidence against a laryngeal, only your unwillingness to accept one.
Presumably Vladimir doesn’t believe in *h₁ at all, since no one’s ever seen it in vivo.
@Hans
“I was talking about your proposal that a laryngeal caused the lengthening of a stop and the cluster /ks/ instead of the expected /kt/. Do you have examples for that?”
Lat maximus next to Osc maimas is an example. Lat ianitri:ces next to Gk einate:r ‘husband’s brother’s wife’ (*H1yenH2ter) shows -s- which is one step away from a complete loss of a laryngeal. The situation is very similar to Skrt especially considering that Lat pater alternates with -piter in Juppiter.
What other Latin clusters do you have in mind in which a laryngeal is reconstructible? It’s not that there are a lot of them in the first place.
“On Slavic stryj- – do we have any indication that PIE * /#pt(r)V-/ and */#pH2t(r)V-/ would give anything else but /#st(r)V-/ in Slavic?”
Slav *netiji ‘nephew’ (Lat nepo:s < *nept-) shows no -p- whatsoever.
"1) we don’t have either *paH2ter or *pater or paH2ter in Anatolian. We only have Palaic papa-, which is a different formation and therefore has no direct bearing on the reconstruction of this specific formation."
We can't just ignore it considering that we have a perfect lineup between Pal papaz, Toch pa:car, Gk pat:er, Lat pater, Goth fadar, Arm hayr, and a stable collocation Pal Tiyaz papaz ~ Skrt Dyaus pita. Plus we have another strong lineup of Lyc kbatra, Luw tuwatra, Toch tkacer/ckacer, Gk thugater – all with -a-. As I wrote above, Anatolian kinship terms tend to be monosyllabic or reduplicative, so structurally papaz is not an anomaly or a "baby word." One way or the other, there's no *pH2-ter in Anatolian. Same for *dhugH2ter. Same for megH2-. I understand the advantages of reconstructing a laryngeal there and in the case of the 'daughter' and the 'great' word there's aspiration on the neighboring consonant but there's nothing of that sort in Skrt pita. Hence, an ad hoc postulation of an epenthetic vowel between p- and -H2-.
We can keep it as one possible model but I'd look for a better one.
"but no evidence against a laryngeal, only your unwillingness to accept one."
We need positive evidence to reconstruct something, not the absence of negative evidence.
@TR
“Presumably Vladimir doesn’t believe in *h₁ at all, since no one’s ever seen it in vivo.”
That’s different. H2 is supposed to be present in Anatolian. And we have plenty of evidence for it there. H1 by definition got lost in Anatolian. It doesn’t hurt to have it in a reconstruction because it makes the system complete. It doesn’t illuminate anything either but at least there’s no contradiction between the model and the reality. In the case of *pH2ter the model is not consistent with attested reality.
So do you think English papa also comes from *ph2ter-, with an irregular failure of Grimm’s Law?
@TR
Eng papa is a French borrowing.
Maybe if you read nothing but that footnote! Read the whole thesis. I just did, it’s feasible. 🙂
What makes you think I need to do such a thing? 🙂 S-mobile isn’t something that happened at one point in PIE times; it has never died. It’s still mobile within English (consider melt and smelt, where German only has schmelzen “to melt”) and within German (admittedly, the synonyms lecken and schlecken “to lick” seem to be geographically segregated).
Among the “Luwian” “hieroglyphs”, there are two signs traditionally interpreted as a. A few years ago a paper came out that argued one of them is actually /ʔa/ and continues *h₁; I should check if it’s on academia.edu at some point.
Kloekhorst also interprets certain Hittite plene spellings this way, e.g. e-eš-zi “is” as ʔe-es-t͡si.
The lineup is not perfect. Therefore, we must actively dismiss the idea.
@David
“What makes you think I need to do such a thing? S-mobile isn’t something that happened at one point in PIE times; it has never died.”
Typically, when a root is reconstructed with an s-mobile in it, it has a broad but sporadic distribution across IE dialects. I’m not aware of any root that had an s-mobile in Slavic only. Especially a root that had previously lost p-. (A hypothetic s-mobile root would have looked like spotryji** in Slavic). Claiming that Slav *stryji has an s-mobile (and before that it had lost p-) in it is therefore a product of your imagination. An imagination nurtured in Cambrian Period reconstructions. 🙂
“The lineup is not perfect. Therefore, we must actively dismiss the idea.”
It’s not an idea, it’s a fact (here’s a useful mnemonic for you: papaz, pa:cer, hayr, pate:r, pater, fadar, athair) and a stubborn fact, to boot, that comes up in the majority of IE dialects regardless of whether you “actively dismiss” it or not.
Eng papa is a French borrowing.
OK, I’ll ask the same question a different way: do you think French papa comes from Latin pater via regular sound change?
@TR
I don’t know. We need to look up the details but yes at a first glance it should go back to PIE *pappos of sorts. One thing to keep in mind is that there are baby kinship terms such as daddy or papa. They exist in a parallel fashion to monosyllabic and/or reduplicated kinship terms that function as a “normal”, adult kinship term to designate a category of relative. The two registers interact and one can draw on the other but they are distinct. Pal papaz is such a standard term for father (not a form that exists only in baby speech or among adults talking to kids), so I wouldn’t expect it to deviate from sound laws. Consider Goth aithei ‘mother’ that underwent a Grimm’s Law change *t > th, while still being a papaz-like kinship term.
papaz, pa:cer, hayr, pate:r, pater, fadar, athair
It does look like there’s an odd man out in this lineup… but come to think of it, the solution is obvious: a labiovelar! Something like *pekw- would obviously account for all the forms. While we’re at it, we might as well reconstruct *kwekw-.
Pal papaz is such a standard term for father (not a form that exists only in baby speech or among adults talking to kids), so I wouldn’t expect it to deviate from sound laws
So you think it comes regularly from PIE *ph2ter-, or if you prefer, *pter-?
And how on earth do you know that “Pal papaz is such a standard term for father”, and that there’s no other Palaic word for “father”, when there exist a total of four Palaic texts?
We need to look up the details but yes at a first glance it should go back to PIE *pappos of sorts.
Well, if you believe that, there’s your solution: Palaic papaz must go back to the same PIE *pappos. Ergo, it can tell us nothing about the form of the *ph2ter- word.
[edited to combine several comments into one]
And how on earth do you know that “Pal papaz is such a standard term for father”, and that there’s no other Palaic word for “father”, when there exist a total of four Palaic texts?
Why, it must be so! It could not in reason be otherwise, as Edith Wharton says about house-architecture.
@TR
“And how on earth do you know that “Pal papaz is such a standard term for father”, and that there’s no other Palaic word for “father”, when there exist a total of four Palaic texts?”
It’s very simple. A. Pal papaz participates in the same stable phrase “Tiyaz papaz” as Gk pate:r (Zeus pater) and Skrt pita (Dyaus pita). B. Standard Anatolian kinship terms tend to be of the same shape as papaz (E.g., Hitt huhhas, hanna, atta, nana, etc.)
“While we’re at it, we might as well reconstruct *kwekw-.”
PIE *kwe-, *akwe-, *kweH2ter would all be possibilities (see further details above).
“Palaic papaz must go back to the same PIE *pappos. Ergo, it can tell us nothing about the form of the *ph2ter- word.”
Those are related forms, so yes it can tell us quite a bit about it. IE *pH2ter or *paH2ter emerged outside of Anatolian as a secondary formation off of the more basic *pa- attested in Pal papaz. It’s sort of like Lat avunculus or OIr amnair ‘mother’s brother’ emerging from more basic avus ‘grandfather’ that corresponds to Hitt huhhas ‘same’.
What we need is an Anatolian formation demonstrating the reality of a laryngeal-carrying cluster as proposed in such reconstructions as PIE *pH2ter, *dhugH2ter and *megH2-. So far nothing of that sort has been forthcoming. So, let’s think again.
@TR
Re: laryngeal-carrying clusters in Latin. There are two very similar cases: 1) Lat. glīs, Gk galee ‘weasel’, Skt. girikā ‘mouse’ (< *gH2l-); 2) Lat glo:s, Gk galoo:s 'sister-in-law'. In both cases, Latin loses the laryngeal but lengthening the consonant in this position would likely not change the ultimate outcome. But it's interesting that g- is not lost here, as one may expect by looking at the way Latin treats plain voiced stops before a resonant (natus < *gnatos). So, gH2- is treated just like *gh- (comp. glaber < *ghladh-). It's possible that this is because gH- and gH2- are perceived as geminated -gg- before R, so one is lost just like plan g- would, but the other one remains.
Vladimir, I think your last comment was addressed to David, not me.
IE *pH2ter or *paH2ter emerged outside of Anatolian as a secondary formation
So you do believe in *ph2ter, you just think it’s post-Anatolian? If so, that certainly seems possible (though not provable). I don’t know what it would prove if it’s true, but I admit I’ve lost track of the argument.
Vladimir, you’re making ridiculous statements again. You’re wrong to expect gl- > l- in Latin. Gn- > n- is a completely different sound change that is conditioned specifically by a following nasal /n/, not just any “resonant.” Just using Wikipedia, it seems that glacies comes from PIE *gel-, glans comes from PIE *gʷelh₂-, gluo comes from PIE *glew-/*gley-, glubo comes from *glewbʰ-. There are parallel examples with gr-, like gravis < *gʷréh₂us and granum < *ǵr̥h₂nóm.
We need positive evidence to reconstruct something, not the absence of negative evidence.
/i/ in /pitar-/ vs. /a/ elsewhere is all the evidence we need. I also find Kloekhorst’s explanation of kbatra etc. more convincing than what I’ve seen from Dziebel and / or you. I don’t think continuing this specific discussion will change either your or my opinion.
I wrote:
“On Slavic stryj- – do we have any indication that PIE * /#pt(r)V-/ and */#pH2t(r)V-/ would give anything else but /#st(r)V-/ in Slavic?”
Vladimir wrote;
Slav *netiji ‘nephew’ (Lat nepo:s < *nept-) shows no -p- whatsoever.
That’s correct. But the cluster is not in word-initial position here. On the other hand, we have nestera which seems to belong here as well. Vasmer endorses a reconstruction *nept-tera to explain the /s/. So we have the following options:
(1) PIE *-p(H)t(r)V- > *-pst(r)V- as a general rule. In that case, *netiji has to be explained.
(2) The rule works only in word-initial position. In that case, nestera needs to be explained, perhaps by a derivation with -ter-, as quoted by Vasmer.
(3) The rule may be triggered by additional conditions (accent, position of the word in the sentence, etc.) so that both /-t-/ and /-st-/ are possible outcomes. In that case, these conditions need to be investigated.
(4) There is no such rule, -pt(r)V- always results in Slavic -t(r)V- and then either (4 a)stryj- is not related to the “father” word or (4b) you need an s-mobile to link them.
I’m currently favouring (3), especially as there are cases of labial + /t/ resulting in /st/ word-internally, as in gre(s)ti “row, rake, scrape, dig”, stem greb-, where the Slavic languages have reflexes both with and without /s/ in the infinitive.
(Of course, there are more possibilities, like Dziebel’s shape-shifting labiovelars – have fun inserting them wherever you like.)
@TR
“So you do believe in *ph2ter, you just think it’s post-Anatolian? If so, that certainly seems possible (though not provable). I don’t know what it would prove if it’s true, but I admit I’ve lost track of the argument.”
I think the data points to a scenario whereby PIE *paH2ter (*pa + *H2ter) yielded *pH2ter in Indo-Iranian and *pater elsewhere.
@Eli Nelson
“Just using Wikipedia, it seems that glacies comes from PIE *gel-, glans comes from PIE *gʷelh₂-, gluo comes from PIE *glew-/*gley-, glubo comes from *glewbʰ-. There are parallel examples with gr-, like gravis < *gʷréh₂us and granum gr-, but you are right – others don’t. This has little bearing on the overall argument but thanks for pulling them up.
@Hans
” also find Kloekhorst’s explanation of kbatra etc. more convincing”
It’s not about being convincing, it’s about synching the data with the model. In this regard Dziebel’s interpretation whereby kbatra comes from *gwatra is better than Kloekhorst’s, although similar to it in postulating *-we- where we have -u- in other forms for ‘daughter’.
“Of course, there are more possibilities, like Dziebel’s shape-shifting labiovelars – have fun inserting them wherever you like.”
Even Dziebel’s wildest ideas seem to be healthier than your list of mechanical, ad hoc, unattested and unfalsifiable changes that hundreds of people have failed to prove over the course of 200 years.
I think the data points to a scenario whereby PIE *paH2ter (*pa + *H2ter) yielded *pH2ter in Indo-Iranian and *pater elsewhere.
With irregular loss of a in one case, and of the laryngeal in the other? Why on earth not just reconstruct *pH2ter- to start with and have done with it?
In any case, even supposing you were right, what would that tell us about anything else? I have the feeling you think there’s something more at stake here than the exact proto-form of the “father” word, but I don’t know what it is.
@TR
“With irregular loss of a in one case, and of the laryngeal in the other?”
Not necessarily. PIE *meH2ter > Gk me:ter, Skrt ma:tar. PIE *paH2ter (pa + H2ter) > Gk pate:r, Skrt pita:.
“Why on earth not just reconstruct *pH2ter- to start with and have done with it?”
Because it’s not attested anywhere. We have to accommodate the -a- that’s attested in virtually every branch.
“In any case, even supposing you were right, what would that tell us about anything else? I have the feeling you think there’s something more at stake here than the exact proto-form of the “father” word, but I don’t know what it is.”
It secures the back vowel after p- and makes Dziebel’s proposal to derive both te- forms and pa-forms from *kwe-(under the principle “dental reflex before a front vowel vs. labial reflex before a back vowel”) consistent with the data at hand.
Oh, it’s another labiovelar thing… That’s what I suspected.
You say “PIE *meH2ter > Gk me:ter, Skrt ma:tar. PIE *paH2ter (pa + H2ter) > Gk pate:r, Skrt pita:” as if the sound changes are the same and prove your point, when actually they’re different and disprove it. It’s like we’re living in different logical universes.
@TR
“Oh, it’s another labiovelar thing… That’s what I suspected.”
That’s how the conversation about *pH2ter started above. Someone said that there’s no back vowel after p- in the current reconstruction, while I tried to show that there should be one.
“as if the sound changes are the same and prove your point, when actually they’re different and disprove it. It’s like we’re living in different logical universes.”
I’m not following you here. Could you rephrase?
In the “mother” word, you have PIE *eh2 (phonetically [ah2]) > Gk./Skt./etc. a:. In your reconstruction of the “father” word, we would have PIE *ah2 > Gk. a, Skt. i. When I pointed out that your “father” changes would be irregular, you responded by comparing them to the “mother” change, as if they were parallel rather than completely different. (Not to mention that it’s far from clear that PIE even had a phoneme /a/, as you’re assuming.)
In any case, even if I somehow came to agree with you about the “father” word (this would require independent evidence that PIE *ah2 gave Gk. a and Skt. i, which doesn’t exist), I’d still think the labiovelar stuff was ridiculous, so maybe there’s not much profit in discussing “father” further.
@TR
“(Not to mention that it’s far from clear that PIE even had a phoneme /a/, as you’re assuming.)”
I’m not assuming it, I know it was taken off the plate by the laryngeal theory. I’m just going with the evidence and trying to fit it into the laryngeal paradigm.
” (this would require independent evidence that PIE *ah2 gave Gk. a and Skt. i, which doesn’t exist), ”
What kind of independent evidence do you have in mind? It either all shifted to a in Greek and i in Skrt, or phonetic laws admit exceptions.
“I’d still think the labiovelar stuff was ridiculous”
I probably just don’t have your sixth sense about what makes sense to reconstruct and what doesn’t.
What kind of independent evidence do you have in mind?
Show me another word where PIE *ah2 (assuming /a/ even existed) gave Greek a, Sanskrit i. There is no such word, and what we would expect is a: in both languages (given that this was the outcome of */eh2/ [ah2]), so your derivation from *pah2ter involves two unparalleled, unjustifiable ad hoc changes — as is usual with the *kwekw theory of PIE.
*sigh*
The idea is that ptr- was first simplified to tr- and later received an s-mobile. There could be four thousand years between those two events.
My mentions of melt and schlecken have already shown that your attestation requirement is completely ridiculous.
I thought the s was a grammatical element – there are “sigmatic aorists” and “sigmatic presents”, right? – and the b is lost by the Law of Open Syllables?
Then why does *ah₂ yield long ā in all branches, including Indo-Iranian, in all other words, notably including *máh₂tēr and *bʰráh₂tēr?
Why doesn’t “father” have the same vowel as “mother” and “brother” except in Tocharian and in Romance, following the merger of Classical Latin a and ā?
Parsimony.
It is *°h₂, without a phonemic vowel, that is continued by short i in Indo-Iranian and short a elsewhere.
It wasn’t completely taken off the table, actually. But don’t confuse phonemic with morphophonemic transcription. 🙂
@TR
“Show me another word where PIE *ah2 (assuming /a/ even existed) gave Greek a, Sanskrit i.”
Duh, thugater vs. duhita, mega- vs. mahi. Everybody knows them.
“*/eh2/ [ah2])”
Just keep them distinct: aH2 for ‘father’ and eH2 for ‘mother’.
“as is usual with the *kwekw theory of PIE.”
How is kweH2ter- “worse” that *pH2ter?
@David
“Then why does *ah₂ yield long ā in all branches, including Indo-Iranian, in all other words, notably including *máh₂tēr and *bʰráh₂tēr?”
See above @TR: keep *eH2 and *aH2 distinct.
