European languages before Indo-European

[Octavià]

As I said before, there's no need to assume ALL IE languages are descendents from a single protolanguage (e.g. a tree model). This PoV, which unfortunately has become a dogma, actually brings more trouble than benefits.

Ok, so how is this hypothesis better able to explain the available data?

In earlier posts I've stated some of the drawbracks of the traditional model. You should review them.

Obviously the tree model is an oversimplification of language evolution; it's not a dogma if nobody really takes the tree model perfectly correct.

IMHO, this is what has happened in the case of the IE family. Almost everybody insist on a single PIE despite the difficulties.

Besides the "consonantal shift" of Germanic and Armenian, the sound system of traditional PIE has other drawbacks like the ambiguity of the "laryngeal" symbols *H₁, *H₂, *H₃, ... and even *y.

What? How is ambiguity bad, if we don't have enough evidence for what these sounds actually were?

I disagree. There's enough evidence to postulate these values (taken after Martinet: Des steppes aux océans):
H₁ = /ʔ/ ~ /h/
H₂ = /χ/ ~ /ħ/
H₃ = /ʁ^w/ ~ /ʕ^w/

This reduces the ambiguity, although it doesn't cancel it completely. In any case, this should be enough for IE-ists to stop using the old-fashioned term "laryngeal".

ambiguity of ... *y

How so?

Because in some cases this *y is reflected in Greek as h/0 but zd in others.

[WeepingElf]

Talskubilos (or should I call you Octaviano?), I am confused.

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but you commit all sorts of leaps of logic (such as citing loanwords in Latin as evidence for Kartvelian influence on Germanic), and often contradict yourself. I have lost track long ago, and don't have a good idea just what is your hypothesis. Could you please sum it up for us all?

[Octavià]

Talskubilos (or should I call you Octaviano?), I am confused.

If you want to adress me by my first name, I prefer to use the Catalan form Octavià or Tavi for short. Octaviano is too ugly for me. I'd also like to know if you prefer I call you "Jörg" or "WeepingElf".

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but you commit all sorts of leaps of logic (such as citing loanwords in Latin as evidence for Kartvelian influence on Germanic), and often contradict yourself. I have lost track long ago, and don't have a good idea just what is your hypothesis. Could you please sum it up for us all?

Surely I haven't expressed myself good enough.

My primary field of research are European substrate languages, including those which in a more or less ortodox way are part of the IE family. As I said earlier, IMHO there wasn't a single but several related protolanguages inside the IE family, one of which (Pontic), the direct ancestor of languages like Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Albanian and possibly also Celtic, adquired a superior status and became a superstratum to anguages such as Balto-Slavic, Italic and Germanic, which descend from other(s) protolanguage(s), which I named "Hesperic" and "Danubian" after your own theory.

Apparently, Hesperic was spoken in NW Europe, while Danubian is from the Balkan-Central Europe area. As a very rough guide, words labelled as "NW" in Mallory & Adams would be from Hesperic, those with "WC" from Danubian and those with "GA" or no label from Pontic. The separation between these groups must have taken place at the Mesolithic, long before than in std theories. I'm currently working out the isoglosses between them by studying sound correspondences between cognate forms.

There were of course other non-IE substrate languages, either related to North Caucasian (mostly, but not exclusively, NEC), Semitic or Kartvelian (e.g. those loanwords in Latin and Spanish).

[Morrígan]

Because in some cases this *y is reflected in Greek as h/0 but zd in others.

How is this at all odd? In most cases, AFAIK, this is caused by laryngeal interference supported by other evidence.

[WeepingElf]

Talskubilos (or should I call you Octaviano?), I am confused.

If you want to adress me by my first name, I prefer to use the Catalan form Octavià or Tavi for short. Octaviano is too ugly for me. I'd also like to know if you prefer I call you "Jörg" or "WeepingElf".

OK, let's keep to "Talskubilos" and "WeepingElf".

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but you commit all sorts of leaps of logic (such as citing loanwords in Latin as evidence for Kartvelian influence on Germanic), and often contradict yourself. I have lost track long ago, and don't have a good idea just what is your hypothesis. Could you please sum it up for us all?

Surely I haven't expressed myself good enough.

