European languages before Indo-European

[WeepingElf]

As we are talking about birds, it is sometimes said that some Germanic bird names are from an unknown substratum language. Alas, I haven't found much on this matter so far.

[CatDoom]

Well, for one thing, the word "bird" is itself of uncertain origin, though that's a peculiarity of English rather than the Germanic languages as a group.

[Pole, the]

birds aren't real. birds are a prescientific myth and it's high time that we purged this nonsense from our speech. when i go to mcdonald's, i sit by the window and watch the dinosaurs outside peck at bread crumbs

I like to think that dinosaurs aren't real. They're just fossil birds.

Nor reptiles are real. They are just retard mammals.

[Neon Fox]

Pole, dude, don't use "retard". It's a nasty thing to say.

[Pole, the]

Sorry.

[Neon Fox]

Sorry.

I am not particularly bugged, but I figured it would be helpful to know that the word's a slur. I always hate it when I stumble over something that I didn't know was offensive--if I'm going to offend people, I'm going to do it on purpose, thankyouverymuch! And since I don't have a dog in that fight, I can point it out calmly and without being hurt. Do as you like with the info.

Anyway, sorry to threadjack

[jal]

Nor reptiles are real. They are just [redacted] mammals.

No, they're polyphyletic, if you exclude birds.


JAL

[Pole, the]

Sorry.

I am not particularly bugged, but I figured it would be helpful to know that the word's a slur. I always hate it when I stumble over something that I didn't know was offensive--if I'm going to offend people, I'm going to do it on purpose, thankyouverymuch! And since I don't have a dog in that fight, I can point it out calmly and without being hurt. Do as you like with the info.

Anyway, sorry to threadjack

BTW, how is your work on Proto-Northeastern going?

[Neon Fox]

BTW, how is your work on Proto-Northeastern going?

Uh...look, the Winged Victory of Samothrace!

I have all sorts of interesting ideas about the culture, but the language, not so much.

[Terra]

I am not particularly bugged, but I figured it would be helpful to know that the word's a slur. I always hate it when I stumble over something that I didn't know was offensive--if I'm going to offend people, I'm going to do it on purpose, thankyouverymuch! And since I don't have a dog in that fight, I can point it out calmly and without being hurt. Do as you like with the info.

Anyway, sorry to threadjack

Has your name always been "Neon Fox"? You've been a member since 2003, but I don't remember you.

[Hallow XIII]

with 347 total posts in 11 years: would you?

[Neon Fox]

I am not particularly bugged, but I figured it would be helpful to know that the word's a slur. I always hate it when I stumble over something that I didn't know was offensive--if I'm going to offend people, I'm going to do it on purpose, thankyouverymuch! And since I don't have a dog in that fight, I can point it out calmly and without being hurt. Do as you like with the info.

Anyway, sorry to threadjack

Has your name always been "Neon Fox"? You've been a member since 2003, but I don't remember you.

It has, but I periodically do a thing where I don't post for, like, three years. :)

[CatDoom]

For what it's worth, I'm a fan of Proto-Northeastern; I've got a daughter I've been toying with that has a phonology roughly inspired by Maasai. Then again, I've got bits and pieces of daughters for about half the languages on Akana at this point...

[WeepingElf]

What is Proto-Northeastern?

[Neon Fox]

What is Proto-Northeastern?

The conlang I've been working on (very, very slowly) for Akana. That is, not on topic for the thread, alas. :)

[Tropylium]

As we are talking about birds, it is sometimes said that some Germanic bird names are from an unknown substratum language. Alas, I haven't found much on this matter so far.

Schrijver's "Language of Bird Names"? It's not so much explicitly a substratum of bird names, as much as a set of irregular words whose clearest examples are bid names. IIRC the actual defining feature is a "movable A" that is generally absent from Germanic when it should be present according to apparent western IE cognates. I think I had some documents about this somewhere…

[jal]

Googling for Schrijver and bird names, I found this random page, which gives a nice short introduction to the pre-IE European languages that are found as substratum.


JAL

[WeepingElf]

Googling for Schrijver and bird names, I found this random page, which gives a nice short introduction to the pre-IE European languages that are found as substratum.

Bookmarked. That is a very interesting page, thank you!

[Chagen]

I know this is incredibly late but...

Not necessarily; what about a theoretical dialect that had 0-grade ablaut on the e, which became *k^wklos, which later changed to kúklos?

But would that be a regular correspondence? Would the vocalisation of the rounding explain the accent retraction?

Irregular sound changes do happen, all irregularities do not have to be from a foreign substrate…

Isn't it one of the most fundamental axioms of Linguistics and Historical Linguistics specifically that ALL sound changes are perfectly regular and that "irregular" sound changes don't happen?