“It is *°h₂, without a phonemic vowel, that is continued by short i in Indo-Iranian and short a elsewhere.”
It’s just not attested anywhere, although it should be attested in Anatolian. -a- is attested everywhere but Indo-Iranian.
@Vladimir:
It’s not “duh.” It looks like you haven’t even understood the objection David is making. As usual, your ignorance is accompanied by delusional self-confidence.
The a in thugater comes from *°h₂/*əh₂. There was NOT an “a” vowel here in PIE. Same for mega.
Words with PIE *ah₂/*eh₂ usually developed to η in Greek, like φηγός, μήτηρ, φυγή.
You’re conflating *ah₂/*eh₂ and *əh₂, and you actually expect anyone to take you seriously?
@Eli Nelson
“The a in thugater comes from *°h₂/*əh₂.”
It’s not attested anywhere. I can’t take it seriously, sorry. You are confusing interpretation with attestation. Thugater, tkacer, kbatra, tuwatra – all have -a-. There’s no dead or living IE language that has *°h₂/*əh₂. You need to start providing evidence and logic justifying a reconstruction, not just a reconstruction. Earlier, I motivated the inclusion of Pal papaz into the *pH2ter cognate set. Motivating means providing reasons for an argument. You bypass the reasons phase and keep jumping to the argument. And when I don’t buy it, you get frustrated. Just follow the proving process, and I will accept the argument.
“Words with PIE *ah₂/*eh₂ usually developed to η in Greek, like φηγός, μήτηρ, φυγή.”
Well, it means you have to reconstruct something else for pater vs. me:ter. I propose paH2ter for pate:r and meH2ter for me:te:r. You think it’s *pH2ter vs. *meH2ter. But -a- is attested in ‘father’ words across the board (including Pal papaz, a language that should have preserved -H2-), hence you can’t throw out of the equation. Even if you have a beautiful model in mind.
” delusional self-confidence.”
Listen, I don’t have any self-confidence. I’m an amateur with a lot of curiosity for Indo-European linguistics. I just follow the evidence and I don’t buy “insider baseball” arguments you and other put in front of me. They just don’t sit well with my common sense.
As I said, different logical universes. It’s hopeless.
@Vladimir: What? You think the laryngeal is suspect, so instead of *pH2ter you’re reconstructing it as *paH2ter? That still has a laryngeal. I don’t understand your thought process here at all. No need to be sorry, by the way–the fact that you “can’t take it seriously” has no importance whatsoever to anyone but you.
You can’t “just follow the evidence.” All science is theoretical. Your overconfidence is shown by the fact that you, a self-proclaimed amateur, think you’re capable of interpreting and understanding the evidence better than experts and professionals in the field.
@Eli Nelson
“You think the laryngeal is suspect, so instead of *pH2ter you’re reconstructing it as *paH2ter? That still has a laryngeal.”
Yeah, you can call me out for “hedging”. I’m not anti-laryngealist. But at least I’m acknowledging the attested radical -a- in my reconstruction. And I treat -H2- as part of the affix *-H2ter, not part of an unattested root.
“think you’re capable of interpreting and understanding the evidence better than experts and professionals in the field.”
No, but I do believe that experts in the field should be able to spell it out to a skeptical amateur and convince this amateur. We are all rational beings. I don’t believe in “spirits of words” or “extraterrestrial intelligence.” And if they can’t it means they haven’t figured it out yet. This is very natural and there’s no need to hide it behind artificial models. Imagine I would engineer a car that only I and my team will be able to drive. This kind of car wouldn’t last a hour in the real world.
“All science is theoretical.”
What about a theory of semantics then? Where is it? People have been claiming that it’s impossible.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
Are you aware why Saussure predicted the existence of *h₂ in the first place?
Are you saying sounds can never be lost? Are you saying that, by some miracle, every sound (and sound sequence!) of a language must be preserved in at least one of its descendants?
The reason you don’t buy insider-baseball arguments is because you hardly have any idea of baseball, but you believe you understand it very well. You confuse your common sense, our preferences, with objective logic.
Exactly as I said: Dunning, Kruger.
Oh, I agree. Trouble is, you’ve overlooked one little thing:
You want us to give you a complete course in historical linguistics. You seem to believe that could be done in two, three blog comments. In reality, it would take much longer because so much is already known.
You make the same mistake I’ve seen so many creationists make over the years: they assume that any knowledge they don’t have doesn’t exist. They can’t imagine that there might be more out there to learn.
You don’t necessarily need to sit down in a university and get a degree to talk with the professionals. I haven’t done that; I’ve merely spent a few years reading on (mostly) the Internet in spare or borrowed time. Yet, I still overlook fairly elementary things on occasion, as demonstrated several times in this thread; this goes both ways, in that I overlook both my own mistakes and those of other people.
“All science is theoretical.”
What about a theory of semantics then? Where is it? People have been claiming that it’s impossible.
This doesn’t follow.
@ Vladimir:
One last attempt to explain the principle.
There are words that show the following correspondences:
1) Greek /e:/ in Ionic-Attic, /a:/ in dialects like Doric; Latin /a:/, Indo-Iranian /a:/, Celtic /a:/, Tocharian /a:/, Germanic /o:/, Baltic /o:/, Slavic /a/, Hittite /ah/
2) Greek /a/, Latin /a/, Indo-Iranian /a/, Celtic /a/, Tocharian /a:/, Germanic /a/, Baltic /a/, Slavic /o/, Hittite /a/
3) Greek /a/, Latin /a/, Indo-Iranian /i/ (or Zero), Celtic /a/, Tocharian /a:/, Germanic /a/, Baltic /o/ (or Zero), Slavic /o/ (or Zero), Hittite Zero.
These correspondences don’t only show up in the discussed words denoting relatives, but in many others. As I don’t have the space here, please refer to the standard handbooks for examples of these correspondences.
Crucially, IE reconstruction assumes that for each of this correspondences, a separate phoneme must have existed in pre-split PIE, as the different outcomes cannot be explained by conditioning factors. Let’s call these phonemes X, Y, and Z. If you don’t accept this general principle – different correspondences imply different phonemes in the Proto-Language, except if you can identify conditioning factors that may have caused the differences post-split -, then any further dialogue is useless. A further corollary of this – even if there is suspicion that there may have been a conditioned change, but the conditions cannot be identified, separate phonemes are identified until the conditions can be identified (e.g. some IEanists assume that instead of the three series palatal. velar, and labiovelar there were only two which then split into three depending on neighbouring vowels / resonants etc.; until they can name these conditions and show them on all of the material, we need to assume three series in pre-split PIE.)
Now, X,Y, and Z have a history of reconstruction. In the Classical (“Brugmannian”) model, X was reconstructed as /a:/, Y as /a/, and Z as /ə/ (the so-called schwa indogermanicum). Under the current model, the reconstructions are */eH2/ and */aH2/ (the possibility of */aH2/ existing besides */eH2/ is only assumed by a minority of IEanists), both becoming */aH2/ in pre-split PIE and giving a long vowel /a:/ or its continuants in non-Anatolian IE.
Y is now mostly reconstructed as */H2e/, pre-split PIE */H2a/, but quite a few IEanists assume that there was also a PIE /a/ that didn’t result from laryngeal colouring.
Z is now mostly reconstructed as the result of a larngeal standing between two stops. Unfortunately, the laryngeal becomes Zero (i.e. vanishes) in Anatolian in this position, but its existence can be inferred from other forms of roots which shows the laryngeal. In Indo-Iranian, the laryngeal also sometimes (not always!) leads to apiration on a preceding stop.
Now, if you want, you can try to say that phoneme Z that represents correspondence No. 3):
A) was never a laryngeal, but always /a/; in that case you have to explain a) why this /a/ became /i/ or Zero in Indo-Iranian, Zero in Anatolian, b) why this phoneme sometimes resulted in aspiration in Indo-Iranian, c) the fact that this phoneme shows up in the Zero grade of roots with a laryngeal, and (d) what then was phoneme Y, which is represented by /a/ (or its continuants) in all branches, including Indo-Iranian and Anatolian (or, alternatively, if you say both were /a/, you need to explain what were the conditioning factors that led to the non-/a/ outcomes in Indo-Iranian, Slavic (partially) and Anatolian).
B) Was only a laryngeal when it results in aspiration in Indo-Iranian (and perhaps when other forms of the root can be shown to have had a laryngeal), otherwise /a/ (This seems to be your position, or did I misunderstand you here?). In that case, questions (a) and (d) still remain; plus you need to explain your reasons to reconstruct two different phonemes for correspondence 3).
Plus, you need to show these things not just on the couple of words that we’ve been discussing here, but on all the relevant material. i.e. on all words that show the correspondences Y and Z. The same holds true for the Dziebelian labiovelars – it’s not sufficient to say “These words have related meanings and we can derive them from each other if we postulate labiovelars that can become several kinds of other stops”; it is necessary to show under what conditions a labiovelar becomes each of the possible stops in each of the daughter languages, on all the material.
Without this, we’ll be simply discussing these matters in totally different frames of reference, and that’s not a fruitful approach.
@Hans
Thanks! As always, very informative and thoughtful.
“If you don’t accept this general principle – different correspondences imply different phonemes in the Proto-Language, except if you can identify conditioning factors that may have caused the differences post-split -, then any further dialogue is useless.”
I fully accept it.
“A further corollary of this – even if there is suspicion that there may have been a conditioned change, but the conditions cannot be identified, separate phonemes are identified until the conditions can be identified.”
Yes, I accept it. But my principle is more stringent than this. If you don’t have enough evidential basis to reconstruct a new PIE phoneme, you should keep the correspondence between attested sounds without providing a reconstruction. IE *pH2ter, *megH2- and *dhugH2ter are good examples: there’s no evidence for H2 behind IE *a/Skrt i anywhere, including Anatolian. Judging by the distribution across the currently assumed phylogeny (Palaic, Tocharian attest for /a/), it was PIE *a > PInIr *i but we can write IE *a ~ PInIr *i acknowledging that it hasn’t been fully figured out. There seems to be a progression from a back vowel (Gk pater) to a front vowel (Skrt pita, Lat -piter) to no vowel (Avest pta, Goth dauhtar, Arm dustr). But we can’t trump evidence with a model, which is what reconstruction *pH2ter does.
For *megH2- and *dhugH2ter we can reconstruct H2 because of -h- in Skrt (and potentially -x in Lat maximus and uxo:r) and because we are also reconstructing voiceless stop + laryngeal = voiceless aspirate for PInIr. But we can’t assume that the same laryngeal had two different effects – coloring a vowel and aspirating a consonant. So, strictly speaking, we should reconstruct *dhugH2Vter or *dhugHater (again distributionally because of tuwatra, cbatra and tkacer), or, using Dziebel’s formula (voiced aspirate = voiced stop + laryngeal), early-PIE *dugH2Vter/*dH2ugVter.
“Was only a laryngeal when it results in aspiration in Indo-Iranian (and perhaps when other forms of the root can be shown to have had a laryngeal), otherwise /a/ (This seems to be your position, or did I misunderstand you here?).”
You understood it correctly. At this point, after having given it a further thought, I would keep the vowels separate from the aspiration in Indo-Iranian, so when IIr shows aspiration – reconstruct a laryngeal, when IIr shows /i/ and the rest of the dialects show /a/ – keep the correspondence without reconstruction or provisionally postulate a > i. See above.
” it’s not sufficient to say “These words have related meanings and we can derive them from each other if we postulate labiovelars that can become several kinds of other stops”; it is necessary to show under what conditions a labiovelar becomes each of the possible stops in each of the daughter languages, on all the material”
I agree. Dziebel identifies those conditions a identical to the ones attested in Greek: a dental reflex before a front vowel, a labial reflex before a back vowel, k before u or a consonant but in some cases Greek does not follow those conditions and some alternations between labiovelar outcomes have remained unexplained but nobody doubts the validity of the cognate sets in which they occur.
@David
“You make the same mistake I’ve seen so many creationists make over the years: they assume that any knowledge they don’t have doesn’t exist.”
No, I’m aware of what I know and what I don’t know. But scientific knowledge is always public, never esoteric or clanish. And the “unknown” is as objective as objective knowledge. And people should come together to exchange knowledge with each other in a “market economy of knowledge” to chip away at the unknown instead of engaging in a “domestic production of ideas” for their own clan-members who read the same books, accept the same premises and celebrate their omniscience at a block party. By endorsing this old-fashioned economy of ideas you are effectively creating something that’s no science and no creationism. It’s some kind of paganism – appeasing the temperamental gods of Indo-European studies, worshipping the ancestors and punishing the infidels.
@Vladimir:
None of this is esoteric. It’s great that you appreciate Hans’s explanation, and it seems like a good summary to me, but as he says, the standard handbooks have plenty of examples of these correspondences. Wikipedia has a fair amount of information about the “schwa indogermanicum” and the reasons for its reconstruction. Like any other discipline, you’ll go further in historical linguistics if you actually study and understand what previous people have written rather than trying to figure everything out on your own using “common sense.” Your attitude is like someone trying to build a perpetual motion machine, who ignores it when other people object and tells him that it is against the laws of thermodynamics. The others keep on trying to teach this person basic physics knowledge, but because he’s never studied physics, won’t open a physics textbook and apparently can’t even read Wikipedia or other free online articles about basic physics concepts, he insists that they are just “worshipping the ancestors” and are too closed-minded to appreciate his revolutionary new ideas.
Also, in practice, you clearly don’t accept the principle Hans mentions, since you continue to push the idea that ” it was PIE *a > PInIr *i,” despite us having no knowledge of conditioning factors that would cause “a” to change this way. If you really can’t accept that it was a syllabic laryngeal, I’ll give you a piece of notational advice: the old-fashioned way to represent “i in Indo-Iranian and a elsewhere” is *ə. If you write “*pəter,” you’ll look at least a little less clueless than if you write “*pater, where by some inexplicable sound change the a became i in Indo-Iranian.” It’s also shorter. The symbol *ə can be treated as a cover symbol for this set of correspondences; using it doesn’t commit you to saying that [ə] was the exact phonetic value in PIE, just like you can write *g in reconstructions while believing the phonetic value of this sound was [ɢ] or [kʼ]. It’s exactly analogous to the case with the series of velars Hans mentions where even scholars who believe that PIE had fewer than three phonemic series will generally use standard notation that distinguishes *k, *ḱ, and *kʷ.
@Eli Nelson
You spend all this time on allegorizing my ignorance thus proving my point regarding “insider baseball.” And the only time you actually descend down from the skies of your superior knowledge and talk pragmatically you make 3 mistakes:
“If you really can’t accept that it was a syllabic laryngeal.”
It’s not about me accepting the model, it’s about you providing evidence for it. (Gk kata ‘hundred’ has a reflex of a syllabic nasal attested as a nasal in Lat centum – now that’s evidence). A methodological mistake.
“in practice, you clearly don’t accept the principle Hans mentions, since you continue to push the idea that ” it was PIE *a > PInIr *i,”
I explained why I admitted such a development, while acknowledging that it’s not a proven one. A mistake of misconstruing an opponent’s thought.
“If you write “*pəter,”
I never liked it because it’s an easy way out. Just like reconstructing a new phoneme /th/ to explain thorn clusters. But it’s also less pretentious than reconstructing *pH2ter. So, if you write “*pəter,” you’ll look at least a little less pretentious than if you write “*pH2ter, where by some inexplicable sound change an unattested syllabic laryngeal gave /a/ everywhere but Indo-Iranian and disappeared without a trace from where it’s supposed to be attested, namely Hittite. A mistake of rising above the evidence and generating “Platonic” reconstructions.
Dziebel identifies those conditions a identical to the ones attested in Greek: a dental reflex before a front vowel, a labial reflex before a back vowel, k before u or a consonant but in some cases Greek does not follow those conditions and some alternations between labiovelar outcomes have remained unexplained but nobody doubts the validity of the cognate sets in which they occur.
Does he have a comprehensive list of the material somewhere, where he shows how the rules apply?
@Hans
All that I’m aware of is this long post: http://kinshipstudies.org/2014/07/23/indo-european-labiovelars-a-new-look/.
I don’t thing every example he cites delivers on the vowel-conditioned regularity we are looking for, bur according to the intro, he’s trying to find this Greek-dictated regularity in a broader IE material.
All that I’m aware of is this long post: http://kinshipstudies.org/2014/07/23/indo-european-labiovelars-a-new-look/.
I don’t thing every example he cites delivers on the vowel-conditioned regularity we are looking for, bur according to the intro, he’s trying to find this Greek-dictated regularity in a broader IE material.
I don’t see him saying anywhere in that post under what exact circumstances the labiovelar takes what form in which language. He just throws together forms that in his view belong together, without stating the rules. See e.g. his collection on *kwel- / *pel- (item No. 6), where the reflex is sometimes a labiovelar, sometimes a labial in the same language under the same conditions (e.g. Lithuanian kel- vs. pel-.) He says that the results were conditioned, but doesn’t show it. As long as he just presents collections of material like this, without naming the rules and showing how they work, on all cases where he reconstructs a labiovelar, he can basically declare as related any etyma that contain a stop of the same class; the only stops he seems to keep separate as far as I can see are (voiceless) vs. (voiced + voiced aspirates).
Now, if he’d argue that the conditioned developments of the labiovelars had happened at such an early stage of PIE that they all had been obscured by paradigmatic levelling and by re-distribution to different meanings (which would work for, say, *kwel- “revolve” vs. *pel- “ashes”), this would be at least an interesting speculation, although hardly provable. But as he clearly seems to assume that the labiovelar was still there in pre-split PIE and turned into other kinds of stops only in the individual branches or even languages, he ought to be able to show the rules, not just on the examples in the blog, but on all cases where the individual languages show labiovelars, labials, dentals, and velars.