My primary field of research are European substrate languages, including those which in a more or less ortodox way are part of the IE family. As I said earlier, IMHO there wasn't a single but several related protolanguages inside the IE family, one of which (Pontic), the direct ancestor of languages like Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Albanian and possibly also Celtic, adquired a superior status and became a superstratum to anguages such as Balto-Slavic, Italic and Germanic, which descend from other(s) protolanguage(s), which I named "Hesperic" and "Danubian" after your own theory.

Then you misuse those labels. It is never a good idea to take a name coined by someone else and fill it with a different meaning. That only leads to misunderstandings. What TaylorS and I mean by "Hesperic" and "Danubian" are languages distantly related to IE, branching off about 2000 years still before Anatolian, that are exitinct by now, and were spoken by the first Neolithic farmers in Central Europe and the lower Danube area, respectively. Hesperic languages have left their traces in the Old European hydronymy.

The exact order of the divergences in Non-Anatolian IE are hard to discern, and the scholars are divided on that matter. Your "Pontic" group (minus Celtic, which IMHO goes together with Italic) actually makes sense and is indeed supported by many scholars.

Apparently, Hesperic was spoken in NW Europe, while Danubian is from the Balkan-Central Europe area. As a very rough guide, words labelled as "NW" in Mallory & Adams would be from Hesperic, those with "WC" from Danubian and those with "GA" or no label from Pontic. The separation between these groups must have taken place at the Mesolithic, long before than in std theories. I'm currently working out the isoglosses between them by studying sound correspondences between cognate forms.

I'm sorry, but a Mesolithic divergence within IE is impossible. The agricultural, wheeled-vehicle etc. terminology was inherited from PIE because the sound correspondences are regular. If PIE was Mesolithic, these world would have to have been borrowed from language to language, and the sound correspondences irregular. But it seems that you don't care about regular sound correspondences anyway

There were of course other non-IE substrate languages, either related to North Caucasian (mostly, but not exclusively, NEC), Semitic or Kartvelian (e.g. those loanwords in Latin and Spanish).

There certainly were non-IE languages before the spread of IE; four stocks still live today, and a few others lived long enough to leave written records. I am agnostic about their interrelationships. They may stem from the languages of the first European Homo sapiens spoken 40,000 years ago - a time to deep for our current methods.

[Octavià]

What TaylorS and I mean by "Hesperic" and "Danubian" are languages distantly related to IE, branching off about 2000 years still before Anatolian, that are exitinct by now, and were spoken by the first Neolithic farmers in Central Europe and the lower Danube area, respectively. Hesperic languages have left their traces in the Old European hydronymy.

IMHO, a significant part of these (proto)languages, although technically extinct, still survive in present-day IE languages. This is our main point of disagreement.

The exact order of the divergences in Non-Anatolian IE are hard to discern, and the scholars are divided on that matter. Your "Pontic" group (minus Celtic, which IMHO goes together with Italic) actually makes sense and is indeed supported by many scholars.

Don't forget Proto-Pontic is actually the protolanguage upon tradtional PIE has been modelled. More precisely, it's what you call "(Late) PIE".

I'm sorry, but a Mesolithic divergence within IE is impossible. The agricultural, wheeled-vehicle etc. terminology was inherited from PIE because the sound correspondences are regular. If PIE was Mesolithic, these world would have to have been borrowed from language to language, and the sound correspondences irregular. But it seems that you don't care about regular sound correspondences anyway

I think you still don't understand me. In my model, there's not a single "PIE" but several ones (that is, not a single-node tree model), the most recent and "innovative" of which is precisely Pontic. The wheeled-wehicle lexicon is then part of a Pontic superstratum in most IE languages (except Anatolian and probably also Tocharian), which represents an aculturation process due to élite dominance. No wonder sound correspondences are regular, for Pontic is the model upon which traditional PIE has been built. Hence your counterargument becames a circular one.

There certainly were non-IE languages before the spread of IE; four stocks still live today, and a few others lived long enough to leave written records. I am agnostic about their interrelationships. They may stem from the languages of the first European Homo sapiens spoken 40,000 years ago - a time to deep for our current methods.

I disagree. At least some of these languages date from the expansion of farming ecomomy in the Neolitic à la Renfrew and have living relatives in North Caucasian and Semitic. Others might be older but they would be still within the Nostratic/Eurasiatic phylum (IMHO std chronologies are too low).

[Octavià]

Because in some cases this *y is reflected in Greek as h/0 but zd in others.

How is this at all odd? In most cases, AFAIK, this is caused by laryngeal interference supported by other evidence.

