The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

[R.Rusanov]

it did, obviously

I'm merely supposing an origin for them

[WeepingElf]

it did, obviously

I'm merely supposing an origin for them

I am entertaining the hypothesis that the three-vowel system */a i u/ of the pre-ablaut stage resulted from what I call the "Great Vowel Collapse" (GVC), wherein all non-high vowels of a richer inventory (at least */a e i o u/) of a yet earlier stage (perhaps Proto-Indo-Uralic?) collapsed into */a/, and that the three velar series preserved the features [+front] and [+round] of the collapsed vowels. So */ke/ > */ḱa/, */ka/ > /ka/; */ko/ > */k^wa/. But this is just personal speculation and may be entirely wrong-headed!

[jal]

what I call the "Great Vowel Collapse" (GVC)

Isn't that the same kind of mechanism proposed for Ubykh with it's limited number of vowels and large consonant inventory?


JAL

[WeepingElf]

what I call the "Great Vowel Collapse" (GVC)

Isn't that the same kind of mechanism proposed for Ubykh with it's limited number of vowels and large consonant inventory

Yes, something similar happened in Northwest Caucasian, too. Perhaps there was an areal connection: PIE probably was spoken north of the Black Sea - not really far from the northwestern foothills of the Caucasus.

[R.Rusanov]

k wasn't palatal tho
and q wasn't either

[WeepingElf]

k wasn't palatal tho
and q wasn't either

What are you talking about?

[KathTheDragon]

The only thing I can wring out of that is denial of palatovelars.

[Chagen]

Hope he's got a good way of explaining Sanskrit <ś> then. Actually what are the arguments against palatovelars anyway? I thought they were taken for granted.

To be fair, the PIE stop system is one of the typologically bizarre stop systems ever--only voiced aspirates, palatization and labialization on only one POA...if the IE-langs were a smaller family and there wasn't as much evidence, I have a feeling that PIE would be considered a complete fiction of a crackpot if it were ever brought up. Also if we didn't have any attestations of Sanskrit, I also get the feeling that PIE would be reconstructed vastly differently.

[WeepingElf]

Hope he's got a good way of explaining Sanskrit <ś> then. Actually what are the arguments against palatovelars anyway? I thought they were taken for granted.

To be fair, the PIE stop system is one of the typologically bizarre stop systems ever--only voiced aspirates, palatization and labialization on only one POA...if the IE-langs were a smaller family and there wasn't as much evidence, I have a feeling that PIE would be considered a complete fiction of a crackpot if it were ever brought up. Also if we didn't have any attestations of Sanskrit, I also get the feeling that PIE would be reconstructed vastly differently.

The PIE stop system is indeed quite odd, and perhaps misreconstructed. Some people say that the PIE "palatovelars" were just plain velars and the "plain velars" uvulars (and the "labiovelars", accordingly, labialized uvulars), and what regards the phonation types, there is a wildgrowth of alternative models, the "glottalic theory" being the most famous. IMHO the glottalic theory does make sense, but perhaps for a pre-stage rather than the time of breakup; one idea I have is that the "voiced aspirates" actually were voiced fricatives.

[R.Rusanov]

turkish had a chain shift k>kʲ, then q>k
some arabic dialects have g>ʤ, q>g (q may have been voiced)

some other languages have something very much like this too.

meanwhile there are no clear examples of palatal stops becoming velar stops in the entirety of linguistic writing, so hypothesizing a merger of kʲ and k in, say, greek is absolutely grotesque, unless you're doing it ironically

[Chagen]

Hope he's got a good way of explaining Sanskrit <ś> then. Actually what are the arguments against palatovelars anyway? I thought they were taken for granted.

To be fair, the PIE stop system is one of the typologically bizarre stop systems ever--only voiced aspirates, palatization and labialization on only one POA...if the IE-langs were a smaller family and there wasn't as much evidence, I have a feeling that PIE would be considered a complete fiction of a crackpot if it were ever brought up. Also if we didn't have any attestations of Sanskrit, I also get the feeling that PIE would be reconstructed vastly differently.

The PIE stop system is indeed quite odd, and perhaps misreconstructed. Some people say that the PIE "palatovelars" were just plain velars and the "plain velars" uvulars (and the "labiovelars", accordingly, labialized uvulars), and what regards the phonation types, there is a wildgrowth of alternative models, the "glottalic theory" being the most famous. IMHO the glottalic theory does make sense, but perhaps for a pre-stage rather than the time of breakup; one idea I have is that the "voiced aspirates" actually were voiced fricatives.

Fricatives fortifying is not a very common change from what I remember though--especially not into extremely typologically rare voiced aspirates (why not just normal voiced stops) so maybe we're stuck again.

It's funny how the more we work on PIE, the less SAE it becomes. PIE is incredibly un-european.

meanwhile there are no clear examples of palatal stops becoming velar stops in the entirety of linguistic writing, so hypothesizing a merger of kʲ and k in, say, greek is absolutely grotesque, unless you're doing it ironically

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Improbable_things_happen

[R.Rusanov]

something is improbable, q.e.d. it happened

impeccable logic

[Thomas Winwood]

The argument is "'it's unlikely, therefore it didn't happen' is invalid", not "it's unlikely, therefore it happened".

[TaylorS]

Slightly off topic, but I am currently reading The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, it is a really good book on IE studies and IE archeology. I am currently only at the Sredny-Stog culture (when Anatolian branched off and spread into the Balkans following the collapse of Copper Age "Old Europe") and it is already blowing my mind.

This is a good book, yes, but it almost entirely talks about developments in Central Asia. It doesn't say anything about what went on in Central Europe, for instance.