(And yes, I understand that this cannot be done in one blog entry, but if he wants to be taken seriously, this work is a necessary first step. Whatever one may think about Jouha Pyysalo’s model of PIE, he at least did that part of his homework. A corollary of this – even if Dziebel does this work, people may still rejet his model, but at least there would be a clear basis for both assertion and rejection.)
@Hans
“Now, if he’d argue that the conditioned developments of the labiovelars had happened at such an early stage of PIE that they all had been obscured by paradigmatic levelling and by re-distribution to different meanings (which would work for, say, *kwel- “revolve” vs. *pel- “ashes”), this would be at least an interesting speculation, although hardly provable. But as he clearly seems to assume that the labiovelar was still there in pre-split PIE and turned into other kinds of stops only in the individual branches or even languages”
I was under the impression that he dates a laryngeal split for pre-proto-Indo-European (early Indo-European), so paradigmatic vowel leveling and the emergence of voiced aspirates from voiced stops+laryngeal happened after that (e.g., Germ *bhardeh2- from *gwer- without aspiration. Then different languages either retained or lost various dental, velar or labial forms. So, in the case of the ‘father’ word, Anatolian, Balto-Slavic and Germanic have largely retained te-, ate- forms, while the rest mostly pa-, apa- forms. I don’t remember where I got this impression though. I now can see that he is not stating it anywhere. Maybe it’s just the way I interpreted the data he pulls myself.
Erratum: “he dates a laryngeal split.” > “he dates a labiovelar split.”
Just so much tonight:
I don’t think anybody thinks there was a phonemic contrast between */eh₂/ and */ah₂/; if a phoneme */a/ existed, the contrast to */e/ was neutralized next to */h₂/. This is what Piotr thinks, and why he consistently writes *ah₂ and *h₂a where most others write *-e-.
But that’s a separate question from whether a distinction of *|eh₂| and *|ah₂| existed on the morphophonemic level, provided that a phoneme */a/ existed in other environments. (If Piotr is right, they might be distinguished by ablaut: *|a| participates in *|aː| ~ *|a|, *|e| participates in either *|eː| ~ *|e| or *|e| ~ *0. Importantly – Eichner’s law –, *|eː| is not colored by *|h₂|, so both ablaut series with *|e| in them should stay distinct from the one with *|a| in it.)
Unfortunately, historical linguists hardly ever try to distinguish between phonetic, phonemic and morphophonemic transcriptions.
I don’t think anybody thinks there was a phonemic contrast between */eh₂/ and */ah₂/; if a phoneme */a/ existed, the contrast to */e/ was neutralized next to */h₂/. This is what Piotr thinks, and why he consistently writes *ah₂ and *h₂a where most others write *-e-.
Maybe I wasn’t clear here – I was talking about a status before the colouring effect and even pre-ablaut; you see that I also assume merger to *aH2 for pre-split IE. That of course presupposes the existence of a separate phoneme /a/ before the working of ablaut. I’m not sold on that, but I’m also not excluding it.
I was under the impression that he dates a laryngeal split for pre-proto-Indo-European (early Indo-European), so paradigmatic vowel leveling and the emergence of voiced aspirates from voiced stops+laryngeal happened after that (e.g., Germ *bhardeh2- from *gwer- without aspiration. Then different languages either retained or lost various dental, velar or labial forms. So, in the case of the ‘father’ word, Anatolian, Balto-Slavic and Germanic have largely retained te-, ate- forms, while the rest mostly pa-, apa- forms.
In that case, he would need at least to reconstruct the paradigms in order to show which forms had which outcome of the labiovelar and were the basis of its spead to other forms where the labiovelar is expected to have a different outcome (e.g. if he (say) assumes an original root *kwekw- becoming *tep/tek/tet- depending on the following endings, he needs to show that in the paradigm.) On Germ *bhardeh2- from *gwer- – does he assume that the layngeal in the suffix causes the aspiration? How does he explain the forms of the root with the same stops that are not suffixed with *-eH2-?
@Hans
“That of course presupposes the existence of a separate phoneme /a/ before the working of ablaut. I’m not sold on that, but I’m also not excluding it.”
This is not too far-fetched for me. Maybe I should just agree with you. It still makes it easier for me to take Pal a, Toch a:, Gk a, Lat a, etc. in pater as a direct reflex of your pre-ablaut stage /a/ because their wide distribution, including the most divergent branches.
“does he assume that the laryngeal in the suffix causes the aspiration?”
I remember asking him the same question in a comment – he just doesn’t clear comments. I think what he means is that *gwer/*bar- + *H2 > *gwher-/*bhar- + *deH2 > *gwherdha-/*bhardha-. Same for femur: *gweH2m- > *gwhem > *femur, *gweH2s- > *gwhes- > hostis next to *gwem- > venio.
Seems that instead of reconstructing media aspirata, he just puts in a larngeal near to a media wherever it’s convenient for him (i.e., wherever he wants to link some roots). Again, he needs to show the existence of the laryngeal by independent means – lengthening of vowels in a different ablaut grade of the root, showing up as schwa between stops, showing up in Anatolian in positions where its expected to, colouring of vowels, etc. Otherwise ist unfalsifiable and therefore useless.
Ah. In a vowel system this small, colouring is inevitable, so I have to assume it’s been there ever since the vowel system was that small.
@Hans
“Again, he needs to show the existence of the laryngeal by independent means – lengthening of vowels in a different ablaut grade of the root, showing up as schwa between stops, showing up in Anatolian in positions where its expected to, colouring of vowels, etc.”
I don’t think voiceless aspirates as combinations of voiceless stops + laryngeal in Indic have been proven this way. And we’ve already seen how laryngeal reconstructions such as *pH2ter, *dugH2ter, *megH2- and *egH2om that show up as aspirates in Indic have no correspondence in the Anatolian data.
I don’t think voiceless aspirates as combinations of voiceless stops + laryngeal in Indic have been proven this way.
They have, please look at the history of that idea. You’ll need to look at the sources behind the handbooks, the original articles and monographs, etc.; the handbooks of course only give a few examples, so you may be under the impression that this couple of examples (which also tends to be repeated in the literature) is all there is. Of course, if you start by not accepting some basic assumptions of the standard reconstruction (like the existence of a separate series of media aspirata, or the development of laryngeals to /a/, Zero, /i/ in the various branches), the proofs may not convince you – in each system, there are layers of assumptions, and if you reject more basic assumptions, proofs based on them cannot hold.
And we’ve already seen how laryngeal reconstructions such as *pH2ter, *dugH2ter, *megH2- and *egH2om that show up as aspirates in Indic have no correspondence in the Anatolian data.
Well, we’re going in circles here. The formation *p???ter- itself simply isn’t attested in Anatolian, and you cannot draw inferences from non-attested words (as I said, even if Palaic papa- is related, it’s a different formation (reduplication instead of the “relatives” suffx). In *megH2- and *egH2om, the laryngeal is in positions where it isn’t retained in the specific Hittite forms, but it leads to fortification in Hittite meki-, written me-ek-ki- (Kloekhorst § 1.4.5 f / p.99); in uk it is deleted in word-final position (§ 1.4.5 k / p.102) – the PIE reonstruction is actually *h1egH, with *-om, *-oH etc. being extensions in the individual branches. We have discussed “daughter” before and not agreed, but at least in Kloekhorst’s reconstruction of the sound-laws of Anatolian, no laryngeal is expected to be retained between stops (§ 1.4.5 j / p. 101). So the Anatolian material does not contradict the Indo-Iranian evidence; that would be only the case if there would be no laryngeal where one should show up by the sound laws valid for Anatolian, and at least for *megH2-, there is the indirect evidence of fortition.
Before we get bogged down into disccussing individual examples – that is not the point. Individual exapmples always can be explained as exceptions, ad-hoc rules can be formulated, etc. A system needs to be able to explain most of the material, not every single case. Therefore, I repeat, Dziebel needs to show that his overall system works, and how exactly it works, and to demonstrate it on all applicable material. Then a meaningful discussion can begin.
@Hans
“They have, please look at the history of that idea.”
Yes, you are right. I looked at it again. In fact Dziebel, too is trying to find support for his formula voiced stops+laryngeals=voiced aspirates by using neighboring vowels (as in Lat femur vs. Gk be:ma). I have a question for you: why do people reconstruct 1 laryngeal in *dhugH2ter and derive 2 effects from it: one on the neighboring consonant (-h- in Skrt duhita:) and one on the vowel (-i- in Skrt, -a- in Greek). Is it even possible for one ancestral phoneme to translate into two phonemes – one consonant and one vowel? I thought it contradicted one of your principles?
“Of course, if you start by not accepting some basic assumptions of the standard reconstruction (like the existence of a separate series of media aspirata, or the development of laryngeals to /a/, Zero, /i/ in the various branches), the proofs may not convince you – in each system, there are layers of assumptions, and if you reject more basic assumptions, proofs based on them cannot hold.”
Yes, that’s the root of the problem. I do read original articles but they all use assumptions, which, when piled one on the other, make the whole thing unconvincing.
” The formation *p???ter- itself simply isn’t attested in Anatolian, and you cannot draw inferences from non-attested words (as I said, even if Palaic papa- is related, it’s a different formation (reduplication instead of the “relatives” suffix).”
That’s another basic point of disagreement. And it’s a methodological one. Pal papa has to be counted among the IE father words for the reasons I identified above. Separating it creates a need for assumptions.
“there is the indirect evidence of fortition.”
Thanks. This makes sense. Interestingly, it parallels Dziebel’s reconstruction of Lat uxo:r as *ukttor < *ugH2tor with the same fortition effect caused by the laryngeal.
Is it even possible for one ancestral phoneme to translate into two phonemes – one consonant and one vowel? I thought it contradicted one of your principles?
No, there only has to be an observable rule. See Russian, among other Slavic languages, where front vowels care represented both by palatalisation on the preceding consonant; even cause the insertion of /l/ after labials, and still are also there as vowels. Piotr explained the proposed mechanism for H > (h)i somewhere up in this discussion, I don*t have the time now to look it up.
Interestingly, it parallels Dziebel’s reconstruction of Lat uxo:r as *ukttor < *ugH2tor with the same fortition effect caused by the laryngeal.
Yes, he just hasn’t shown that this fortition is a regular process in Italic or Latin – as you can see from magnus or maior, Anatolian fortition didn’t apply in Latin, and it’s also not shown to have worked in the other non-Anatolian IE languages.
And it’s a methodological one. Pal papa has to be counted among the IE father words for the reasons I identified above. Separating it creates a need for assumptions.
Formations are important. Sound laws work in certain environments and don’t work in others. Even if papa and the pH2ther group are ultimately related, their development may have parted ways hundreds of years before the split-up of PIE. Latin bonus and bene go both back to Old Latin duen-, but the vowels developed differently in different formations (adjective duenos to bonus with /o/, adverb bene with /e/, resulting later in e,g, French bon and bien. The analogy is not perfect, but it’s a bit like you’re looking at the words in French and decide that there must have been only one vowel in Latin because the words bon and bien clearly belong together – in a way you would be right, they go back to one form, but the split had already happened in Latin and the unitary form is Old Latin.
@Hans
“Formations are important. Sound laws work in certain environments and don’t work in others. Even if papa and the pH2ther group are ultimately related, their development may have parted ways hundreds of years before the split-up of PIE.”
I don’t disagree with it. But we also can’t just doctor cognate sets into the ones that we can explain phonetically leaving the rest out because they don’t fit. Plus if there’s an agreement between radical vowels (papaz, pa:cer, etc.) we shouldn’t probably attribute some of those radical vowels to the influence of a secondary affix *-H2ter just because it “explains” (without attestation to support the explanation) a different root vowel (Skrt pita:).
“Piotr explained the proposed mechanism for H > (h)i somewhere up in this discussion,”
Schwa epenthesis, you mean?
“Anatolian fortition didn’t apply in Latin,”
They may have been independent processes. Comp. also Verscharfung in Germanic: the presence of a laryngeal resulted in the gemination of semivowels with the subsequent hardening to clusters ggj, ggw, ddj, ddw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holtzmann%27s_law
“as you can see from magnus or maior,”
These forms do need to be explained (but they show different, sonoric environment) but the agreement between ux:or (dugH2-) and maximus (megH2-) seems to be strong evidence.
No. The -a- in Greek and the aspiration in Skrt are direct reflexes of the laryngeal; the -i- in Sanskrit is the Indo-Iranian epenthetic vowel, automatically inserted behind the laryngeal but not directly derived from the laryngeal itself.
Besides, Hans is of course correct that there’s no such principle.
No. Dziebel has the consonant lengthening working in the other direction – in Hittite the plosive before, not behind, the laryngeal is lengthened –, and… seriously, come on, *ktt?!? Even Finnish doesn’t have this kind of plosive cluster. Third problem: why would *tt have become /s/ when short *t did no such thing?
Absolutely – we can, and we should!
Life becomes much more interesting once we stop insisting that Latin habere “have” must be cognate with German haben “have”. Suddenly we can explain a long list of things that seemed unrelated up to then.
@Hans
Re: *pH2ter.
One approach that could furnish the much-needed attestation of a laryngeal in this form involves pairing the following forms: Hitt huhhas ‘grandfather’ as an outgroup, Toch A a:we ‘grandfather’ ~ Toch A a:p ‘father’, Toch B a:ppo ‘father’; Arm haw ‘grandfather’ ~ hayr ‘father’ (Gen. hawr); Old Irish aue ‘grandson’ ~ athir ‘father’; Old Norse afi ‘grandfather’ ~ fathir ‘father’. If we reconstruct the root as *pH2e-/*apH2e- enlarged with affixes *-wH2o- and *-ter, then we would be able to link -H2- in *pH2ter to -h- in Hitt huhhas ( h in Armenian and f > h > 0 in Celtic. In other languages, pH2 remained a cluster from which first /p/ got dropped followed by a loss/vocalization of H2 (retained in Hittite).
As a similar development, I can offer the following: Gk hepa:r (hepso ‘boil’), Lat iecur, Skrt yakrt, Slav *ikra ‘liver’ ~ IE *pekwo- ‘cook, bake’ (Lith kepu ‘bake’ > kepenos ‘liver’, Slav *pesti ‘bake’, *pesteni ‘liver’) > PIE *pH1ekw- ‘bake, cook’ > *pH1ekwr-/n- ‘liver’. The derivation of ‘liver’ from ‘bake, cook’ in Balto-Slavic is remarkable considering that it applies to both *pekw- and *kwep- root variants. In Greek, an overlooked pair hepa:r ~ hepso shows the same semantic link.
@David
“The -a- in Greek and the aspiration in Skrt are direct reflexes of the laryngeal; the -i- in Sanskrit is the Indo-Iranian epenthetic vowel, automatically inserted behind the laryngeal but not directly derived from the laryngeal itself.”
OK, this answers my question. The epenthetic vowel is a problem of course.
“Third problem: why would *tt have become /s/ when short *t did no such thing?”
Latin cluster -kt- + -t gives -x- as in plexus < *plect-tos, nexus < *nect-tos (see above).
“In Hittite the plosive before, not behind, the laryngeal is lengthened”
In Latin, too, presumably: ugH2tor > *ukktor > *ukttor > *uxor.
“Life becomes much more interesting once we stop insisting that Latin habere “have” must be cognate with German haben “have”.”
I wholeheartedly agree. But we need to take to the next level: life becomes much more interesting once we stop insisting that words that mean “have” must be cognate (only) with other words meaning “have.”
Correction: “If we reconstruct the root as *pH2e-/*apH2e- enlarged with affixes *-wH2o- and *-ter, then we would be able to link -H2- in *pH2ter to -h- in Hitt huhhas ( h in Armenian and f > h > 0 in Celtic. In other languages, pH2 remained a cluster from which first /p/ got dropped followed by a loss/vocalization of H2 (retained in Hittite)” should read: “If we reconstruct the root as *pH2e-/*apH2e- enlarged with affixes *-wH2o- and *-ter, then we would be able to link -H2- in *pH2ter to -h- in Hitt huhhas. The original cluster pH2 became a single phoneme in Germanic, Armenian and Celtic and then followed the same pathway of loss (*pH2 > Germanic f, Armenian f > h, Celtic f > h > 0). In other languages, the cluster pH2 remained a cluster but then p got lost and then H2 got lost/vocalized everywhere but Anatolian.”
Another example of a possible PIE cluster *pH2- turning into phoneme *p or losing p if remaining a cluster is PIE *peH2-s ‘protect, feed’ vs. *H2owi- ‘sheep’ : Hitt pahs- ‘protect’, hawis ‘sheep’, Arm hoviw ‘shepherd’, Gk poimen ‘shepherd’, po:u ‘flock of sheep’ ~ o(F)is ‘sheep’, Lat pa:sco ‘put to graze’ ~ ovis ‘sheep’, Old Irish oi ‘sheep’. So we would reconstruct *poH2- > *pH2owi- (Hitt pahs- but *phawis > hawis).
Yeah, and pretty soon we would be able to link everything to everything. *yawn*
Give me three other examples where a plosive is dropped before a laryngeal at the beginning of a word, and I’ll consider it.
Ah, but this doesn’t just happen behind /k/! 🙂 This is just another example of the *|t-t| = */tst/ rule. The Italo-Celtic and Germanic outcome of *tst is *ss; behind a consonant, of course, this was immediately shortened to /s/.
I’m pretty sure that would have given **ugator > **ugitor.