This is the traditional explanation, but it looks insatisfactory to me.

[WeepingElf]

What TaylorS and I mean by "Hesperic" and "Danubian" are languages distantly related to IE, branching off about 2000 years still before Anatolian, that are exitinct by now, and were spoken by the first Neolithic farmers in Central Europe and the lower Danube area, respectively. Hesperic languages have left their traces in the Old European hydronymy.

IMHO, a significant part of these (proto)languages, although technically extinct, still survive in present-day IE languages. This is our main point of disagreement.

I do think that there could be Hesperic loanwords in western IE languages; I also consider it likely that the Germanic sound shift may have been caused by a Hesperic substratum, and the "weird" grammatical transformation of the Insular Celtic languages perhaps as well. But the western IE languages are still overwhelmingly Late IE and not Hesperic - not any more than French is Celtic.

The exact order of the divergences in Non-Anatolian IE are hard to discern, and the scholars are divided on that matter. Your "Pontic" group (minus Celtic, which IMHO goes together with Italic) actually makes sense and is indeed supported by many scholars.

Don't forget Proto-Pontic is actually the protolanguage upon tradtional PIE has been modelled. More precisely, it's what you call "(Late) PIE".

The standard model accounts for Italic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic quite well. It is true that Ancient Greek and the ancient Indo-Iranian languages have been the most important sources for the standard model, but that does not mean that the other IE languages can't descend from what the standard model attempts to model.

I'm sorry, but a Mesolithic divergence within IE is impossible. The agricultural, wheeled-vehicle etc. terminology was inherited from PIE because the sound correspondences are regular. If PIE was Mesolithic, these world would have to have been borrowed from language to language, and the sound correspondences irregular. But it seems that you don't care about regular sound correspondences anyway

I think you still don't understand me. In my model, there's not a single "PIE" but several ones (that is, not a single-node tree model), the most recent and "innovative" of which is precisely Pontic. The wheeled-wehicle lexicon is then part of a Pontic superstratum in most IE languages (except Anatolian and probably also Tocharian), which represents an aculturation process due to élite dominance. No wonder sound correspondences are regular, for Pontic is the model upon which traditional PIE has been built. Hence your counterargument becames a circular one.

If the vocabulary in question was part of a "Pontic" superstratum, it would be expected to show different sound correpondences from the rest of the vocabulary - because before the time of borrowing, the two parts of the vocabulary would have followed different developments in the different languages. But that is not the case! Such mismatches are the way loanwords are detected. The massive Iranian loanword layer in Armenian was singled out that way; so could the many Norman French loanwords in English, even if we did not know first hand that English has borrowed them from Norman French. There are no such irregularities in the western IE languages, at least not ones that separate Neolithic farming terminology from the culture-independent basic vocabulary.

There certainly were non-IE languages before the spread of IE; four stocks still live today, and a few others lived long enough to leave written records. I am agnostic about their interrelationships. They may stem from the languages of the first European Homo sapiens spoken 40,000 years ago - a time to deep for our current methods.

I disagree. At least some of these languages date from the expansion of farming ecomomy in the Neolitic à la Renfrew and have living relatives in North Caucasian and Semitic. Others might be older but they would be still within the Nostratic/Eurasiatic phylum (IMHO std chronologies are too low).

Yes. Some languages were spread by Neolithic farmers, and some may have been related to Indo-European. Others may have continued Mesolithic or Upper Palaeolithic languages.

[Richard W]

The ... wheeled-vehicle etc. terminology was inherited from PIE because the sound correspondences are regular.

Like Proto-Algonquian *paaškesikani 'gun' and *eškoteewaapoowi 'whiskey'?

Incidentally, are Sanskrit cakrá- and Greek kúklos actually regular?

[WeepingElf]

The ... wheeled-vehicle etc. terminology was inherited from PIE because the sound correspondences are regular.

Like Proto-Algonquian *paaškesikani 'gun' and *eškoteewaapoowi 'whiskey'?

I know what you are talking about. Those are transparent compounds which were translated from language to language, creating the semblance of inherited words. Most of the IE words in question aren't transparent compounds, so this kind of loan translation could not have happened that easily.

Incidentally, are Sanskrit cakrá- and Greek kúklos actually regular?

I don't have the sound change lists at hand, but cakrá- is definitely regular; I am not so sure about kúklos - labiovelars are a complicated matter in Greek.