So sayeth my copy of Indo-European Language and Culture on page 5:

"Sound changes are, importantly, are regular and exceptionless [emphasis Fortson's]-- that is, they affect all the relevant examples of the particular sound(s) in the language. [emphasis mine]"

[zompist]

No. It was a dogma of the Neogrammarians, who prevailed in the late 19C over the earlier view that sound changes were merely tendencies. But the evidence on ongoing sound changes is that they diffuse word by word, and sometimes the process runs out of steam, leaving a few exceptions.

Larry Trask discusses this in his Historical Linguistics (ch. 10), and William Labov talks about it in his massive Principles of Linguistic Change.

It's still nearly regular on historical timeframes, and it's also the best rule of thumb: i.e., assume that a change is regular till proven otherwise, because if you don't look for subtle, conditioned regularities you probably won't find them.

[Zju]

Googling for Schrijver and bird names, I found this random page, which gives a nice short introduction to the pre-IE European languages that are found as substratum.


JAL

The very first sentence of that website?

The department of IE Comparative Linguistics at Leiden University has been working on a new Indo-European Etymological dictionary (IEED)[1] for more than a decade.

Does anyone have any news on this? It sounds promising.

[Tropylium]

No. It was a dogma of the Neogrammarians, who prevailed in the late 19C over the earlier view that sound changes were merely tendencies. But the evidence on ongoing sound changes is that they diffuse word by word, and sometimes the process runs out of steam, leaving a few exceptions.

Larry Trask discusses this in his Historical Linguistics (ch. 10), and William Labov talks about it in his massive Principles of Linguistic Change.

It's still nearly regular on historical timeframes, and it's also the best rule of thumb: i.e., assume that a change is regular till proven otherwise, because if you don't look for subtle, conditioned regularities you probably won't find them.

I am skeptical, FWIW. Sound changes in progress certainly diffuse. But do they do it on a word-by-word basis?

If they really did this, it is quite puzzling why sound changes still do run to completion, historically. And even more puzzling why you sometimes find what looks like a diffused sound change that in language A has been applied wider than in language B. We'd expect instead sound changes to leave leftovers all over the place, and to stop in all sorts of random places instead of nicely conditioned ones. And certainly we would not expect highly conditional sound changes to be observable at all, after the fact.

Consider e.g. *e > *i in Germanic: Proto-Germanic first innovated this shift in unstressed syllables; then it expanded to i-mutation of any *e followed by *i/*j, including by an *i that was *e before the previous change (demonstrating that this was a chronologically different stage); in Northwest Germanic it furthermore expanded to *e > *i before any coda nasal (loanwords in Finnic show that this was again not contemporary with the former); and Gothic finally got rid of short /e/ altogether. This is not a word-by-word cascade, it is an environment-by-environment one. Which seems a lot more reasonable.

And the very concept of "irregular change" is epistemologically troubling. Clearly something must decide if a word in a given speaker's idiolect changes its shape or not. If it's not a change in the underlying phonology, then what? Are we to attach half-lifes to individual instances of phonemes? — And of course, does this not imply that "regular changes" consist of iterated irregular changes, and therefore the apparent regularity is merely an accidental epiphenomen of some sort?

Assumptions of in-progress irregularity are a problem for chain shifts as well. Sound change has no memory. If we assume that e.g. the Great Vowel Shift originally rampaged thru English words one by one, should we not find abundant examples where a word underwent one change such as /aː/ > /ɛː/ during an early period, then got hit by a wave of /ɛː/ > /eː/, slightly later by /eː/ > /iː/, and finally was targetted by a late torrent of /iː/ > /əi/? Nothing such happens at all.

Regularity can of course be greatly mixed up afterwards by dialectal or sociolectal mixture. But such complications do not seem like sufficient evidence to conclude that all the historically known examples of regular conditioned sound changes happened as unsystematic "double-slit experiment" cascades of a word here, a word there, with no guiding overall principle observable during any one change.

[Tropylium]

Also, back on topic, Guus Kroonen talks about the "bird names" substrate in some detail here:
https://www.academia.edu/7041551/Non-In ... Hypothesis

[WeepingElf]

Also, back on topic, Guus Kroonen talks about the "bird names" substrate in some detail here:
https://www.academia.edu/7041551/Non-In ... Hypothesis

That article looks very interesting from leafing through it. Bookmarked. I shall re-read it more carefully later. Thank you for sharing!

[zompist]

Tropylium: yes, it's surprising; that's why linguistics is exciting.

Lexical diffusion wasn't postulated based on examination of historical sound change, but on observing ongoing sound change— an effort pioneered by Labov. He discusses the subject in three 500-page books, which aren't light reading. But look up the discussion in Trask.