From the pronounceable to the unpronounceable and globally unattested? Why? For shits and giggles?
Exactly. You are the one here who insists that “father” must be cognate with other kinship terms and not possibly with anything else, and that different words meaning “father” must be cognate with each other just because they mean the same thing and are used in the same phrases.
As if *-owi- were a known suffix.
@David
“Give me three other examples where a plosive is dropped before a laryngeal at the beginning of a word, and I’ll consider it.”
I’ve already adduced 3 examples but I knew you would come for more. So I got prepared. Here you go:
IE *H3estH1- ‘bone’ (Hitt hastai, Gk osteon, Lat os (Gen ossis), Skrt asthi, Arm oskr, Slav *kosti) ~ IE *pste(H)n- ‘breast, breastbone’ (Gk ste:nion, Avest fstana, Skrt stana, Toch A passam) < *pH3estH-, or *kwH3estH-.
IE *peH2ur-/n- ‘fire’ (Hitt pahhur, Gen. pahwenas, Gk pyr, etc.) ~ *H2a-s-/t- ‘ashes, hearth’ (Hitt hassa ‘hearth’, Lat a:ra ‘fire-altar’, a:trium ‘room with a fireplace’, Czech vatra ‘fire’ < *pvatra, etc.) < *pH2es-/t-/*pH2eur-/-n-.
IE *we(s)kwer- 'evening' (Gk hesperos, Lat vesper, Lith vakaras, Slav veceru, OIr fescor), Germ. *westi 'west' ~ IE *pos-t- 'before, late, later' (Lat post 'behind, after, later, Skrt pacca 'same', Lith pastaras 'late', Slav *posdh- 'late') < *pH3oskwe-/*pH3weskwe-.
IE *yenH2ter 'husband's brother's wife' (Gk einater, Lat ianitrice:s, Skrt yatr, Lith jente, Slav *yentra, Arm niri) ~ *nepo:t 'grandson, nephew', *nepti- 'granddaughter, niece', Gk anepsios, anepsia 'cousin' < *H2enepH2ter.
**ugitor.”
Why “sure”?
“Exactly. You are the one here who insists that “father” must be cognate with other kinship terms and not possibly with anything else, and that different words meaning “father” must be cognate with each other just because they mean the same thing and are used in the same phrases.”
I’m used to your style of debating. When you get caught with a straight right, you turn around and try to use your opponent’s same right hand to punch back. 🙂 Clearly, I’m the one who’s been advocating (pace Dziebel) for semantic change as an inherent part of the cognate set composition methodology. And even now I adduced a wide range of forms meaning ‘father’, ‘father’s brother’, ‘grandfather’ to draw the right material in to be able to resolve a vexing phonetic problem. It’s good to see you’ve come around but you need to give proper credit to others for your new enlightened position.
Yeah, except you have no reason to suppose *h₃ in *psten-. The Greek form can’t belong. Also, you need to explain the *n; it’s part of the root – *psten- is not an n-stem!
What you’re showing me are three cognate sets that happen to have *st and similar meanings in common. You ignore all the rest.
…These things don’t have anything in common other than a and related meanings! You should be ashamed.
How do you get an alternation between *o and *we, and where does the final *e come from?
Another bisyllabic root built on nothing but *n. Sure, there’s a *t, but it belongs to the suffix as you correctly infer. Everything else comes and goes as needed.
Because laryngeals between consonants don’t disappear in Italo-Celtic like they do in Germanic or (except in the first syllable) Balto-Slavic. They are replaced by (originally epenthetic) vowels, which tend to end up as i in Classical Latin in unstressed or formerly unstressed positions. You just provided an example: *yenh₂ter- > ianitr-. Other exampels from this thread are genitor and plēnus.
You quote this as if I believed this was a good thing.
Have you completely missed the fact that I criticized you for this?!?
David, you don’t have to keep banging your head against this particularly obstinate wall, you know. You could always follow Piotr’s wise lead. If you enjoy it, of course, don’t let me stop you!
http://xkcd.com/386/
I know this URL by heart. 🙂
Do tell me if this thread becomes too long for the software to handle. Until then, I’m not the one who’s wrong here, so I see no reason to stop. 🙂
Trying to teach the Herodotean horse to sing isn’t wrong either.
@David
“Yeah, except you have no reason to suppose *h₃ in *psten-.”
Nothing would survive in a pst-cluster. There’s no reason for k- in Slav *kosti to be there but it is there. Note the nice match between a laryngeal in Skrt asthi and a laryngeal in Gk ste:nion.
“You ignore all the rest.”
What’s left to ponder? The lack of affixal -n- in the words for ‘bone’. You need to get used to same roots taking on different affixes.
“These things don’t have anything in common other than a and related meanings!”
I reconstructed a common root between both – *peH2-/*pH2e- ‘fire’. It took different affixes – wer-/-n- and -s-/-t-. This is quite normal. Words evolve, you know.
“How do you get an alternation between *o and *we”
H2 must have had labialized articulation.
“where does the final *e come from?”
It doesn’t have to be there. And even the labiovelar doesn’t have to there. The invariant element is *pH3wes-/*pH3os-.
“You just provided an example: *yenh₂ter- > ianitr-.”
But I also provided examples of the cluster yielding eventually -x-, so Italic shows two different developments for laryngeals (just like Armenian in hayr/haw vs. dustr and just like Greek in anepsios vs. einater < *H2enepH2t-). The question is of course why? And my answer at the moment is "I don't know" but the data is out there to interpret.
"Have you completely missed the fact that I criticized you for this?!?"
Sweet science of linguistics! David Marjanovic in the red corner just did it again! First get hit by a straight right, then clinch out of stubbornness and finally try to hit the opponent using the opponent's own right hand. Get hit with a left, clinch and use the opponent's left hand against the opponent himself. Piotr simply threw a towel 🙂
@David
Another good one for you: IE *pek’us ‘livestock’ (including horses) (Skrt pasu, Lat pecus, Umbrian pequo, Lith pecus) ~ IE *H1ek’wo- ‘horse’ (Gk ‘ippos, Skrt asva, Lat equus, Toch yakwe, etc.) < *PIE *pH1ek'u-/*pH1ek'wo-. The development is very similar to IE *yekwrt 'liver' (Gk he:par 'liver', hepso 'boil', Lat iecur, etc.) ~ IE *pekwo- 'cook, bake' (see above).
A few more, now also beyond p-:
*pHx-: > *p (if a single phoneme) or *0Hx- > *Hxe- > *0+colored adjacent vowel (if originally a cluster)
1. IE *pet- ‘fly, rush, beseech, attack, demand’: Hitt pittar ‘wing’, Lat petere ‘rush, attack, beseech’ (hence petitio– > Eng. petition, repetere ‘do again’), Gk petomai ‘fly’, piptein ‘fall’, etc. ~ H1iter- ‘again’ (Lat iterare ‘repeat’, Hitt itar ‘road’, itrari ‘messenger’ < *pH1et-.
2. IE *H2ewis ‘bird’ (Lat. avis, Gk. aetos, Skr. vis, Av. vīš, Arm. hav, Lith. višta, Ir. aoi, Welsh hwyad ‘duck’) ~ IE *paut- ‘bird’ (Slav *рutа ‘bird’, Lith putýtis ‘birdie’, pučiùtė ‘hen’, šìlо pùtinas ‘quail’, Skrt рṓtаs ‘animal cub’, Lith раũtаs ‘egg’ < PIE *pH2ew-t-. Note: Lith раũtаs ‘egg’ and Lat ovum, Gk oio:n, Slav *aje, Welsh wy ‘egg’, etc. often derived from the ‘bird’ root *H2ewis.
*tHx-: > *t (if a single phoneme) or *0Hx- > *Hxe- > *0+colored adjacent vowel (if originally a cluster)
3. IE *H2ekwеH2- ‘water’ (Lat aqua, Goth ahwo: ‘water’) ~ IE *tek(w)- ‘run, flow’ (Lith teku ‘run, flow’, Slav *teku ‘same’, Skrt takti ‘rushes’, Toch B cake ‘river’, etc.) < *tH2ekw-.
4. IE *H2ek’s- ‘axis’ (Gk akso:n, Lat axis, Skrt aksas, OHG ahsa, Slav *osi, Lith asis) ~ IE *tek’s- (Gk tekto:n ‘carpenter’, Skrt taksati ‘he fashions, he constructs’, Lat texo: ‘weave, build’, Slav *tesati, Lith tasyti ‘hew’, OHG dehsala ‘axe’) < *tH2ek’s-. Note Gk akso:n vs. tekto:n suggesting that Proto-Greek had a normal sequence *k’s- and -t- in tekto:n is a late, local innovation.
5. IE *Hukw- ‘cooking pot’ (Skrt ukha ‘cooking pot’, Lat aulla ‘pot’ (< *auksla), Goth auhns ‘oven’, Arm akut’ ‘hearth’, OHG ofan ‘oven’, OEng ofen ‘furnace’, Gk ipnos ‘oven’, Myc i-po-no ‘cooking bowl’) ~ IE *tep- (Skrt tapati ‘warms up’, Lat tepeo: ‘be warm’, Slav *teplu ‘warm’, OIrish ten (< *tepn-) ‘fire’) < *tHekw-. Vocalism here still needs work under any scenario.
For some of them I had a different solution upstring but these, I admit, work much much better.
Finally, a great one with k-:
IE *H2rtko-, *H2rkto- ‘bear’ (Hitt hartagga, Gk arktos, Skrt rksa, Lat ursus) ~ IE *k’rst-‘fur, animal hair, bristle’ (Lith siurkstus ‘crude, hard’, serys ‘bristles’, Slav *sirsti ‘fur, animal hair’, OHG hursti ‘cristas’) < *k'H2r-kst-.
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/etymology.cgi?single=1&basename=%2Fdata%2Fie%2Fgermet&text_number=+++361&root=config
The Indo-European word for 'bear' thus acquires a new, natural etymology as a well-attested taboo word meaning 'hairy one'. It also become understandable why Finnic karhu 'bear', which is thought of as an IE borrowing has k- in it. It's interesting that the 'fur' isogloss is found precisely in the geographic area of Indo-European that does not have the *H2rkto- 'bear' attested.
Wow, so many irregular correspondences. Just so much for now:
Why isn’t the *e colored?!?
Why would the laryngeal just disappear here? There is no laryngeal anywhere in *ḱers-; you can see this from the Baltic tones.
What do you mean by “if a single phoneme”?
@David
“Wow, so many irregular correspondences….Why would the laryngeal just disappear here?”
This is definitely a pattern but I wouldn’t call it irregular.
“What do you mean by “if a single phoneme”?”
My thought was that a plosive is lost in a cluster plosive + laryngeal. But when the cluster is phonemicized then, the laryngeal is lost with vowel coloring.
@David
A couple more interesting ones. One may answer your earlier question why in certain forms the laryngeal is lost without a seeming trace.
p-
1. IE *H2enH1- ‘breathe’ (Skrt aniti ‘he breathes’, Gk anemos ‘soul’, Lat animus ‘same’, Toch B a:nme ‘self, soul’, Arm holm (< *honm) 'wind' ~ IE *pneu- 'breathe' (Gk pneo: 'breathe, blow', pneuma 'breath', O Eng fne:osan 'sneeze' (http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/etymology.cgi?single=1&basename=%2Fdata%2Fie%2Fpiet&text_number=1600&root=config) < *pH2enH1-/*pH2nH1-.
bh-
2. IE *H2ener- 'man, husband' (Gk ane:r, anthropos, Arm aner 'husband's father', ayr [< *anir] 'man, husband') ~ IE *bhendh- 'relative, husband's father' (Gk pentheros 'husband's father', Skrt bandhu 'relative', Lith bendras 'companion' < *bHen(dh)r. Note affixal consistency between anthropos and pentheros. Note precise semantic match between Arm aner and Gk pentheros.
To answer your earlier question, in *bH2endh- H2 clearly merges with the preceding voiced stop to create a new phoneme *bh (phonemicization) that turns into ph in Greek and then goes to p- in the remote environment of another voiced aspirate outcome, namely -th-. The vowel stays uncolored. In Gk ane:r, on the other hand, the vowel is colored but the stop is lost – my hypothesis is it's lost because bH2 was a cluster.
It’s likely that Grimm’s Law that accounts for the surface change from *p to f in Germanic reflects the underlying phonemicization of a laryngeal, so that pH2 > ph > f. Goth fadar, therefore, reflects *pH2ater (and not pH2ter) but in general provides support for a laryngeal in this root.
Armenian p > (f) > h and Celtic p > (f) > h > 0 is the same process just taken one step further.
“It’s likely that Grimm’s Law that accounts for the surface change from *p to f in Germanic reflects the underlying phonemicization of a laryngeal, so that pH2 > ph > f.”
@Vladimir: Oh… so does this mean that Proto-Germanic *f is always from pH? Since you mention Grimm’s Law, I guess that also means that Germanic *þ comes from tH, and proto-Germanic *h comes from kH.
@Eli Nelson
“Oh… so does this mean that Proto-Germanic *f is always from pH? Since you mention Grimm’s Law, I guess that also means that Germanic *þ comes from tH, and proto-Germanic *h comes from kH.”
Your question is fair. I don’t know. I wouldn’t assume so, but I’ll keep this suggestion in mind. Judging by Goth dauhtar ‘daughter’ (dhugH2- > *dhukH2- > *duhtar) it’s not that far-fetched.
While we’re at it, here’s another one:
IE *per- ‘strike, split, push’ (Arm harkanem, OIr orgaid ‘he kills’, Lith periu, Slav *pereti, Skrt sphurati) ~ IE *H2er- ‘to plow’ (Hitt hars- ‘work land for sowing’, Toch AB a:re, Gk aroo:, Lat aro:, OIr airim ‘plow’, etc.), *H2erH3tr- ‘plow’ (Gk arothron, Lith arklas, Slav *ralo, etc.) < *pH2er-.
Interestingly, Slavic thundergod Perun (< *per-) and his son Jarilo who plowed the soil may be derived from the same root *pH2er-.
@Piotr
Have I made a compelling invitation for you to come back to this string? 🙂
Soon you’ll have two laryngeals in every root! Even though, just a few comments upthread, you complained that the one in *ph₂ter- isn’t attested as a consonant anywhere!
Maybe you should have a kookfight with Jouna Pyysalo. Or just with yourself.
@David
“Soon you’ll have two laryngeals in every root! Even though, just a few comments upthread, you complained that the one in *ph₂ter- isn’t attested as a consonant anywhere!”
You are, as usual, missing the point. The analysis I conducted provides actual evidence for a presence of a laryngeal in the ‘father’ root because Hitt huhhas ‘grandfather’ (< *phewH2o-) can now be shown to belong to the same cognate set. Without this kind of analysis the claim was unfounded.
"Maybe you should have a kookfight with Jouna Pyysalo. Or just with yourself."
You need to get used to the fact that you are not talking to kooks in this string. You are talking to people with different opinions who are tackling real problems. Sometimes these real problems are left behind by academics such as yourself for others to deal with, so that you have more freedom to advance "mainstream thinking."
You keep demonstrating that you’re a kook. If you don’t want to be one, work on that. 😐
BTW, you mean “thread”, not “string”.
@David
“You keep demonstrating that you’re a kook.”
Let’s again think rationally and analytically. A kook could be a person who can’t think using facts and logic and escapes into the realm of pure ideas where s/he is never wrong. As you can see from above, I use only facts and logic. When I’m wrong, I admit it. But the word ‘kook’ is an easy asset that even a kook can toss around freely to slap this label on anyone and anything who he doesn’t like. You may think that you can’t possibly be a kook because you are basking in the “mainstream” but may be there are two kinds of kooks: an active ones who generate ideas of their own and passive ones who latch on to others’ ideas without any concern for logic and facts and with the safety net of an omniscience illusion. Think about it!
The law I proposed above can be further illustrated by the following examples involving very familiar IE forms:
IE *H3enbh- ‘hub, navel’ (Gk omphalos, Skrt nabhi ‘hub, navel, kin’, Avest naba-nazdista ‘next of kin’, Lat umbilicus, OHG nabalo, OPruss nabis) ~ IE *gen-/*gon- ‘beget’ (Skrt janati ‘give birth’, Gk genos, Lat gigno: ‘produce’, na:scor ‘to be born’, OEng cynn ‘race, family, kin’, cenna ‘produce’, OHG kind ‘child’, Arm cnanim ‘be born, bears’ < PIE *gH3en- ‘beget’, *gH3enbho- ‘kin, navel’. This analysis makes it possible to bring Hitt ha(n)s- (PAnatol *Ha(n)so-/*Hamso-) ‘give birth, beget’, Luw hamsa ‘grandchild’, into the same set with IE *gH3en-. The semantically identical derivation of Hitt hassu- ‘king’ from *ha(n)s- and Germ. *kuningaz ‘king’ from *kun- ‘kin’ makes the connection all the more plausible. Hitt hassa-hanzassa ‘kith and kin’ or ‘child and grandchild’ (the former translation seems to be more compelling) is a full morphological parallel to Avest naba-nazdista.
IE *genu- ‘knee’ (Hitt genu, Toch kanwem, B keni, Lat genu:, Gk gonu, Skrt ja:nu, Arn cunr) ~ IE *H3noghu- ‘leg, foot, nail’ (Skrt anghri ‘leg’, nakha ‘nail’, Gk onuks ‘nail’, Lat unguis ‘nail’, Lith naga ‘hoof’, nagas ‘nail’, Slav *noga ‘leg, foot’) < PIE *gH3enu-, *gH3nogh-.