[Richard W]

It could also be a matter of what splits such a tree should be recording - how long has the North Slavic dialect continuum been dead? Note that Lusatian is shown as splitting off from the languages of the North Slavic continuum. As Frisian has remained part of the West Germanic continuum and English has not, perhaps it is right that Frisian should be assessed as more closely related to Flemish than to English.

I really see no justification whatsoever for Polish being grouped with East Slavic as opposed to the other non-Lechitic West Slavic languages. The division between West (incl. Polish) and East Slavic is one of the oldest in the Slavic family...

And doesn't this division actually extend into the South Slavic languages?

And what do you mean "Lusatian is shown as splitting off from the languages of the North Slavic continuum"; Lusatian (ie, Sorbian) is just another subbranch of West Slavic.

I am describing the tree in Figure 1a. The initial split of the Slavic languages is into South Slavic and the rest (traditional East and West Slavic). The first split of the rest is between Sorbian and the (other?) members of the North Slavic dialect continuum.

Has anyone actually analysed these surprising results? I suspect they result from an inability to handle dialect continua using a tree model. Also, I've seen a claim that Poles and Belorussians were distinguished by religious denomination in the expulsions at the end of WW II.

[Morrígan]

I don't have the sound change lists at hand, but cakrá- is definitely regular; I am not so sure about kúklos - labiovelars are a complicated matter in Greek.

It is, I think. The change *kʷ → k occurs before or after *u, IIRC.

[Richard W]

Most of the IE words in question [wheel-technology terms] aren't transparent compounds, so this kind of loan translation could not have happened that easily.

Calques are a strong possibility - many of the words are not lexically isolated, and someone has already mentioned transfers from sled technology.

[Octavià]

I do think that there could be Hesperic loanwords in western IE languages; I also consider it likely that the Germanic sound shift may have been caused by a Hesperic substratum, and the "weird" grammatical transformation of the Insular Celtic languages perhaps as well. But the western IE languages are still overwhelmingly Late IE and not Hesperic - not any more than French is Celtic.

Maybe.

The standard model accounts for Italic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic quite well. It is true that Ancient Greek and the ancient Indo-Iranian languages have been the most important sources for the standard model, but that does not mean that the other IE languages can't descend from what the standard model attempts to model.

I've already stated my reasons to think otherwise, but you haven't adressed them.

If the vocabulary in question was part of a "Pontic" superstratum, it would be expected to show different sound correpondences from the rest of the vocabulary - because before the time of borrowing, the two parts of the vocabulary would have followed different developments in the different languages. But that is not the case!

I don't pretend Pontic lexicon was limited to words related to wheeled vehicles, for this is ridiculous.

There are no such irregularities in the western IE languages, at least not ones that separate Neolithic farming terminology from the culture-independent basic vocabulary.

I think you were speaking about wheeled vehicles, not Neolithic farming technology, which by definition CAN'T be from what you call "Late PIE".

I also remind you that irregular correspondences are very frequent in the lexicon commonly reconstructed for PIE. That is, the traditional model needs some "tuning" in order to fit the actual data.

Yes. Some languages were spread by Neolithic farmers, and some may have been related to Indo-European. Others may have continued Mesolithic or Upper Palaeolithic languages.

IMHO, the ancestor of IE languages is among the latter.

[Richard W]

I don't have the sound change lists at hand, but cakrá- is definitely regular; I am not so sure about kúklos - labiovelars are a complicated matter in Greek.

It is, I think. The change *kʷ → k occurs before or after *u, IIRC.

But what we have is *kʷe > ku, and relative to Sanskrit the Greek first syllable acquires stress. I'm not sure that the Old English variants hweol, hweowol and hweogol clarify matters.

I raised wheeled vehicles because I don't like the shallow chronology they imply - I'm not arguing for a Mesolithic spread.

[Tropylium]

IMHO there wasn't a single but several related protolanguages inside the IE family, one of which (Pontic), the direct ancestor of languages like Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Albanian and possibly also Celtic, adquired a superior status and became a superstratum to anguages such as Balto-Slavic, Italic and Germanic, which descend from other(s) protolanguage(s), which I named "Hesperic" and "Danubian" after your own theory.

How would you distinguish this scenario from one where BlSl, Italic and Germanian do genetically descend from Late PIE ("Pontic"), but contain words from LPIE-related substrates? To do this requires grammatical evidence, I think, and AFAIK the grammar of the "non-Pontic" branches aligns quite well with the "Pontic" ones.