Yeah, that was a bit disappointing, I was expecting more on the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker horizons. I really like his discussions about the interactions between the PIE-speaking Yamnya people and the Cucuteni-Tropolye culture, though. He argues that the Globular Amphora culture that emerged from the fusion of the 2 cultures is where the dialect ancestral to Proto-Germanic was spoken.

[TaylorS]

May I ask, what exactly blew your mind? (I haven't read the book, btw.) I'm interested in what the book talks about exactly.

The putting together of evidence from both archeology and what PIE vocabulary tells us about the culture of it's speakers. It gives such a fuller view on what these folks were like.

Also, the timing of when the various branches of the language family tree separated fits the archeology perfectly.

[TaylorS]

It's funny how the more we work on PIE, the less SAE it becomes. PIE is incredibly un-european.

The same thing happened to reconstructions of Proto-Semitic, IIRC. It seems to look less and less like Hebrew and Arabic and more and more like Amharic. It is even reconstructed to have /tɬʼ/, fer Christ's sake!

[hwhatting]

some arabic dialects have g>ʤ, q>g (q may have been voiced)

And with a further shift q>ʤ (via g) in some Gulf dialects.

I actually think that the idea of reconstructing k q k^w, and that k' (k^j) only was a feature of the Satem languages (plus Albanian & Luwian), has merit.

[KathTheDragon]

So, Satem does k > k', then all the dialects do q > k?

[WeepingElf]

Fricatives fortifying is not a very common change from what I remember though--especially not into extremely typologically rare voiced aspirates (why not just normal voiced stops) so maybe we're stuck again.

Voiced fricatives fortifying to voiced stops is not all that rare. It happened in various Germanic languages. And if the "voiced aspirates" were fricatives, it happened in about half of the IE branches, too. But "voiced aspirates" are so typologically rare in themselves that saying the change necessary in my model for Indic was "not very common" is a truism and just begs the question.

[KathTheDragon]

But "voiced aspirates" are so typologically rare in themselves that saying the change necessary in my model for Indic was "not very common" is a truism and just begs the question.

And:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Improbable_things_happen

[jal]

But "voiced aspirates" are so typologically rare in themselves that saying the change necessary in my model for Indic was "not very common" is a truism and just begs the question.

And:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Improbable_things_happen

When it comes to reconstructing languages, I would always opt for the more plausible solution (Occham's razor and all), but yeah, improbable things do happen. What do we know about voiced aspirates in the rare languages they do occur? What's the aspiration, /ɦ/? Does that make breathy voice of the vowel onsets?


JAL

[KathTheDragon]

A quick survey of the wikipedia article says that there is at least one language that contrasts breathy-voiced stops in the onset with breathy-voiced vowels. The article cites Indo-Aryan and the Nguni languages (subgroup of Bantu) as generally having breathy-voiced stops, though that doesn't exclude the possibility of other languages having them. They do seem to be relatively rare, but not as rare as aspirated voiced stops.

[Chagen]

Yay, my Indo-European Linguistics by Brügger came~

However I want to ask a question that has less to do with PIE and more to do with its studies--why do many PIE textbooks feel this bizarre compulsion to never transliterate Greek? Old academic elitism? They don't represent Sanskrit in Devanagari or OCS in Cyrillic so this just strikes me as a weird archaism from the days when it was assumed every educated person just by default had taken Greek.

I mean I can read Greek kinda okay so it's not really that annoying, but it does look a little jarring to see roman alphabet everywhere and then Greek awkwardly sitting in the middle of the sentences.

[WeepingElf]

Yay, my Indo-European Linguistics by Brügger came~

However I want to ask a question that has less to do with PIE and more to do with its studies--why do many PIE textbooks feel this bizarre compulsion to never transliterate Greek? Old academic elitism? They don't represent Sanskrit in Devanagari or OCS in Cyrillic so this just strikes me as a weird archaism from the days when it was assumed every educated person just by default had taken Greek.

I mean I can read Greek kinda okay so it's not really that annoying, but it does look a little jarring to see roman alphabet everywhere and then Greek awkwardly sitting in the middle of the sentences.

Well, you gave the answer yourself. Greek has been part of the higher education curriculum for centuries, and the Greek alphabet is also not hard to learn. Still today, most people interested in IE historical linguistics are probably familiar with the Greek alphabet. Hence, transliteration is deemed unnecessary. It is true, though, that the untransliterated Greek words look somewhat like foreign bodies in an English text, though not much more than transliterated material from other languages which is usually in italics. If you ask me, source material should stand out typographically.

What I find more annoying than untransliterated Greek are untranslated quotes. I once got stuck in a paper because an important matter was expressed by means of an untranslated quotation in Russian. Fortunately, I found someone who could translate it for me. An even bigger problem than untranslated quotes is key literature that has not been translated. In Uralic historical linguistics, much important work is available only in Finnish or Hungarian, and in Caucasian linguistics, much is available only in Russian or Georgian.

[Chagen]

I understand it's tradition, but it feels very inconsistent to me. The book doesn't write Latin deivos and datus as <DEIVOS> <DATVS> nor does it put Vedic in Devanagari (and those two are as important to the field as Greek, especially Sanskrit, without which the entire field of Historical Linguistics might not exist (or a least be heavily delayed in coming forth)! Nor does anyone put Hittite in Akadian Cuneiform or Old Norse in runes.

It is by no means a dealbreaker, but it does feel like a bizarre and archaic appeal to a pointless tradition. It's as if mathematicians used roman numerals for no real reason whenever talking about geometry but nowhere else.