IE *genu-, *gonHdho- ‘cheek, chin, jaw’ (Toch A sanwem, Skrt hanu, Gk genus, gnathos ‘jaw’, Lat gena, Goth kinnu) ~ IE *H3ens- ‘mustache’ (Slav *(w)onsu ‘mustache’, OPruss, wanso ‘first beard’, OIr fés ‘beard’, find ‘hair’, Gk ἴονθος ‘youthful beard’ (*vi-vondho-)) < *gH3en-dh-. Note the shared morphology between Gk gnatos and ἴονθος, OIr find.
IE *budhno- ‘depth, bottom’ (Skrt budhna, Gk puthmen, Lat fundus, OEng botm) ~ IE *H1udhr-/-n- ‘udder’ (Skrt udhar, Gk outhar, Lat u:ber, Slav *vydmen) < *bH1udhro/-no-. An additional connection with IE *wodr-/*uden- ‘water, wave’ (Hitt wa:tar, Gen. wetenas, Gk hydor, Lat unda, Lith vanduo, Slav *voda) is possible if we reconstruct *H1wedH3r- on the strength of h- in Greek and long –o- in Greek and Hittite (plural wata:r). Gk outhar and hydor are especially interesting because they demonstrate asymmetrical placement of aspiration in the anlaut (hydor) vs. the second consonant (outhar) but not in two places at the same time. The semantic connection between ‘water’ and ‘milk’ in plausible in view of Skrt var ‘water, cow milk’. The morphology is shared across the board, including the nasal infix in Lat fundus and unda.
A similar pattern is seen in the following common pair:
IE *weid- ‘to see, to know’ (Arm gitem, ‘know’, Gk oida, eido:, Slav videti ‘see’, vedeti ‘know’, etc.) ~ IE *bheidh- ‘believe, trust, confide, persuade’ (Lat fides ‘trust, confidence, belief’, Gk peitho: ‘I convince, I persuade’, etc.) < *bH1(w)eidh-
The next one one is another good-looking etymology based on the same Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law:
IE *bherg’- ‘white, shining, birch tree’ (Lith bersta ‘he turns white’, berzas ‘birch tree’, Skrt bu:rjas ‘Himalayan birch’, Goth bairhts ‘shining’, OHG birihha ‘birch tree’, Slav *bereza ‘birch tree’, Alb bardh, bardhe ‘white’, Lat farnus, fraxinus ‘ash tree’) ~ IE *H2erg’- ‘white, silver’ (Hitt harki ‘white, silver’, Toch A a:rki, B a:rkwi ‘white’, Gk arguros ‘silver’, arge:s ‘white, blinding’, Arm arcat’ ‘silver’, Skrt rajata ‘silver’, arjuna ‘white, light-colored, silver-colored’, Lat argentum ‘silver’, OIr argat ‘silver’) < *bH2erg'-.
A laryngeal is clearly responsible for the emergence of a voiced aspirate here. Notably Germanic, Baltic and Slavic that doesn't have a reflex of IE *H2erg'- is rich in reflexes of IE *bhergh'-/*bH2erg'-. Albanian bardh, bardhe 'white' is an exact morphological and semantic match for Hitt harki- 'white'. In Latin, argentum and fraxinus is an interesting doublet to analyze further (comp. venio vs. femur).
A couple of good ones from the IE body parts vocabulary:
1. IE *H2erH2mo-/*H2RH2mo- ‘arm’ (Skrt i:rma ‘arm’, Avest arema ‘forearm’, Arm armukn ‘elbow’, Lat armus ‘arm, forearm, shoulder blade’, Goth arms, OEng earm ‘arm’, OPruss irmo ‘arm’, Slav *ramo ‘shoulder’) ~ IE *bher-/*bherH2- ‘carry’ (Skrt bharati ‘carries’, bharitram ‘arm, shoulder’, bhari:man ‘carrying, keeping’, bharma ‘care’, Avest bereman ‘same’, Gk phero: ‘carry’, pherma ‘fetus’, Lat fero ‘carry’, offerumentum, Arm berem ‘carry’, Goth baira ‘carry’, Slav *birati ‘take’) < *bH2er-mo-, *bH2erH2-mo.
The semantic connection is natural. Thanks to Skrt bharitram (morphologically identical to Gk pheretron, phertron 'stretcher'), there's a full semantic overlap between the 'carry' forms and the 'arm' forms. Phonology is perfect including the laryngeal in the second segment as illustrated by Avest arema and bereman. The latter is such a specific feature that it could not have been shared by accident.
2. IE *H2emso- 'shoulder' (Skrt amsa, Gk o:mos, Lat umerus) ~ IE *pemsti- (OHG fust, OEng fyst [< *fumsti), Lith kumste, Slav *pensti 'hand, fist') < *kwH2ems-/*pH2ems-.
Semantics is weaker here but the formal fit is good.
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In that case, you should actively look for cases where you’re wrong – y’know, like a scientist does. You should look for forms your hypotheses fail to explain. You have already found lots; you just haven’t noticed.
Here are a few randomly chosen examples:
How? The two forms have a grand total of one phoneme (*h₂) and a vague meaning (“male ancestor”) in common. Literally nothing else fits.
Neither *gʲenu nor *gʲh₃nu can explain the e in Hittite or Latin. And why are the “knee” words all missing any trace of *-ogʰ-? Are you postulating a whole new suffix of mysterious meaning based on one single example?
You haven’t explained the Anatolian s.
In the “navel” word we find both n and m, the latter in front of labial consonants. Such an assimilation is commonplace and expected. Therefore, along with everyone else, you reconstruct *n here. In the Anatolian word, however, we find m, n and lengthening of the following consonant, all of them in front of s; the expected assimilation here is m > n, certainly not the other way around. You reconstruct *n anyway, because you need it so you can connect this root to the “navel” word… That’s not tenable.
So where is the *w in the *bʰ forms? Why doesn’t it leave any trace there? And where does the *dʰ come from, which is clearly absent from the “see”/”know” word?
(…Actually, “know” is the stative aspect, the ‘perfect’, of “see”: “I am in a state of having seen” = “I know”. I wouldn’t list it among the meanings of the bare root.)
Why don’t the Greek words begin with a long vowel? I don’t think *h₁ in front of *w is supposed to just disappear like that on the way to Greek.
No, it’s *h₂ner- – one root, one syllable, one vowel in the full grades. This is why the a- is limited to Greek & Armenian.
(Can’t remember if the word is attested in Phrygian, but I predict a- there, too.)
What, *-os?
Actually, anthropos is cognate with nether, as in The Netherlands, and with inferus. Only the -n- is due to later confusion with aner.
Note further that these words have nothing but *n, *e and *r in common, while everything else is a mismatch. Note in particular the absence of *h₂ from pentheros; maybe you should try panthera next time.
If the kooks want to feed themselves to the panthers, I can’t do much to stop them…
Oh, on the claim that words in fixed collocations cannot be replaced easily… the paper I linked to provides an example for this happening not once, but three times, to gods and men within Greek.
First, there’s the “mortal : immortal” contrast that is shared with at least Armenian and Indo-Iranian: brotós : ámbrotos.
Then, there’s the Homeric “mortal : immortal” contrast that uses the specifically Greek root: tʰnētós : atʰánatos.
Then there’s a “lower : upper” contrast. Greek only seems to retain the “lower” form, ántʰrōpos. The “upper” form shows up in Latin: dii superi.
Homer also mixed the last two metaphors, as in atʰanátōn te tʰeō̂n kʰamaì erkʰoménōn t’antʰrṓpōn “of the immortal gods and of the humans who walk on the earth”.
@David:
“the expected assimilation here is m > n, certainly not the other way around. You reconstruct *n anyway, because you need it so you can connect this root to the “navel” word… That’s not tenable.”
Remember, Vladimir thinks sr > rː > nr > mr > br is a plausible sound change. Nay, not just plausible, but in fact obviously more likely than sr > θr > fr > vr > br, sr > θr > ðr > vr > br, or sr > zr > ðr > vr > br. I don’t think you’re going to have much success with this line of argument. I’d recommend giving up.
@David
“You should look for forms your hypotheses fail to explain.”
Start pulling them together, so I know what you consider forms that my hypothesis fails to explain. I’ve brought together a long list of very robust etymologies. Try to show forms in which my law does not work.
“The two forms have a grand total of one phoneme (*h₂) and a vague meaning (“male ancestor”) in common. Literally nothing else fits.”
You can think of other possibilities but what my hypothesis predicts is that when Hittite has h- and other languages have a- it means that in PIE there were forms with clusters consisting of a plain stop followed by laryngeal. The stop had got lost before the laryngeal got lost everywhere but Hittite. We can still observe those stops in forms in which the laryngeal merged with the consonant and didn’t color the vowel. In the light of haw ~ hayr, afi ~ fathar, aue ~ athir, *pH2e- is the likeliest onset for both ‘father’ and ‘grandfather’ terms. You again overlook the fact that a root takes different affixes, so at some point you would expect a short root with different “extensions.” The extensions *-ter and *wH2o- would account for the IE ‘father’ and ‘grandfather’ terms.
“Neither *gʲenu nor *gʲh₃nu can explain the e in Hittite or Latin. And why are the “knee” words all missing any trace of *-ogʰ-? Are you postulating a whole new suffix of mysterious meaning based on one single example?”
That’s precisely what we would expect to find in forms in which the laryngeal merged with the consonant. The vowel would retain its ancestral state. I’ll look out for more such affixes.
“You haven’t explained the Anatolian s.”
For now it’s an Anatolian-specific affix.
“In the Anatolian word, however, we find m, n and lengthening of the following consonant, all of them in front of s; the expected assimilation here is m > n, certainly not the other way around. You reconstruct *n anyway, because you need it so you can connect this root to the “navel” word… That’s not tenable.”
You exaggerate the problem. -n- is attested in hassa-hanzassa. But yes there are still things to work on.
“So where is the *w in the *bʰ forms? Why doesn’t it leave any trace there? And where does the *dʰ come from, which is clearly absent from the “see”/”know” word?”
Fair points. It’s the same pattern as with the ‘water’ word. I suspect that the laryngeal of the second segment did not aspirate the consonant but in fact colored the following vowel as in Gk oida.
“h₂ner- – one root, one syllable, one vowel in the full grades. This is why the a- is limited to Greek & Armenian.”
OK, zero grade.
“What, *-os?”
*-dhr-.
“Note further that these words have nothing but *n, *e and *r in common, while everything else is a mismatch. Note in particular the absence of *h₂ from pentheros; maybe you should try panthera next time.”
You are missing the point: H2 gave aspiration to *b, hence we have *bh- in pentheros. The vowel retained its ancestral state. In aner, on the other hand, the vowel got colored by b- dropped before a laryngeal. It’s exactly the same as in Lat fraxinus vs. argentum (see above).
“If the kooks want to feed themselves to the panthers, I can’t do much to stop them…”
Team Mainstream is losing in the playoffs. It lost its best scorer, Piotr. Woodchippers are stalled. Panthers are tamed. Its fans are getting rowdy. And they are throwing pickles at Team Underdog. But you can’t stop the game. Team Underdog’s forward scores again:
IE *H3ekw- ‘eye’ (Gk ops ‘eye, face’, ophthalmos ‘ eye’ [< *opth-], Lat oculus, Slav *oko – the etymon is widely attested but many forms are contaminated, so I'll omit them here) ~ IE *skep-/*spek'- 'look, see' (Gk skeptomai ‘observe, look carefully, consider’, skopos ‘target, purpose, aim, spy’, Lat specio ‘I look, I see’, Skrt pasyati ‘look’, spasa ‘spy’, Avest spasyeiti ‘look’, OHG speho:n ‘regard, spy’) < *sk'H3ekwo-. Hitt sakuwa 'eyes' (dissimilated from *skekuwa) supports this link. PIE *spH3ekw- is also possible. In this case Skrt pasyati with a reflex of a palatovelar can be explained as caused by a cluster velar + y. In Latin, specio the loss of -w- is expected before -y- (comp. socius < *sokwyos).
Goal!!!!
BTW, following Dziebel's lead above, PIE forms for 'wolf' (*wlkwo-) and 'dog' (*k'wen-) can now be brought together under the root *k'Hwe-l-/-n-. Dziebel passes to Diakoff – goal again! Team Mainstream is getting mauled. 🙂
@Eli Nelson
“r > rː > nr > mr > br is a plausible sound change. Nay, not just plausible, but in fact obviously more likely than sr > θr > fr > vr > br, sr > θr > ðr > vr > br, or sr > zr > ðr > vr > br.”
It is indeed a better hypothesis. It may not be correct and may end up being dismissed when an absolute better one arrives, but between the two the former is a stronger one for all the reasons I identified above.
@Eli Nelson
And to counter Piotr’s earlier point that in Avestan th > s is an attested sound change, Slav *sestra ‘sister’ vs. *swekur- ‘husband’s parent’ (see above) points to a protoform *sweskwr- (Alb vjeher). In it, it’s -t- in *sestra that corresponds to -ku- in *swekur-, with -s- getting lost through dissimilation in *swekur-. So, I don’t know if Avestan /th/ truly corresponds to *s phonetically. It may just be an example of how cluster simplification yields a false correspondence between remaining consonants. In reality, Avest /th/ corresponds to *t, as so many examples indicate, and /s/ would just be the consonant that got lost in Avestan via the stage of /h/.
So, sr > thr in Latin remains a non-starter. Literally.
@David
“You haven’t explained the Anatolian s.”
In fact I was right – it’s an affix, actually, a “directive possessive” (Melchert, Oettinger) affix *-s(s)a- (see Puhvel’s Hittite Dictionary, “H”, p. 227). Alternations such as hassatar, hansatar ‘family’ are also attested. I wonder though if Luw hamsa ‘grandson’ got its -m- from *-mbh- as in gH3enbh- > *hamm- > *ham-sa-.
@David
Note on the margins: Arm elungn ‘nail’ (< *enung-) shows the same morphology and dissimilation as OIr glun, Welsh glin, Bret glin, Gael gluin ‘knee’ (< *gnu:no < *gonu).
Here’s a riskier but another plausible etymology stemming from the same Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss.
IE *H3dont- ‘tooth’ (Sanskrit dantam, Arm atamn, Lat dentis, Gk odous, OEng tōþ, Gothic tunþus, Lithuanian dantis ‘tooth’, Slav *desna ‘gum’, etc.) ~ IE *ped-/*pod- ‘foot, under, below’ (Hitt patas, Lyc pede-, Lu pati-, Toch A peṃ, B paiyye, Sanskrit pāda, Arm otn, Gk podi, Latin pēs, Alb poshtë, Slav *peši, Lith pėda) < *pH3ed-/*pH3don-t-.
Semantically, this etymology implies that IE *H3dont- originally meant ‘lower tooth’ (in opposition to *gombho- ‘upper tooth’), hence the connection with ‘foot’. Both concepts are probably derived from *pH3ed- ‘under, below, bottom’ (comp. Slav *podu ‘bottom, foundation’, Lith рãdаs ‘sole of foot’, Latv раds ‘floor’, Skrt раdám ‘step, footprint, place’, Gk πέδον ‘soil’, Lat оррidum ‘place’, pessum ‘bottom’).
Every one that I’ve looked at, because in each of them most or all of the other phonemes don’t correspond. That was the whole point of my previous comment, in case you really didn’t notice.
Do that, and then come back – after you’ve found a reasonable number of affixes with reasonably identifiable meanings. I’ll give you a pass on “root extensions” (whose meaning, by definition, hasn’t been identified), but these consist of a single consonant added to something that is large enough to be a root on its own.
…This -a is the PIE 1st-person singular perfect ending *-/h₂a/ (*-|h₂e|). It’s not somehow limited to this word!
No. There is no evidence that we’re looking at anything other than an indivisible root with three consonants: e-grade *h₂ner-, o-grade *h₂nor-, zero-grade *h₂nr̩-. You are postulating a root **h₂n- that somehow always stays in the zero-grade no matter what happens, and an entirely new suffix **-er- – these are unnecessary, unparsimonious complications.
You seem to believe that a laryngeal can decide to either aspirate the preceding plosive or color the following vowel.
Do you know anything about vowel coloring in living languages? Coloring isn’t optional like that. When there’s a coloring consonant close enough to a vowel that can be colored, the vowel will be colored. You can’t have [χɛ] becoming [χɑ] in some cases but not in others.
In other words, I’m not missing the point; you have overlooked a point that works very much against your comparisons.
Unless this spelling just represents /sakʷa/, and the word comes from *sekʷ-, like see and socius.
Keep in mind that the signs ku and uk were used interchangeably for just the consonant [kʷ]: the variable spelling e-ku-zi ~ e-uk-zi (“drinks”) is interpreted as /ekʷt͡si/.
Everything is possible as long as you refuse to tell us the conditions under which the labiovelars developed in all these different directions!
Stop here, work them out, and then come back – or you’re simply not doing science.
That would be the only example of such a development in the entire language.
Wow… your opinion of yourself is the size of a Trump tower.
So, first, you need a way better argument for the claim that noun/verb roots were able to end in a vowel (let alone a short vowel). Then you need to explain what the laryngeal is doing in there. Then you need to explain how you want to get from **kʲwe-l- to *wl̩kʷ-o- – some bizarre metathesis which, on the way, transforms palatalization into labialization???
Obscurus per obscurium comes to mind. You’re postulating a complex of irregular developments and even an irregular starting point to explain something that doesn’t even need an explanation – outside of your/Dziebel’s “theory” of semantics ( = “but these words mean similar things, so they MUST be the same word! They just HAVE to! *stomps foot*”).
