Proposal for a Conlang

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Tiberius Nero
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Proposal for a Conlang

Post by Tiberius Nero »

Okay, so first a bit of background:

Assuming that the Kurgan hypothesis is more or less valid, we can entertain the idea of a hypothetical Graeco-Aryan clade of PIE (or "Southern Indo-European" dialect) that may have been spoken by the peoples of the Yamna culture of the Pontic steppes. So, assuming that this is the case, we can theorize the following:

Proto-Hellenic (or perhaps even a Graeco-Armenian clade) formed in the western part of the Yamna cultural area and split off when the ancestors of the Greeks entered the Balkans (from what I've read, probably sometime between 2500 and 2300 BC); and
Proto-Indo-Iranian formed in the eastern part of the Yamna area and emerged as a distinct language sometime later, with the Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages having diverged by 2000 BC.

What struck me as fascinating was how little we know about the peoples of the Pontic steppe who remained in the central Yamna area, on the shores of the Black Sea. What would an Indo-European language spoken by these people look like?

So far, I figure that, at least in its early development, such a language would exhibit the following shared features with Indo-Iranian:

1. Early satemization and the application of the RUKI rule
2. Vocalization of the PIE syllabic nasals to *a
3. Bartholomae's law and Brugmann's law

However, due to the hypothetical dialect continuum that existed in its early development, it would also possibly have the following differences:

1. Preservation of the PIE vowels *e and *o, unlike in IIr., where they merge with *a. Although, I'm thinking of a possible shift of short *o to *a, as this seems to be a fairly common feature of the Indo-European languages and, from what I've read, quite possibly could derive from original PIE *o originally being a rounded open back vowel, at least in some dialects.
2. Preservation of *k, *g, *gh (from original PIE *kw, *gw, *gwh) before front vowels, assuming that these were realized as palatal allophones in such a position and only became phonemic when *e merged with *o in Indo-Iranian. Of course, at some point, these may very well palatalize later, as in other IE languages, such as Proto-Greek.
3. Preservation of a distinct syllabic *l and syllabic *r and later, their vocalization to *al and *ar;
4. Vocalization of the syllabic laryngeals to *a, as in most other Indo-European languages (and possibly also initial *HC > *aC, as is theorized in Armenian and Phrygian). My thinking here is that, at least from what I've read, the *H > *i shift in Indo-Iranian was largely conditioned by modifications to the vowel system that derived from the leveling of *a, *e, *o as *a.

What does everyone think? I'm looking for further ideas and suggestions for this project. I have yet to develop a coherent alt history for these hypothetical Yamna descendants, but I really would like to put some work into this.

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Salmoneus
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Re: Proposal for a Conlang

Post by Salmoneus »

Tiberius Nero wrote:Okay, so first a bit of background:

Assuming that the Kurgan hypothesis is more or less valid, we can entertain the idea of a hypothetical Graeco-Aryan clade of PIE (or "Southern Indo-European" dialect) that may have been spoken by the peoples of the Yamna culture of the Pontic steppes. So, assuming that this is the case, we can theorize the following:

Proto-Hellenic (or perhaps even a Graeco-Armenian clade) formed in the western part of the Yamna cultural area and split off when the ancestors of the Greeks entered the Balkans (from what I've read, probably sometime between 2500 and 2300 BC); and
Proto-Indo-Iranian formed in the eastern part of the Yamna area and emerged as a distinct language sometime later, with the Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages having diverged by 2000 BC.
This probably isn't what happened.

Despite its end-point, Indo-Iranian seems not to have come from the east, but rather from the west - the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures thought of as PII actually seem to have originated in Europe (they've acquired a lot of european farmer genes that weren't present on the steppe earlier). They're now considered descendents of Corded Ware. Yamnaya, meanwhile, is thought of as being Late PIE.

What seems to have happened is this:
- the Yamna spoke LPIE
- they invaded Europe, creating Corded Ware. Some stayed behind - groups like the Poltavka culture.
- CW then re-invaded the steppe, creating Sintashta, then Andronovo. These groups replaced Poltavka (etc) - specifically via the north, not the west. (that is, they moved east and then south, not south and then east).