Also, setting up intermediate proto-languages does not mean we need to reject the tree model altogether. Every reconstructed language is an approximation, whose primary aim is actually not to reconstruct the proto-language as spoken, but to be a "distillation" from which the descendant langs can be regularly divided. This implicitely ignores dialect variation in the original PIE speaking community for ease of exposition. However, if desired, such features can be look'd into as well.

I don't have the sound change lists at hand, but cakrá- is definitely regular; I am not so sure about kúklos - labiovelars are a complicated matter in Greek.

It is, I think. The change *kʷ → k occurs before or after *u, IIRC.

But what we have is *kʷe > ku, and relative to Sanskrit the Greek first syllable acquires stress. I'm not sure that the Old English variants hweol, hweowol and hweogol clarify matters.

Is there a law such as *ekʷC ukC ?

(Speaking of this root, I'm also fairly stumped by the semantic development in Baltic *kaklas, "neck". Perhaps via an intermediate "axle"?)

[Octavià]

IMHO there wasn't a single but several related protolanguages inside the IE family, one of which (Pontic), the direct ancestor of languages like Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Albanian and possibly also Celtic, adquired a superior status and became a superstratum to anguages such as Balto-Slavic, Italic and Germanic, which descend from other(s) protolanguage(s), which I named "Hesperic" and "Danubian" after your own theory.

How would you distinguish this scenario from one where BlSl, Italic and Germanian do genetically descend from Late PIE ("Pontic"), but contain words from LPIE-related substrates? To do this requires grammatical evidence, I think, and AFAIK the grammar of the "non-Pontic" branches aligns quite well with the "Pontic" ones.

There're actually some differences in morphology between these groups which lead to the Spanish Indo-Europeanist F. Rodríguez Adrados to postulate a separate grouping for these languages (IE III B=non-Pontic and IE III A=Pontic). Gamkrelidze & Ivanov also made a similar division of non-Anatolian IE.

Also, setting up intermediate proto-languages does not mean we need to reject the tree model altogether. Every reconstructed language is an approximation, whose primary aim is actually not to reconstruct the proto-language as spoken, but to be a "distillation" from which the descendant langs can be regularly divided. This implicitely ignores dialect variation in the original PIE speaking community for ease of exposition. However, if desired, such features can be look'd into as well.

I've already stated why I think the tree model is inadequate: what you call "dialect variation in the original PIE" were already different (although related) languages right in the Neolithic. And most of the words attributed to PIE are actually from one of these languages, Pontic, which IMHO became a superstratum to non-Pontic languages. Of course, Pontic languages have also non-Pontic substrates, but this is another matter.

[TaylorS]

I do think that PIE was a fairly large dialect continuum, which is the source of a lot of the irregularities being discussed here. I suspect that it had 2 main dialect regions, spoken by 2 different groups. A SW dialect centered around the Dneister and the Black Sea coast spoken by farmers that did some livestock raising, which prehaps included the Cucuteni Culture, and a NE dialect spoken in inland Ukraine where the classic "Kurgan" culture was developing.

In 1989 Irish-American archaeologist J.P. Mallory published a groundbreaking book called In Search of the Indo-Europeans, in which he used the data from archaeological sites in the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture's region to demonstrate that part of the Kurgan culture (which he refers to by their more accepted name of Yamna culture) established settlements throughout the entire Cucuteni-Trypillian culture's area, and that these two cultures lived side-by-side for over 2000 years of their existence before the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture finally ended.[23] Artifacts from both cultures are found within each of their respective archaeological settlement sites, attesting to an open trade that took place between them.[23] Additionally, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture sites during this entire period indicate that there were no weapons found, nor were there indications of violent killings of people that would be commonplace if there had been warfare or raiding taking place. The conclusion that Mallory reached was that there was a gradual transformation that took place, instead of a violent conquest.

Note that I call it a dialect continuum. a PIE speaker would understand folks from a 100 miles away just fine, but a PIE speaker in Romania would not be able to understand a PIE speaker from the Volga, they are on opposites of the continuum.

[Tropylium]

The the long-range folks I respect are the ones that emphasize cognates in morphology, such as M-T Pronouns and verbal endings. the problem with most Mass-Comparativists is that they start with words of modern languages, NOT words of reconstructed proto-languages. We should be looking for cognates between PIE, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Altaic, Proto-Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Proto-Kartvelian, etc., not modern languages.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. And to reiterate the importance of morphology, there is Vajda's 2009 paper on the Na-Dene/Yenisei connection which is founded largely on morphological correspondences in the verb complex, and comparisons between reconstructed proto-languages for these groups.