It has a fatal flaw: it is, and remains, phonetically impossible. Try again.
OK.
That would make sense (really, it would) if we didn’t already know that the Luwian reflex of *bʰ is p…
I thought *gʲombʰ- was a verb root meaning “grind”?
No, you have this backwards: morphologically, all the examples you cite are derivatives (nouns with stems in *-o-, *-to- and the like). The bare root meant “foot”.
(Do you know what a “root noun” is?)
Note also that the Greek form attests the absence of *h₃ or *h₂ – and by your “logic”, the absence of aspiration should mean that *h₁ wasn’t present either.
@David
“Every one that I’ve looked at, because in each of them most or all of the other phonemes don’t correspond.”
The correspondences in fact are pretty strong, if you remove your biases in favor of old, abstract, ad hoc ideas and against new, empirically grounded hypotheses. Please give me examples of roots that don’t follow the law I’ve formulated.
“This -a is the PIE 1st-person singular perfect ending *-/h₂a/ (*-|h₂e|). It’s not somehow limited to this word!”
Yes. But reconstruction -*h2a/*-h2e does apply to this word! Hence, there was a laryngeal there. Right after the stop.
“You are postulating a root **h₂n- that somehow always stays in the zero-grade no matter what happens, and an entirely new suffix **-er- – these are unnecessary, unparsimonious complications.”
It’s just an earlier form of the root: the full grade is attested in *bhendher- and zero grade in *H2n(dh)er-. Once it broke apart, then another full-zero grade emerged, not in the *-ner- segment.
“Everything is possible as long as you refuse to tell us the conditions under which the labiovelars developed in all these different directions!”
You are confusing, as usual, my volition with objective reality. We can explain Gk skeptomai as a metathesis but the reality is that Gk has a form skeptomai, while Lat specio: Indo-Aryan and Germanic follow the Latin pattern but we need to consider both *skep- and *spek- as possible versions of the root. It’s not because I so choose, it’s because it’s objectively in the data. If we use *H3ekw- ‘eye’ as an outgroup, then skeptomai shows the same -p- as Gk ops, which suggests a labiovelar, so for the combined cognate set we would reconstruct *spekw-. The example of Lat socius ( -m-.
“Note also that the Greek form attests the absence of *h₃ or *h₂ – and by your “logic”, the absence of aspiration should mean that *h₁ wasn’t present either.”
Yes, I noticed that across all the forms. This means that in PIE times p+H = p but b+H = bh. Or some of those laryngeals had palatalizing effects that only transpired in “satem” languages (comp. *kH2erk(s)t- ‘fir’ > Hitt hartagga, Gk arktos ‘bear’ but Slav *sirsti ‘fir’ or IE *kH2er- ‘head, horn’ > Hitt harsar, Lat cerebrum, Gk kara, Skrt siras) and in satem languages only on some consonants (e.g., not on labial or dental stops).
“Do you know anything about vowel coloring in living languages? Coloring isn’t optional like that. When there’s a coloring consonant close enough to a vowel that can be colored, the vowel will be colored. You can’t have [χɛ] becoming [χɑ] in some cases but not in others.”
The etymological material is supportive of the law i’ve formulated. I specified two different conditions: if it was a cluster then the plosive is lost first, then the laryngeal is lost, and the vowel is colored. If the stop+laryngeal sequence was phonemicized (the stop absorbed a laryngeal and did not drop out), then vowel was not colored. IE *bherHm- vs. IE *H2ermH- (see above) illustrate it nicely. Two different conditions, two different outcomes. We can see a voiced aspirate emerging, on the one hand, and a vowel colored, on the other.
@David
“No, you have this backwards: morphologically, all the examples you cite are derivatives (nouns with stems in *-o-, *-to- and the like). The bare root meant “foot”.”
Yes, I agree. *H3don-t- is *pH3ed-on-t, with -on- just like in Gk pedon ‘soil’. So ‘foot’ > ‘bottom, low’ > ‘lower tooth’.
Re: IE *k’er- ‘head, horn’. The belonging of Hitt harsar to the same group as Lat cerebrum, Gk kara, Skrt siras, etc. has been suggested multiple times. The phonetics has been an issue. My reconstruction *k’Her- makes the phonetics regular. It’s possible that the variant with a colored vowel is in fact IE *H3ers- ‘buttocks’ (Hitt arras, Gk orros ‘tail, rump, base of the spine’ < *orsos, Arm or 'rear-end'). Semantically, the connection between head and horn parallels the connection between rump and tail. And we've already discussed the tendency of Indo-Europeans to equate polar body parts (thigh ~ underarm, toe ~ finger, butt cheek and face cheek, etc.) So, the resulting protoform should be reconstructed as *k'H3er-s- or even *kH3er-s-.
For the action of Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law in the inlaut, with the lengthening of the preceding vowel, comp. the following:
IE *meH2ter ‘mother’ (Gk me:ter, Lat mater, etc.) < *makH2- (comp. OPruss moazo 'mother's sister', Lith masa 'husband's sister' < *mak'- < *makH2-)
IE *bhreH2ter 'brother' < *mregwH2ter (comp. Lith merga 'girl', Gk parthenos 'virgin, girl').
IE *seH2wl- 'sun' (Lat so:l, Gk he:lios, Slav *slunice, Lith saule, etc.) ~ IE *swet- 'light' (Hitt siwatt- 'day', Skrt cvetas 'white, shining', Lith sviesti 'shine', sviteti 'glimmer', OH hwiz 'white', Slav sweteti 'shine', *swetu 'light, day', *svetilu 'shiny, bright', Russ svetilo 'sun, moon') < *sewtH2l- < *swetH2l-.
@Vladimir:
I don’t remember; what was the conditioning factor that determines if a cluster like *THe develops to Te or to Ha (or if a cluster like DHe develops to Dhe or Ha)? Did you ever say, or does it still remain to figure that out?
Also, how can you be so sure of these phonetic laws when you keep changing the reconstructions? At one point; PIE *pet- is from *kʷekʷ-. The next, it’s from *ph₁et-. Maybe it’s fun to argue for etymologies like these as an intellectual game, but clearly only one of them can be true (unless we end up going with something like *kʷHekʷH).
That’s a grave misunderstanding. I’m complaining that your examples of your law don’t follow all the other sound laws for the other phonemes in the words you compare. If one phoneme corresponds regularly and the three or five others don’t, the comparison is wrong, and the words are not cognate! That is my point.
So… does every other 1sg perfect show the same developments?
That’s one more ad-hoc hypothesis that you’re dragging in by its hair, kicking and screaming.
So why is it skeptomai and not skoptomai?
This got truncated; please try again.
You seem to be rediscovering the well-known root *sekʷ- “follow” > “follow with the eyes” gt; “see”, though…
Well, figure that out before you come back and dump a heap of mutually contradictory speculations on us.
Connecting “fir” and “bear”, funnily enough, is really strange from a semantic point of view…
I honestly have no idea what makes you think so.
Under which conditions did this happen?
I’m saying that vowels remain colored after a laryngeal is lost. That’s where almost every Greek a comes from, for instance. You have them spontaneously revert to *e for no discernible reason.
Coloring isn’t a sound change that happens during the loss of a laryngeal. It’s something that happens immediately, automatically and inevitably if a sound system contains few vowels and any back consonants.
Maybe you should read up on the fight between trivocalistas and pentavocalistas about how to write Quechua. There’s plenty about it in English on the Internet.
…Isn’t this Greek -on just the thematic vowel and the neuter nom/acc ending, PIE *m? That would never end up inside a derivate…!!!
This still doesn’t fit the Greek a.
Every one of these can be explained as having a long vowel from loss of the laryngeal.
The correspondences in fact are pretty strong, if you remove your biases in favor of old, abstract, ad hoc ideas and against new, empirically grounded hypotheses.
It is abundantly clear by now that whatever you think at the moment = “new, empirically grounded hypotheses,” and whatever anybody else thinks = “old, abstract, ad hoc ideas.” If somebody manages to convince you of something, it automatically becomes a new, empirically grounded hypothesis. This is solipsism in its purest form, and (once again) I do not understand why people are bothering to argue with you.
@David
” I’m complaining that your examples of your law don’t follow all the other sound laws for the other phonemes in the words you compare.”
With some of your criticisms I agree and explicitly use them to optimize the law, others are completely unclear to me. What “other phonemes”? Take Slav *berza ‘birchtree” and Lat argentum ‘silver’ e – ancestral in Slavic because the stop is retained, r the same, g’ > z in Slavic, g in Latin.
“So… does every other 1sg perfect show the same developments?”
I’ll look into it but we are looking for 1sg perfect forms that show variation between voiced aspirates and voiced stops in two segments plus vocalic alternations between colored and uncolored vowels. You can do some work, too. Bring them over!
“That’s one more ad-hoc hypothesis that you’re dragging in by its hair, kicking and screaming.”
I honestly see it as a perfectly solid etymology. Morphology, phonology and semantics are all consistent. IE *bhendhr ~ H2n(dh)er is just like *bherg’- ~ *H2erg’- or bherHm ~ H2ermo-. What am I missing?
“So why is it skeptomai and not skoptomai?”
There’s a Greek form skopos, so ablaut, too, is operating in this root. But considering that Lat has -e- in specio: I reconstruct *-e-. Under the Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law a sequence retains the ancestral vowel /e/ if preceded by a retained stop. The vowel goes to /e/, /o/ or /a/ if the stop got lost before a laryngeal and the laryngeal got lost after that. But this form is complex because some kind of dissimilation has been going on.
“The example of Lat socius ( -m-.”
The example of Lat socius ( “follow with the eyes” gt; “see”, though…”
I know this root. The meaning ‘eyes’ for Hitt sakuwa makes it a likely candidate for the *H3ekw- set. And it’s not just my opinion. But you can always use your favorite s-mobile explanation, too. Oh, waits, that would actually support Diakoff’s ideas! No, I better not bring up s-mobile here.
“hat’s where almost every Greek a comes from, for instance. You have them spontaneously revert to *e for no discernible reason.”
They didn’t revert to them. See in a several places above for a detailed explanation of the law. -e- is the ancestral vowel retained when stop is retained.
“Every one of these can be explained as having a long vowel from loss of the laryngeal.”
Of course you can. You can doctor any data to fit the model, Dr. Marjanovic.
“Isn’t this Greek -on just the thematic vowel and the neuter nom/acc ending, PIE *m? That would never end up inside a derivate…!!!”
Why not? -t- is a typical affix for body parts (comp. Skrt yakr-t ‘liver’). So you have a form such as pedon ‘soil’ + a body part affix.
“I honestly have no idea what makes you think so.”
If Steve kindly allows me to write a post on his site, I’ll collate all the examples above, so you and others could see a full picture. Otherwise, please go back and look through all the recent examples I pulled in this thread. Nothing is kicking and screaming.
If Steve kindly allows me to write a post on his site
Afraid not, but I would urge you to start your own blog (Blogger is free and easy to use), where you can put everything together in easily accessed form. As a side benefit, this discussion could be continued there rather than here.
@Eli Nelson
“At one point; PIE *pet- is from *kʷekʷ-. The next, it’s from *ph₁et-. Maybe it’s fun to argue for etymologies like these as an intellectual game, but clearly only one of them can be true (unless we end up going with something like *kʷHekʷH).”
I caveated above that some of the new solutions I found are better than the old ones. I know you are not used to seeing work in progress. And yes ideally I’d like to have it all final but I also respond to your and others’ feedback, so it naturally changes.
@Steve
“I would urge you to start your own blog (Blogger is free and easy to use), where you can put everything together in easily accessed form. As a side benefit, this discussion could be continued there rather than here.”
I’m afraid I’m just going to lose the momentum. Plus I don’t really blog that much beyond this string, so it’s really not worth it for me.
@Steve
“If somebody manages to convince you of something, it automatically becomes a new, empirically grounded hypothesis. This is solipsism in its purest form.”
I don’t see anything wrong with getting convinced in cases when people use facts (aka “empirically grounded hypotheses”) and not ad hoc ideas to do the job of convincing. This is the opposite from solipsism. It’s dialogue.
@Eli Nelson
“I don’t remember; what was the conditioning factor that determines if a cluster like *THe develops to Te or to Ha (or if a cluster like DHe develops to Dhe or Ha)? Did you ever say, or does it still remain to figure that out?”
here’s an explanation for the development of voiceless aspirates from clusters of voiceless stops and laryngeals:
“In support of the theory that voiceless aspirates developed from clusters of stop plus a consonant which has disappeared it has been observed that voiceless aspirates alternate with voiceless stops. Thus, beside Gk. πλάθανον ‘dish’, Skt. pr̥thú ‘broad’, we find a voiceless stop τ rather than θ in Gk. πλατύς ‘broad’. If voiceless aspirates had developed from one PIE phoneme, the irregularities like Gk. πλατύς are difficult to explain; if they developed from a cluster, which in some ablauting forms was separated by a vowel, e.g. /plteXw-/ : /pltXew-/, the reason for the interchange of stop and aspirate is apparent. Another such contrast is found in Av. nom. sg. pantā ‘way’, gen. sg. paθō, with t in the strong cases, θ in the weak. Aspirates would have developed only in the inflected forms in which the laryngeal was contiguous with the stop; they were generalized in one set of forms, lost in another.” http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/piep11.html
My Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law is very similar. The alternations I found are between voiced aspirates and colored vowels (e.g., *bherHm vs. *H2ermo-) and plain stops (e.g., *pek’us vs. *H1ek’wo-, *pekwo- vs. *H1ekwr-) and colored vowels. The surprising novelty is that in PIE the stops got lost when followed by laryngeals, which suggests that they formed a cluster. The stops stayed intact when the laryngeal merged with them to form a new phoneme with a secondary articulation (voiced aspirates – yes, palatovelars – maybe) or just got lost if the stop couldn’t not take any secondary articulation at all (p, t).
No time.
I’ll get to some of your points later; so far my only reaction is *headdesk*. You really need to learn a few basics – and you’re evidently completely unaware of that.
Good idea; I much recommend WordPress over Blogger/Google, though, which is too stupid to allow the <blockquote> tag.
I much recommend WordPress over Blogger/Google, though
I agree (you’ll notice I switched), but WordPress ain’t free.
I am not willing to have this thread expand indefinitely, so if Vladimir isn’t willing to start a blog to move the discussion to, perhaps you could? I’d be delighted to add a link to it.
@Steve
“I am not willing to have this thread expand indefinitely”
Let’s take it to comment 1999. That’s how much time I need to convince David, Eli Nelson, TR, Lars and Hans that Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law is real. I’m not vouching for Ms. Pickles. And I lost my faith in Piotr the Great. He’s lost in the mainstream matrix. 🙂
And this will set the record for your blog and it will stay unbeaten until Marie-Lucie publishes her Penutian post. 🙂
Deal?
That’s more than 100 comments away, you won’t convince anyone, and we are already far past the previous record.
Hat, you need to shut ‘er down; she’s a-suckin’ mud.
@John Cowan
I dunno. People are reading it – you included. So what’s there to kill? So urgently. 100 comments is a max. I can’t believe it should take people with some good knowledge of IE linguistics that many comments to get behind a law that uses basic IE vocabulary, explains so much, works so neatly and opens a venue for future research. OK, it came from an amateur like me. Not from a mainstream scholar. But all the best IE laws came from amateur linguists. Verner was a librarian, for god sake. Grassmann was a mathematician. I’m an engineer. Not too far apart. Having a fresh, outsider mind and an eye for a “white space” is important for innovation. Knowledge is important, too, of course but knowledge evolves and can’t be museumified.
@David et al.
Here’s another good one:
IE *bheH2g’- ‘divide, distribute, allot’ (Gk phagein ‘eat, devour’, Skrt bhajati ‘divide, distribute’, bhaga ‘prosperity, happiness’, Avest baz- ‘bestow, divide’, Avest baga ‘share, happy lot’, OPers baga ‘god’, Slav *bogu ‘god’) ~ IE *yeH2g’- ‘worship’ (Skrt yajati ‘worship, sacrifice, make an offering’, Avest yaz- ‘same’, Gk hagios ‘holy’) < PIE *bH1eH2g'- or *bH1ag'-.
Note on the margin: Gk hippos (< *pH1ekw-), hagios (bH1ag'-), hepso (< *pH1ekw) – all show /h/ where I reconstruct *H1. Some mainstream scholar proposed it as well. Too late to find it but Piotr should know who he is.
I have long wanted to start blogging in principle, but I’ve never found/taken the time, and I’m afraid the next few months won’t let me either.
Wow, you’ve completely failed to notice my point: derivational affixes are not added behind case endings. Greek doesn’t do that, Latin doesn’t do that, Russian doesn’t if you look closely; apparently no language on this planet does at all.
*yékʷr is a bare stem; it doesn’t need a case ending to become a nom/acc sg.
*sigh*
Let’s try *|ph₂ter|- and huhhas again. OK, *-ter- is a known derivational suffix, the Hittite -a- must be the thematic vowel, the -s is the nom. sg. ending, and you postulate that *ph₂- became *h₂- under completely unspecified conditions. If we accept this, where does the -uhh- come from?
If there’s some kind of reduplication going on (for completely unclear reasons, see the next comment…), that still doesn’t explain where the -u- comes from; we’d expect -a-.
And that’s one of your least terrible examples.
I don’t think people here are holding this against you; I certainly am not. What I’m holding against you is the Dunning-Kruger effect – the massive scale at which you overestimate your understanding of what you’re talking about. You seem to believe you’ve understood the mainstream position(s) to 80 %; in reality you’ve only understood it to 30 % at the most.