The question then arises: what about Graeco-Aryan? Well, obviously we don't know. They could have split off at any point. But here's my personal guess:
- some CW re-enter the steppe, forming the Graeco-Aryan continuum (which may be a clade, but just as likely is just a sprachbund). PII is found at the northeast extent of their range, while Graeco-Armenian is found at the southwest, on the Black Sea. The continuum breaks up when the PII move too far east, to the Volga, and lose regular contact.
- Greek, Armenian and probably Phyrgian move out of their Black Sea homeland into Greece and Anatolia. Alternatively, if you'd like Armenian to be more 'eastern', they may break off from Graeco-Phyrgian and travel to Armenia via the caucasus, which enables them to remain in closer contact with PII for longer.
- Balto-Slavic would then be presumably the non-Graeco-Aryan branch located closest to the Graeco-Aryans

------------------------------

Of course, this doesn't preclude your what-if scenario. It just divides your what-if into two different questions:

- what would a language look like that was intermediate between II and Greek (etc)?
- what might have happened to the people who inhabited the Yamna lands?

The second question does seem intriguing historically. Because there appear to have been at least three 'eastern' waves:
- the Afanasevo, who migrated into Siberia, seem to have been a sister-group to the PIEs. Some theorise that these may have become Tocharians (with PIE a bit earlier), but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise
- the non-Corded Ware IE cultures of the step. It's not easy to find a successor for these. Again, Tocharians make geographical sense, but the evidence points elsewhere. Perhaps they eventually became the Armenians? More likely, they just got overrun by Corded Ware groups.
- Andronovo expanded not only into India and Iran, but also all the way into Siberia, where genetically IE groups seem to have survived well into the 1st millennium AD.

Then you've got the Tocharians. The puzzle here is that genetically they look like Andronovo (i.e. Indo-Iranian), and in particular they're overwhelmingly R1a (a genetic male-line clade found on the steppe as a small minority but that somehow became the dominant majority in Corded Ware). That all suggests an origin in Corded Ware. But the linguistic evidence suggests that Tocharian is not II, and not even close to the other corded ware languages (germanic, balto-slavic, possibly italo-celtic but it's not clear). One option is that the "Tocharians" were late Indo-Iranian invaders, but they continued to speak (or at least write in liturgical contexts) a pre-II eastern IE language. Another possibility is that Tocharian is closer to II than we think, but just went weird somehow - or everything else did, by maintaining a sprachbund that Tocharian left. this isn't impossible - for instance, you can deal with the problem of satem vs tocharian full mergers by assuming that the sprachbund "satem" change was just something like "velar > palatal stop", that all satem languages then dealt with in the same obvious way, but which Tocharian basically just reversed. But this seems like special pleading. Add in the problems of Anatolian and its relation to Tocharian and things get very tricky...
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hwhatting
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Re: Proposal for a Conlang

Post by hwhatting »

Salmoneus wrote:Then you've got the Tocharians. The puzzle here is that genetically they look like Andronovo (i.e. Indo-Iranian), and in particular they're overwhelmingly R1a (a genetic male-line clade found on the steppe as a small minority but that somehow became the dominant majority in Corded Ware). That all suggests an origin in Corded Ware. But the linguistic evidence suggests that Tocharian is not II, and not even close to the other corded ware languages (germanic, balto-slavic, possibly italo-celtic but it's not clear). One option is that the "Tocharians" were late Indo-Iranian invaders, but they continued to speak (or at least write in liturgical contexts) a pre-II eastern IE language.
Another option is that they were the "avantguarde" of CW - breaking off early, either as an isolated group going East before the Indo-Iranians or as the far end of a continuum that was later mostly submerged by IIr.
On the use of Tocharian - at least for B, it was clearly more than liturgical, we have e.g. caravan passes etc., so B must have been at least an administrative language, if not the vernacular or trade language of its area. And the fact that the Buddhist missionaries translated literature into Tocharian also makes it likely that bot A and B were either spoken languages at that point (even though it seems that A became language mostly used in religious works after that point) or at least widely read literary languages, otherwise translating those texts wouldn't have made much sense.

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