WeepingElf wrote:I wish to resume here the discussion of the origin of the PIE stop grades we had on the Great PIE Thread and which led me to start this thread. (…) Now if the PIU/Mitian inventory was like Fortescue's Uralo-Siberian one, *t' could have emerged from the affricate *c (this would have to have gone somewhere as PIE doesn't have any affricate).
As you've already mentioned, this kind of thinking seems unlikely to go anywhere much, if it's not based in actual sound correspondences. And thinking that Uralic is "generally archaic" seems like a poor starting point as well. The bisyllabic CVCCV
root structure and general agglutination are maybe likely to be more archaic than the monosyllabic (s)CCVCC and fusionality in IE, but it does not mean that everything else would be archaic, too.
There is no PU *c /ts/, by the way; this is merely a typewriter-friendly alternate transcription from the 60s thru 80s, either for *ć (in which case *č gets rewritten → *z) or *č (in which case *ć gets rewritten→ *cj).
I don't think there's any actual evidence for PIE *d ~ PU *č or *ć to go around either, and I suspect the affricates in Uralic are not archaisms to begin with. *č and *ć could be from e.g. *Cs and *Cś (including *ns, *nś > *nč, *ńć). Hyllested has suggested there might be instead a correspondence with PIE *Kʷ ~ PU *č: e.g. PIE *h₃negʷʰ- ~ PU *künčə 'nail'; PIE *h₂angʷʰis 'snake' ~ PU *kunčV 'worm'. If so, this could be through either some earlier palatalization process in Uralic (*kʷe > *če), some velarization process in IE (*č > *[ʈʂ] > *[ʈʂʷ] > *kʷ), or maybe some kind of cluster simplification (*kr > *kw > *kʷ; *kr > *tr > *č). But it would be nice to find more than one example.
Related to the last possibility, I wonder what PIU phonotax could have been like. Are
all word-initial consonant clusters in PIE secondary, or has Uralic secondarily simplified some of them? There's a precedent in Middle Indo-Aryan, which simplified almost all Old IA consonant clusters (e.g. pr tr kr > p t k; rp rt rk > pp tt kk; sp st sk > (p)pʰ (t)tʰ (k)kʰ).
WeepingElf wrote:I mean like, one would come up with an Indo-Uralic correspondence set, e.g. (I don't know yet whether this set is valid or not) PIE *dh : PU *ð. But what was the PIU sound like? Taking a look at languages such as Eskimo-Aleut, or Fortescue's Uralo-Siberian reconstruction attempt, one may guess that the Proto-Indo-Uralic sound may have been *ð.
Let's suppose there is such a correspondence. The first thing I'd look into is typology: is d > ð or ð > d more likely? The more common option would seem to be the first. The second is common only in three specific cases:
– in fortition environments (word-initially in West Germanic)
– when combined with θ > t (Ossetic, Yaghnobi, Continental Nordic, Aramaic, standard Hebrew)
– as a kind of hypercorrection (standard Finnish /d/ for earlier /ð/, introduced from non-native pronunciation by Swedish speakers).
*ð in both Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut (and Chukotko-Kamchatkan) might be then simply parallel developments from an earlier *d.
This is all theoretical anyway, though, since the actual data doesn't really have clear recurring correspondences. A few good-looking pairs are:
*dʰ ~ *ð: PIE *h₂we-dʰ- ~ PU *kuða- 'to weave'; ? PIE *Hnedʰ- ~ PU *ńiðä- 'to bind' (neither very consistently attested)
*d ~ *ð: PIE *ḱad- 'to fall' ~ PU *śaða- to rain'
*nt ~ *ð: PIE *h₂ant- ~ PU *eðə- 'front'
*rd ~ *ð: PIE *ḱerd- ~ PU *śVðämə 'heart'
*rgʰ ~ *ð(k): PIE *bʰergʰ- 'high' ~ PU *piðə 'height, length', *pið-kä 'tall, long'
This is heterogeneous enough that at least some of these comparisons are most likely wrong. The first three have also been proposed to be loans instead.
KathTheDragon wrote:As an alternative to ejectives, we might consider implosives for PIU, yielding the PIE plain voiced stops, and the PU nasals.
This may be more likely, since as per Kümmel, we can find some decent data for this (e.g. PIE *deiḱ- 'to point' ~ PU *näkə- 'to see'). This has the benefit of providing a correspondence for PU *ŋ, which has no obvious counterpart in IE.
On the other hand, PU did not have *ŋ-, while PIE has plenty enough of *g- and *gʷ-. So that would need some kind of an explanation, too. There's *g ~ *k in e.g. PIE *gerh₂ōws 'crane' ~ PU *kurkə 'crane', but this could very easily be onomatopoetic (if inherited, we would probably expect a labiovelar in IE).
Assuming Proto-Mitian *m *n *ń *ŋ has similar problems. Why does Tungusic allow all four word-initially, Turkic none of them, and most others just the front nasals (*m *n and, if applicable, *ń)?
Again, typology suggests that the situation where *-ŋ- in particular was only allowed within a word (in Uralic, Mongolic, Yukaghir, CK, EA) probably develops from an earlier system where there was no **ŋ at all, and after which there was some kind of a word-internal cluster simplification such as *ng > *ŋ (this is how this situation developed in various languages like Germanic, Avestan or innovative parts of Dravidian, after all).
On the other hand, there do not seem to be any examples of either *ŋ or *ŋk in Uralic corresponding to an IE *nK cluster.
mèþru wrote:Here's some stuff I found on Wikipedia that can serve as a starting point:
Among the sound correspondences which Čop did assert were (1972:162) (…)
Čop's stuff is a decent starting point for data, but if you've ever actually looked at his papers (you can find scans of his compilation work
Indouralica online through the usual channels), they suffer from a lot of junk analyses. For one, there's gratuitous segmentation to make things "more comparable"; e.g. he compares Uralic *uwa 'flow, stream' (reliably established) with an internally reconstructed pre-PIE *aw- 'to flow', from which *w-ed- 'water' is then supposedly a derivative. On the other, to some extent there's the usual cherry-picking problem: comparisons between isolated single-branch terms like Finnic *liiva 'sand' ~ Greek λυμα 'dirt' (the former has been rather explained as a loan from Baltic *gleiwā).