Verner and Grassmann did the work; they read the literature that explained why the professionals thought the way they did; they understood what they were talking about. You have barely begun to do that work.
There’s a lot of literature on these two roots; you should read it. 🙂
A large part of the reason why there’s so much literature on them is that these are some of the best candidates for containing real, underlying, morphophonemic *|a| instead of *|h₂|. After all, we find this a in the same grammatical forms in Greek and Vedic – which should never happen, because *h₂ between consonants gives a in Greek, but i in Vedic! Read slides 12–14 in this presentation for an introduction to this issue.
The only mainstream proposal on the origin of h- in these Greek words is that this is the outcome of *h₁j-, and possibly also of *h₁- before *i. There are several links to the latest paper way upthread.
Perhaps, but he’s not reading this thread anymore, because he lost patience with how much you overestimate your understanding. And given how much emphasis he puts on derivational morphology in his work, it’s frankly better that way – if he saw that you wanted to add derivational suffixes to the whole word pédon as if it were a root, he might get a heart attack.
Piotr has recently written a whole series on reduplicated nouns and their meanings in PIE.
To be honest, Vladimir, I’ve stopped reading what you write as well. Back when you were mostly channelling Dziebel your claims did elicit discussions and facts about roots and sound laws that the happy amateurs among us hadn’t yet learned of. But now it feels as if you’re just tossing out any connection you can think of, and David pops in a few times a week and spikes them with the same arguments each time.
You are out of your depth and I think you should stop. I think you should have stopped a few weeks ago. This is making nobody happy.
I have long wanted to start blogging in principle, but I’ve never found/taken the time, and I’m afraid the next few months won’t let me either.
Don’t think of it as “starting blogging,” think of it as taking a few minutes to set up a basic blog (as I said above, Blogger is easy and free, and you can always transfer whatever’s there to another venue like WordPress if you decide to move). It won’t take any longer than composing one of your multi-paragraph comments, and from then on it’s just a matter of arguing with Vladimir there rather than here, and I will be much happier.
Let’s take it to comment 1999. That’s how much time I need to convince David, Eli Nelson, TR, Lars and Hans that Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law is real.
This is just another sign that you are delusional. You are not going to convince anyone of anything, and although I realize the pointless back-and-forth is enjoyable to those who take part in it, it is increasingly irritating to me, your host, and I am not willing to put up with it for over a hundred more comments. I’ll wait to see if David agrees to host it, but in any case I’ll shut it down by tomorrow. Apologies to all who find it more entertaining than I do.
Time to party like its comment 1999!
Thanks for putting up with us so long, Hat!
I emphatically disagree with much of what Team Mainstream put in front of me over the past 1000 comments and I tried my best to stay engaged and plow through some cognitive barriers, biases and arrogance that we all have by showing by example how people can learn from each other and collaborate.
But alas! No progress is in sight. You’ve helped me understand a lot but you also missed an opportunity to look at my work without a bias. My goal now is to take my work to someone like Dziebel who seems to be more thoroughly trained, fearless and effective at solving etymological problems than some of the respectable commenters here. Let’s see what he says. But my lack of academic credentials will become an issue again – it is an issue with you guys, too, whether you agree with it or not. I could take it to Jouna Pyssalo, but now I’m convinced that there were more than one laryngeal in PIE, so he will snub me for a different reason than you guys.
But enough of my ramblings. Thank you, All! Thank you, Steve. Peace!
Good point.
I won’t do anything tomorrow, though – I’ll spend the next night on a train, and will try to work on my grant proposal some more before I leave.
*facepalm*
Dunning, meet Kruger.
He’s certainly fearless. As you can see from this very thread, though, he’s not trained in historical linguistics, and he’s not at all effective at solving etymological problems; he just declares victory all the time, much like you.
@David
“*facepalm*, *sign*, Dunning, meet Kruger.”
You and Piotr completely undermine your claim to “know Indo-European linguistics” by this constant defaulting to social and psychological cues. I just don’t take this as indication of your expertise. I don’t even know what who Dunning and Krueger are. And I’m not interested at looking them up. I only appreciate expertise when it comes through the analysis of concrete linguistic examples. You’ve failed to understand even my most simple example of *pH2e- ‘grandfather, father’ adding affixes *-w(H2)o- as in Lat a-vus ‘grandfather’ or Gk pa(F)is ‘son’ (naturally Hitt huhhas < *H2e+wH2o < *pH2e+wH2o by my Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law instantly supported by *peH2s- ~ *pH2owis 'sheep, herd') and -ter. And I'm putting these well substantiated claims out as hypotheses, nor even proven facts. Instead, you playback first-grade reconstructions (knowing the basics is fine but never reaching maturity is pretty bad) such as *pH2ter in which H2 is unattested phonetically and the whole structure is bizarre morphologically (your root is simply *p because *H2ter is known as a suffix and you are criticizing me for having roots that are too short!). And you assume all this to be a proven fact. It's insider baseball, not science.
I'm done. I'm a very patient man but this is just ridiculous.
No, I’m sorry, everyone, I’m almost done but not quite.
David, you just linked me to Piotr’s deck (https://www.academia.edu/4124049/Another_long_grade_Non-canonical_ablaut_involving_PIE_%C4%81) that explicitly addresses the two roots that I showed above to be cognates. And let’s read what it says:
“perfectly straightforward correspondences like Ved. bhaj-: Gk. φαγ- or Ved yaj- : Gk. ἀγ- (even in identical morphological environments!) … bʰeh2g- vs. *bʰh̥₂g- ‘share’, *Hjeh₂g- vs. *(H)jh̥₂g- ‘worship; sacrifice’.”
He calls the two roots “perfectly straightforward correspondences”. I add Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law to explain the difference in the onset, the meanings are fully compatible and the two roots are cognates.
Once again: IE *bheH2g’- ‘divide, distribute, allot’ (Gk phagein ‘eat, devour’, Skrt bhajati ‘divide, distribute’, bhaga ‘prosperity, happiness’, Avest baz- ‘bestow, divide’, Avest baga ‘share, happy lot’, OPers baga ‘god’, Slav *bogu ‘god’) ~ IE *yeH2g’- ‘worship’ (Skrt yajati ‘worship, sacrifice, make an offering’, Avest yaz- ‘same’, Gk hagios ‘holy’) < PIE *bH1eH2g'- or *bH1ag'-.
I even included a version with an "original a" and you refer me back to a deck that argues precisely for this "original a" and I'm somehow the one who lacks "basics", "does not understand", etc. And I even reconstruct H1 here before /a/ suggesting that H1 does not color vowels, whether original /e/ or original /a/. But H1 does add aspiration to b, hence *bh.
derivational affixes are not added behind case endings
Actually, this can happen as a result of grammaticalization. Older versions of English had the collocations who ever (nom.) and whom ever (acc.) These became grammaticalized as whoever and whomever, with the case ending trapped inside. Another example is mother-in-law, plural mothers-in-law. English is steadily moving toward mother-in-laws, however, restoring the normal state of affairs. The same thing would probably happen to whomever, except that -m is no longer recognizable as an oblique case inflection, despite its presence in him, them; What’s more, whom is itself rapidly vanishing from the language and taking whomever with it.
Haspelmath’s 1993 paper on the externalization of inflection, which focuses on how the inflection winds up at the end after all, rather than on how it gets trapped in the first place.
I’ve personally learned a lot from this thread (both about IE linguistics and human psychology), but it long ago hit the point where people are just talking, or increasingly shouting, past each other, so I agree with our host that it’s time to wrap up. Thanks for being patient with us all, Hat!
Strange, because you claimed upthread that you’re not subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect. I’ll repeat the link to the Wikipedia article.
I failed to understand it because you never mentioned you saw the same novel suffix in all three. 😐 Also, you’re still left with a noun root that ends in a short vowel – that would be the only noun or verb root to do so in all of PIE.
Well, if I accept your new suffix and your novel root structure, you’re still left with nothing but *h₂ corresponding between *|ph₂ter-| and huhhas.
It very neatly explains the otherwise entirely unexpected correspondence of Indo-Iranian *i to a in all the other branches. That’s good enough for me.
The root makes perfect sense as *|peh₂|-. Once *|ph₂-ter-| had ceased to be very formal and had become a more normal kinship term, *|h₂ter-| was reinterpreted as a new suffix that was then added to other kinship terms. This explains where the kinship-term suffix *h₂ter etymologically comes from! Isn’t that great? It’s certainly parsimonious. 🙂
Use your patience for learning, not for soothing your ego – or you’ll get nowhere in any science.
*facepalm*
He calls Ved. bhaj- a perfectly straightforward correspondence of Gk. φαγ-, and Ved yaj- a perfectly straightforward correspondence of Gk. ἀγ-. That makes two “perfectly straightforward correspondences”, emphasis added.
Maybe you should use some of your patience for just reading?
You’d need it before the *y, not before the *a. In other words, you’re postulating yet another metathesis. And how is the *y lost in *bʰaǵ-?
You’ve also kept the *h₂ in your reconstruction; my point is that it probably doesn’t belong there.
Yes; such special conditions are really unlikely to have applied to this PIE case.
The Haspelmath paper was only just posted to academia.edu, so I read it for the first time and had (as usual) my eyes opened about yet another dogma of linguistics: of course derivation before inflection, except when it isn’t. “Der kritische Weg ist allein noch offen.”
@David
“I failed to understand it because you never mentioned you saw the same novel suffix in all three.”
How is it novel? Look at Skrt pitrvya, Lat patruus or Gk patroFos ‘father’s brother’. Or Gk galo:os, Slav zuluva ‘husband’s sister’ or Slav svekrva ‘husband’s mother’. It’s the same affix as *H2ewos > Lat avus. Szemerenyi even reconstructed *patrHewos for patruus linking father’s brother words with grandfather words.
“you’re still left with nothing but *h₂ corresponding between *|ph₂ter-| and huhhas.”
That’s exactly what is missing from the pH2ter reconstruction. Attestation of *h in the cognate set. Once I added the grandfather words into the set, we can see that it was present there.
“It very neatly explains the otherwise entirely unexpected correspondence of Indo-Iranian *i to a in all the other branches.”
That’s fine to a point. huhhas gives the Anatolian attestation to *H2, which is critical. But now the root is *peH2- (so no short vowel ending) > *pH2eter (pater, fadar), *pHewo- (huhhas, avus), *peH2po- (Pal pa:paz), *pH2ter (pita, pta, ta). The latter is Indo-Iranian only and does not need to be dragged to PIE times.
That’s a reconstruction that makes sense on all fronts.
“The root makes perfect sense as *|peh₂|-. ”
OK, you agree.
“Use your patience for learning, not for soothing your ego – or you’ll get nowhere in any science.”
OK, I collected myself. But please don’t rile people up with your emotional and psychological cues. If it were only the two of us, I wouldn’t care. But you are distracting Lars, TR, Steve and John Cowan who can’t even follow our conversation but want to shut it down because it’s getting too emotional. They trust (Sic!) that you are an expert and I’m not, although my law is perfectly fine, but your critique of it is not.
“That makes two “perfectly straightforward correspondences”, emphasis added.”
Sure. He even adds that it would have been a conspiracy if we had to treat them separately, and he put both examples into one sentence and he spelled them out as identical beyond the onset. With my Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss they can easily be connected into a single cognate set considering that Piotr shows that apart from the onset their are perfectly compatible with each other phonetically and morphologically.
“You’d need it before the *y, not before the *a. In other words, you’re postulating yet another metathesis. And how is the *y lost in *bʰaǵ-?”
No, I don’t think it was lost or was present in PIE times. Just like w- in *weid- or *westi- above, these glides point to the articulation of the laryngeal in PIE. H3 was labialized, H1 was palatalized. So it’s *bH1ag’- (conventional *bhag’-/*yag’-), pH1ekwo- (Gk hippos, Toch yakwe), *pH1ekw- (Gk hepar, Skrt yakrt) vs. *pH3eskw- ‘evening, late, west’ (Germ. *westi-, Gk hesperos, Lat vesper, Lith vakaras ‘evening’, pastaras ‘late’), *bH3eidH2- (conventional bheidh-/*weid-).
“You’ve also kept the *h₂ in your reconstruction”
Because many people reconstruct H2 there. Not just me. I’m fine with either but -a- works better for me now.
“Yes; such special conditions are really unlikely to have applied to this PIE case.”
I didn’t even understand why you think that -on- in pedon ‘soil’ is a case ending in the first place?
“Strange, because you claimed upthread that you’re not subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect.”
This speaks a world about your priorities: you remember my original reaction to your DK comparison (although I already forgot because it’s childish), but you can’t keep track of my etymologies and what they solve for. Please focus on the scientific material, Dr. Marjanovic!
On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice to close the other evergreen next door? More meanness, worse English, and less information.
@David
Re: affixes. See a perfect triad in Greek to illustrate and support my reconstruction above.
pappos ‘grandfather’ (aos**, which we would expect under the *H2euH2o- reconstruction, is unknown in Greek) – ~ Pal pa:paz ‘father’ < (*peH2ppo-)
pater 'father' (*peH2ter/*paH2ter)
pais 'child, son' (< *pH2ewyos).
All three affixes are attested in one cognate set.
But…ta-da-da-da:
How about we reconstruct PIE *pH1ater? H1 does nor color ancestral /e/. And, now I can argue, it does not color ancestral /a/. So that's why we find /a/ in all the 'father' forms in IE languages (including the most divergent branches) but Skrt! And that's why we find /i/ is Skrt pita. Because H1 had a palatalizing effect and in Skrt sequence H1a gave /i/ and didn't turn p- into ph-.
I like this one a lot! It seems the most parsimonious. In parallel, we'd reconstruct *pH1awo-/*pH1awH2o- for 'grandfather' or for Gk pais < *pH1awyo-.
There’s so much wrong in the last few comments that I simply won’t get to it before our esteemed host closes this thread. My train leaves in just over two hours, I still have to pack, and I’m extremely tired because the birches refuse to get a room. I’ll just say you are postulating, in your examples, several new metatheses and a whole new ablaut pattern (*a : 0) without, apparently, even noticing.
And, man, seriously, let go of your simple, inconsequential misunderstanding of what Piotr meant on that slide! He put them on the same slide because they’re both great candidates for verb roots with *a. It would be a “conspiracy” if both of these separate verbs would both have 0-grade in certain forms in Greek but e-grade in the same forms in Sanskrit and, on top of that, laryngeal loss by “Lubotsky’s law” in Sanskrit. Do you seriously believe that Piotr would try to imply that two roots are cognate without actually saying so and without ever addressing the fact that their onsets are blatantly different? You may believe they’re cognate just because they rhyme; he evidently does not.
The paper by Dunning and Kruger was published in Science. 🙂 Nothing childish about that. You really should read the Wikipedia article.
Oh, and this palatalizing effect of *h1… where are you taking that from?
… because the birches refuse to get a room.
Is this a (translated) euphemism that I’m not familiar with?
But you are distracting Lars, TR, Steve and John Cowan who can’t even follow our conversation but want to shut it down because it’s getting too emotional.
Erunda. I can follow what you say, I do follow it as I follow everything here, but I’m getting tired of reading the products of your invincible ignorance. It is not emotional but tedious.
Exactly. I see no emotion involved except your resentment at being called a crackpot; emotion is a fine thing, but endless flailing and refusal to even catch a side glimpse of reality is not.
@Steve
” I see no emotion involved except your resentment at being called a crackpot”
What resentment? I may be an iconoclast but not a crackpot. You fundamentally misunderstand my reasons for posting: I just like solving problems and exchanging knowledge and opinions. I’m not interested in your persona or David’s persona. And I don’t care about what people think about me. You and others are wasting your time trying to offend me. It’s like a chess game: you or John or David or Piotr need to outthink me, not start throwing pawns at me. And after you do so for an umpteenth time, I get up, pick up the pawns and put the them back on the board. And make you try and play by the rules again. I know chess is tedious for many people and “playing Chapaev” is fun. So, I’m fine with us all having fun as long as I get to play chess a bit, too.
@David
“You you seriously believe that Piotr would try to imply that two roots are cognate without actually saying so and without ever addressing the fact that their onsets are blatantly different? You may believe they’re cognate just because they rhyme; he evidently does not.”
Please re-read what I wrote. Not Piotr, but my Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss Law makes those forms related. Of course, Piotr didn’t put them on the same slide because he thinks they are related. He put them on the same slide and in the same paragraph because they are phonetically and morphologically identical beyond the onset. My law explains the onset and makes them related.
“You may believe they’re cognate just because they rhyme; he evidently does not.”
They don’t rhyme. They are related through a postulated sound law. Piotr just quit this string a bit too early. 🙂
“I’ll just say you are postulating, in your examples, several new metatheses and a whole new ablaut pattern (*a : 0) without, apparently, even noticing.”
No metatheses, no new ablauts. Get off the train and review all the data I submitted. It’s all working in a clockwork fashion. You can trust an engineer. 🙂
“Oh, and this palatalizing effect of *h1… where are you taking that from?”
H1 keeps e as /e/, hence it must have been close to this vowel from the point of view of its place of articulation. H3 colors /e/ and makes it /o/, so it must have been labialized. H2 turns /e/ into a back vowel /a/, so it must have been a “velar” fricative of sorts.
@Brett: because the birches refuse to get a room means they are pollinating in public, upsetting David’s (nasal) sensitivities. Maybe you are familiar with the exhortation to Get a room! when people are getting overtly (and overly) libidinous at a party?
I only hope this thread will not cause our host to think twice before posting IE-related stuff in the future, as that would be a real pity.
Not at all! I’m reasonably confident this thread is a one-off.