Tho I am currently having a discussion with a guy who claims there are vital deficiencies, including major morphological differences in the Yeniseian languages other than Ket.* The newest Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska supposedly has some critique as well.

*That he claims the ND system can be related to Uralic, if some suffixes are reversed to prefixes is a pretty big warning light however… and this apparently mainly from a comparision with Eyak, not PAET.

[Octavià]

I do think that PIE was a fairly large dialect continuum, which is the source of a lot of the irregularities being discussed here. I suspect that it had 2 main dialect regions, spoken by 2 different groups. A SW dialect centered around the Dneister and the Black Sea coast spoken by farmers that did some livestock raising, which prehaps included the Cucuteni Culture, and a NE dialect spoken in inland Ukraine where the classic "Kurgan" culture was developing.

At least we're walking on a common ground, but IMHO these two groups were probably already differentiated at the time of the Black Sea Flood (c. 5,600 BC) in the Neolithic. Pontic would arise from the "NE dialect" and Balto-Slavic (plus other languages) from the "SW dialect".

[TaylorS]

At least we're walking on a common ground, but IMHO these two groups were probably already differentiated at the time of the Black Sea Flood (c. 5,600 BC) in the Neolithic. Pontic would arise from the "NE dialect" and Balto-Slavic (plus other languages) from the "SW dialect".

I strongly disagree. As the Wiki article states, the farmers and the pastorialists overlapped for 2000 years, they must have been part of a continuous dialect continuum.

IMO the SW dialects first spun off Proto-Anatolian, then linguistic innovations from the NE dialects influenced those SW dialects, and the SW dialects developed their own innovations: the Augment, and a plosive voicing shift:

Voiced > Breathy Voice ("voiced aspirated")
Glottalized > Voiced

The later SE dialects gave rise to Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian. the later NW dialects gave rise to the rest.

[Octavià]

At least we're walking on a common ground, but IMHO these two groups were probably already differentiated at the time of the Black Sea Flood (c. 5,600 BC) in the Neolithic. Pontic would arise from the "NE dialect" and Balto-Slavic (plus other languages) from the "SW dialect".

I strongly disagree. As the Wiki article states,

Wikipedia is a second-hand source. It's better to have first-hand ones, like the original Mallory's 1989 book (which BTW was just my 2nd book on the subject after Renfrew's). Gamkrelidze-Ivanov's is also very useful, although I don't agree to some of their hypothesis.

the farmers and the pastorialists overlapped for 2000 years, they must have been part of a continuous dialect continuum.

No, this was an "interface" between two different cultures, which is a matter of language contact.

IMO the SW dialects first spun off Proto-Anatolian

Yes, but the terminus ante quem would be the Black Sea Flood (c. 5,600 BC).

The later SE dialects

SE??? IMHO, Pontic was located N of the Black Sea. From archaeology, it's also clear that Pontic speakers invaded the Low Danube-Balkan area from the NE and superimposed over the existing languages.

gave rise to Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian.

Don't forget Albanian, which is a close relative of Indo-Iranian.

[Grigor]

Isn't the placement of Albanian within IE uncertain? Are there any shared innovations between Albanian and Indo-Iranian for that matter?

[Morrígan]

[quote="Troᴘʏʟıum

I don't have the sound change lists at hand, but cakrá- is definitely regular; I am not so sure about kúklos - labiovelars are a complicated matter in Greek.

It is, I think. The change *kʷ → k occurs before or after *u, IIRC.

But what we have is *kʷe > ku, and relative to Sanskrit the Greek first syllable acquires stress. I'm not sure that the Old English variants hweol, hweowol and hweogol clarify matters.

Woops; looks like my brain exploded. Yeah, we should expect to find peplos in Greek, but I don't know about the dialetal variation in labiovelar developments in Greek. Could be a loan from another Greek dialect.

[Octavià]

Woops; looks like my brain exploded. Yeah, we should expect to find peplos in Greek, but I don't know about the dialetal variation in labiovelar developments in Greek. Could be a loan from another Greek dialect.

In Greek, *k^w > p except before front vowels, where it gives t. So the only way to get ku is from *ku.