Huh, this thread is still open…
Exactly. 🙂 I first thought of more colorful metaphors, but then thought better of it…
I think it’s telling that you look at this in terms of persons.
*h₂ must indeed have been back; velar is not enough, though, because velar consonants don’t have such effects in attested languages that I know of, and because *k *g *gʰ had either no such effect or a very limited one. It must have been uvular or pharyngeal.
*h₃ is a tough one. Obviously it’s tempting to think that it must have been labialized, but that doesn’t follow at all – PIE had four other labialized consonants, and they did not color vowels at all, “or the queen’s wedding would be the quoon’s wadding”! [w] doesn’t color vowels in Arabic or Quechua or Inuktitut either. Maybe the trick is that the difference between [ɑ] and [ɒ] is so small; perhaps *h₃ was just the voiced counterpart to *h₂, and which one colored which way was almost a coincidence… actually, I should read more about the Khmer vowel split. Hm.
I see no reason to assume that *h₁ had any coloring effect at all. As far as I can tell, the evidence is almost equivocal on whether it was [h] or [ʔ] (or perhaps both as allophones, except that no conditioning factor has been proposed).
I can’t find what I had noticed, but I’m very tired now, so maybe I’ll find it later…
However, there’s this:
If the stem of the “father” word is *|ph₂eter-|, *ph₂- makes sense, and *-ter- makes sense, but where does the extra *-e- in the middle come from?
And what kind of suffix is *-po-?
Well, it would explain e.g. the Greek form without any need to drop an *-e- from heaven.
By “Skrt” you mean all of Indo-Iranian. But never mind, why would *h₁ suddenly develop a (pretty drastic!) vowel-coloring effect on the way to Indo-Iranian when it lacks it in all the rest of IE? Why is this i found in every zero-grade form that contained any laryngeal (not just *h₁!)?
(BTW, Martin Kümmel has recently argued that *h₁ did create voiceless aspirates in Indo-Iranian.)
Huh, this thread is still open…
Well, that’s because I thought it had pretty much drawn to a close. If you’re physically incapable of ceasing to argue, and thus insist on drawing him back in, I guess I will have to close it. But if you’re that invested in the argument, I can’t see why you don’t start a site to continue it at.
Here’s how Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Law operates in both initial and medial positions, with two different laryngeals involved:
IE *pH1egwH3- ‘drink’ > Hitt pa:si ‘swallows, drinks’, ekuzzi ‘drinks’, Pal ahu ‘drinks’, Luw u ‘drinks’, Toch yok ‘drink’ (< *ye:gwh), Arm empem 'drink', Lat e:brius 'drunk' (with a long grade because it's a "vrddhi" derivative), bibo: (< *pibo), Skrt pibati 'he drinks', payayate 'give someone a drink', OIr ibid 'he drinks', Gk pino: 'drink', posis 'drink', ne:pho 'be sober' (< *ne-egwho), Slav *pijo 'I drink', Lith puota 'drinking feast'.
Typically split into two sets (*H1egwh- and *peH3-/*piH3-), this group has traditionally posed a number of issues. The main one is -b- in Lat bibo:, Skrt pibati. It's currently assumed that they go to reduplicated *pipH3- and that H3 voiced the preceding consonant. But this interpretation is completely ad hoc and unfounded. The problem with *H1egwh-, on the other hand, is that it's rather sketchily attested outside of Anatolian and that Pal attests for a laryngeal -h- ostensibly corresponding to Hitt -k-. Finally, nobody has ever figured out why PIE would have two words meaning 'drink'.
Pre-Laryngeal Plosive Loss law (and Dziebel's hypothesis of a PIE labiovelar split) clarifies some (if not all) of these problems. -b- in Lat bibo:, Skrt pibati is the same -b- as in Lat e:brius going back to PIE *gwh (Gk ne:pho). *H1 reconstructed for *H1eghw- points to an earlier cluster *pH1-. Forms with long -o- (Lith puotas, Lat po:tas) go back to cluster *-gwH3- (see above for examples such as *mregwH2-, *mek'H2ter, *swetH2l-). Under this interpretation, H3 plays the usualPal ahu shows a form after the plosive loss, while Hitt ekuzzi shows a phonemicized cluster *-gwH3-.
So we have several forms that show the same development in the onset involving a cluster pH1
*pH1ek'w- (Lat pekus, equus)
*pH1egwh- (Lat bibo, e:brius)
*pH1ekwo-/*kwH1ekwo- (Lat coquo, iecur).
*pH1et- (Lat petere, iterare)
@David et al.
I’m ready to finish this thread. I don’t want to annoy people anymore. It was fun. Thanks, All!
Great! David, if you can leave it at that, we’re done here, and I won’t have to bother closing the thread. This way, if you do set up a site, you can announce it here.
In that case I’ll just address the question of why PIE had two completely different roots for “drink”. 🙂 Piotr recently explained this here and on his blog…
One might think that if you just add person/number endings to a verb root, you get something basic like a present tense, and other things are derived by some morphological machinery like suffixes. Not so in PIE. Instead, there were “root presents” where just adding endings gave you the imperfective aspect while the perfective one was derived by various means – different means for different verbs –, and “root aorists” where just adding endings gave you the perfective aspect while the imperfective one was derived. Often there are both a “root present” and a “root aorist” for the “same” meaning; in other words, PIE had lexical aspect, where every verb was “telic” or “atelic” as the Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben reportedly calls them. And so, *(h₁)egʷʰ- was atelic, a “root present”, meaning “drink” as a drawn-out action (which may lead to becoming inebrius), while *poh₃- was telic, a “root aorist”, with a meaning more like “swallow”. Later, the derivational machinery developed to the point that each root could express both meanings, causing such pairs of verbs to be winnowed down to varying degrees.
That is a common process. Buy and sell are completely separate roots in English, but German differentiates kaufen and verkaufen only by a prefix, and Mandarin differentiates mǎi and mài only by what once was a suffix (*-s); and for “borrow” and “lend”, German generally has borgen and leihen, but the prefix machinery and the reflexive pronoun have created a huge number of synonyms (sich etwas borgen = sich etwas ausborgen = sich etwas ausleihen = sich etwas leihen…), to the effect that leihen and all its derivatives are rather marginal in my active vocabulary.
A/telic roots: M.C. Vidal has an interesting theory whereby (if I understand it correctly) the same roots could take telic *-mi endings or atelic *-h₂e endings — but when the latter was lost in non-Anatolian, the aspect was lexicalized.
(Roots that most often appeared with *-mi became root presents in *-mi, roots that most often appeared with *-h₂e became root aorists in *-mi — but the older state of affairs can be traced in roots ending in laryngeals that had undergone Schärfung in the 1sg and give rise to K-aorists (because the ending didn’t look like *-h₂e any more), in ablaut patterns, and in the Vedic 3pl in -ur).
That is fascinating.
Indeed, and exactly the kind of thing that makes me not want to close the thread.
Buy and sell are completely separate roots in English
That’s because of semantic transfer. OE had the same sort of pattern as German, with bycgan ‘buy’ > buy, but bebycgan ‘sell’. Sellan by contrast meant ‘give’, or more generally ‘transfer possession’. When Judas is said to have sold Jesus to the Romans, the primary implication originally was that he treacherously handed him over; the thirty pieces of silver were secondary. In Shakespeare, the couplet that John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, found in his tent was “Jockey of Norfolk, be not so bold / For Dickon thy master is bought and sold”, referring to the betrayal of Richard III by the earls of Derby and (possibly) Northumberland. In German, sellen seems to have survived into MHG but was then (apparently?) lost.
The modern, but now dialectal, verb handsel(l) means variously ‘to give someone a small good-luck gift, as on a birthday, anniversary, or New Year’s Day’, ‘to be the first customer (or the first of the day), thus giving the dealer good luck’, ‘to use for the first time’, ‘to bless the first use with a ceremony’, ‘to betroth’, all presumably from an underlying sense ‘to transfer possession hand to hand’.
@David
“And so, *(h₁)egʷʰ- was atelic, a “root present”, meaning “drink” as a drawn-out action (which may lead to becoming inebrius), while *poh₃- was telic, a “root aorist”, with a meaning more like “swallow”.”
I don’t see any evidence for one having an exclusively telic vs. the other having an exclusively atelic meaning anywhere (Hitt pa:s means ‘swallow’ (food or drink), which is just a different lexical meaning). It’s believed that some verbs had an original telic meaning that shifted to non-telic, while others developed in the opposite direction (Clackson, Indo-European linguistics, 133ff). But the difference between the two verbal meanings is indeed important and relevant and may have guided the split of *pH1egwH3- into two different formations in daughter dialects (with inherited phonemicized stops or clusters). Same for *pH1et- above (Lat petere vs. iterare).
I’m not aware of any descendants.
Not necessarily. In some kinds of German, “drink” has been replaced by “swallow” at least in lower registers.
I’m still waiting for the conditions of that split.
I’m still waiting for the conditions of that split.
Please stop baiting him. I’d really rather not close this thread, but you seem determined to force me to.
David, we need to stop. It’s not about who finishes last. Let me think through my next steps and hopefully we’ll get a chance to debate more. I don’t share Steve’s desire to close this string or close the current discussion but that’s his blog, so it’s his call.
@David, Vladimir:
I have a Blogger profile, so I’ve set up a new blog and a placeholder post for discussing Vladimir’s etymologies. Please respect our host’s wishes and post future comments there rather than here. Vladimir, just let me know and I can edit the blog post to put up whatever summary you want of your proposed sound changes. Here is the post: http://indoeuropeanetymology.blogspot.com/2016/03/discussion-of-vladimir-diakoffs.html
Thank you very much, Eli! I’m sorry if I’ve been sounding snippy, but I think I was very patient in putting up with weeks of back-and-forth that went nowhere, and nobody’s patience lasts forever. I might even check in on your thread from time to time, once the rash subsides…
We both know he won’t come up with conditions anytime soon! I limited my response to an impossible request. 🙂 And look, he’s already fleeing into psychology instead of sticking with, as politicians would say these days, “the issues”.
Anyway, thanks, Eli!
@Eli Nelson
Thank you very much! I very much appreciate you opening a blog to continue this discussion. I consolidate my etymologies and post them on your new blog very soon. I have a couple of new good ones. 🙂
@David
“We both know he won’t come up with conditions anytime soon! I limited my response to an impossible request. 🙂 And look, he’s already fleeing into psychology instead of sticking with, as politicians would say these days, “the issues”.”
Please don’t carry over your tactics to the new blog. No sucker punching, no punching me with my own hands, nothing of that nature. You are going to waste more time for more people and you are not going to achieve your goals. I’m going to Eli’s blog to only discuss linguistic matters.
Yay! My guest post is up, thanks to Eli. http://indoeuropeanetymology.blogspot.com/2016/03/discussion-of-vladimir-diakoffs.html
I suppose I will get in the last word on this one.
Moses supposes his toeses are roses,
But Moses supposes erroneously,
Moses he knowses his toeses aren’t roses,
As Moses supposes his toeses to be!
Come on John! You are beating a dead horse!
The last word.
Pffft.
Dear friends, I am a bit busy with a large data publication, but snitched a couple of minutes to inform you of my article that may interest many of you.
It’s called “The Laryngeal Theory has no Theory: Incompatibility with the Anatolian Data excludes a Viable Model” and you can find it here:
https://www.academia.edu/25121020/The_Laryngeal_Theory_has_no_Theory_Incompatibility_with_the_Anatolian_Data_excludes_a_Viable_Model
It’s not uploaded. I’ve sent a request.
I got a reply saying that it will not be uploaded but that preprints may be obtained from the author by email.
Yes, it’s as John said, I’m thanking the Wékwos editors-in-chief in this manner, hoping that people would order a copy of their own following the attached url.
Jouna
“The Laryngeal Theory has no Theory: Incompatibility with the Anatolian Data excludes a Viable Model” now equipped with pdf, thank you for your patience: I want to be loyal to partners, in this case Wékwos.
https://www.academia.edu/25121020/The_Laryngeal_Theory_has_no_Theory_Incompatibility_with_the_Anatolian_Data_excludes_a_Viable_Model
Hi Jouna, I’m reading your paper now. Could you comment on my interpretation of the laryngeals at http://indoeuropeanetymology.blogspot.com/2016/03/discussion-of-vladimir-diakoffs.html#comment-form ? I take the opposite approach to PIE phonology – multilaryngeal and multivocalic – so I don’t anticipate that you accept my model but I’m very much interested in your expert opinion. Thank you in advance!
Hi Vladimir,
Of course I will comment – and thank you very much for linking your blog – as I didn’t know you had one.
It might take a while before I am able to do the actual commenting as I’ve numerous duties just now, but I’ve bookmarked the page already, so will be there as soon as possible to see and comment.
Meanwhile a very nice summer to you, it’s lovely here in Finland already!
Jouna
The above comment is #2,339,000. More than two million comments! (Many were probably cancelled before being saved.)
Edit: No, this one is ‘413, so it’s more of a timestamp than a count. Ah well.
More than two million comments!
Not, happily, in this thread alone, although for a while I had my fears.
How solid is the reconstruction of PIE *o as a rounded vowel anyway? I’m blanking on the details, but I read a paper recently where the author (Kortlandt?) asserted that *e was /æ/ and *o was /ʌ/. If that were so, there’s no need to reconstruct *h₃ as having anything to do with rounding. I don’t know anything about the crosslinguistic typology of vowel coloring, but I wonder if there’s a scenario h₂ and h₃ conditioned two different unrounded vowels, and then the latter developed rounding later (or not, as in Indic). e.g. maybe during the productive phonetic stage of coloring, h₂ colors to /ə/ and h₃ colors to /ɑ/, and subsequently /ɑ/ > /ʌ/ merging with *o, while /ə/ lowers to /a/, creating a new *a morpheme. No idea if there are plausible consonants that could have those effects.
Perhaps not all that much. Part 1 of the latest discussion is up, I’m eagerly awaiting further parts.
An answer to my own implicit question, No idea if there are plausible consonants that could have those effects (i.e. different consonants with contrasting backness of vowel-coloring effects): Kümmel (pg. 314, https://www.academia.edu/1538887/Typology_and_reconstruction_The_consonants_and_vowels_of_Proto-Indo-European ) gives an example from Danish:
Now, of course, I wouldn’t suggest precisely this system for PIE because there does not seem to be a coloring effect, at least not a consistent one, from labials and velars. But perhaps h₃ was a voiced post-velar similar to older Modern Danish [ʁ] with similar coloring, while h₂ was the equivalent voiceless post-velar with a “middle” coloring effect similar to oMD labials and velars. So, short /a/ > /æ/ in the absence of coloring; remaining /a/ under “middle” coloring; and /a/ > /ɑ/ under “back” coloring, with /ɑ/ later merging with whatever the heck *o was. Or, the same thing a little higher if you want to start with short /ə/ (in which case the “middle” coloring is a lowering effect rather than simply blocking any change).
Did we ever learn what Piotr’s marvelous Germanic cognates of Skt. strī “woman” were?
Inquiring minds want to know!
I think it became this paper: Cherchez la femme: Two Germanic suffixes, one etymology.
So it did… Looks like our guesses about -ster were partly right. But curious as I am, I’m not prepared to pony up $42 for the rest of the story.
Oh, I see that’s just the abstract. Sorry I didn’t notice. I’ve read the full paper, and that may mean I have it stored on my computer. Or there may be a better link out there. I’m on travel right now, but I’ll try to find it when I have a chance
That’s indeed it, and Piotr sent it around to interested parties when it came out. Other than writing to him, there’s always the usual illegal way of obtaining the pdf…
Yes, I remember now. He announced it in another thread, and some of us raised a hand and got a copy.
There you go.
Does that link work for others? Clicking the right arrow at the bottom just takes me to the main sci-hub.mu page.
Try this. The doi is your friend.
Thanks, that works!
I wonder if I count as “Western”, being Polish and living in Poland.
Of course Central Europe is Western, and always has been! As for Poland specifically, half of it was “Eastern” in 1867-1918, and all of it (perhaps) in 1945-89, but that’s less than a century in a twelve-century history.
I would say that all of Russia was “Western” in 19th century, at least with regard to science.
Professor Klein who was bothered by Vladimir Diakoff online (please don’t do that again. He is 90 years old, for god’s sake!), believes that Yamnaya was the culture of Proto-Indo-Iranians, so presumably they spoke Proto-Indo-Iranian or the dialect of PIE which evolved into Proto-Indo-Iranian.
He is probably the most qualified person in the world on the subject
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Klejn
Sad news. Lev Samuilovich Klein died on November 7, 2019 at the age of 92.
Check his Wiki article, it’s worth it.
Wow, it sure is. Here are a couple of snippets to whet the appetite:
Now I want to read his work on Homer.
Now I want to read his work on Homer.
What a sign of the forcefully secularized epoch, that a super bright Jewish kid pushed himself into studying of a so totally wrong ancient book 🙂
I revisited this thread today and made the shocking discovery that the affable but incorrigible “Vladimir Diakoff” appears to have been a sock puppet for a certain cranky anthropologist who had been ignominiously booted from the thread a week earlier. At least, his contrivance for getting rid of irksome PIE consonants has been uploaded to academia.edu under a familiar name. Who would have thought?
Oh, interesting. I particularly like “cannot be doubted”…
Way too much internal reconstruction. Dziebel should take a step back and look outside.
I suspected he was a sock puppet at the time, but I wasn’t positive, and since the puppet seemed to be significantly nicer than the puppeteer, it seemed that there would be no point picking a fight about it (for reasons discussed here in the also-current context of AI).