The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Something that's been bugging me for a long time is how Szemerényi's Law mysteriously ignores the thematic accusative plural ending *-ons, despite acting on the identical amphikinetic masculine nominative singular ending. Even more oddly, no-one seems bothered by this when they talk about this. Can anyone shed some light on why this is the case?

User avatar
R.Rusanov
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 393
Joined: Sat Jan 05, 2013 1:59 pm
Location: Novo-je Orĭlovo

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by R.Rusanov »

ons in the acc. is a later develoment from oms
Slava, čĭstŭ, hrabrostĭ!

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

But then what about the ending *-oms, in *dheghoms? Note that the Law is typically stated as **-VRF > *-V:R where F includes *s and at least *h2, of the laryngeals.

User avatar
R.Rusanov
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 393
Joined: Sat Jan 05, 2013 1:59 pm
Location: Novo-je Orĭlovo

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by R.Rusanov »

dheghoms was generalized from paters like pods
Slava, čĭstŭ, hrabrostĭ!

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Huh. I suppose that works. So then Szemerényi's Law only affected sequences with coronal resonants (though I doubt any examples with *l exist)

Edit: just realised I should've written *-ōm < **-oms and *dheghōm < **dheghoms

User avatar
Sleinad Flar
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 124
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:18 pm
Location: Coriovallum, Germania Inferior

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

I don't agree with R. Rusanov's proposal, because that would mean that the change -ms to -ns would be rather late (at least operating after Szemerényi's law, and also after *dheg'hōm was supposedly formed by analogy). But the ending -ns is actually irregular and very persistent (one would expect the more regular -ms to survive), so therefore must be really old. Besides, there is no evidence for m > n before s elsewhere. No, IMO a possible change -ms to -ns must have occured way before Szemerényi's law.

Let's take a closer look at the thematic acc pl ending. Fortson mentions an alternative form *-ōns, surviving in Sanskrit and Umbrian, which according to him may be of PIE date. Szemerényi himself posits this as the original PIE form, and *-ons as a post-PIE shortened form (by analogy with *-ins and *-uns). If we follow this line of thought, Szemerényi's law actually did apply here: *-ons > *-ō(n), and *-ns was added to this secondarily.

(Another possibility is that there is no such thing as Szemerényi's law, and that there were simply two ways of forming the nom sg case: adding -s or lengthening the vowel before the final consonant. Sometimes both happened (*pōd-s). Beekes seems to be of this persuasion)
Last edited by Sleinad Flar on Fri Apr 10, 2015 5:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Was ist ist, was nicht ist ist möglich"
http://sleinadflar.deviantart.com

User avatar
WeepingElf
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1630
Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:00 pm
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Contact:

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Sleinad Flar wrote:(Another possibility is that there is no such thing as Szemerényi's law, and that there were simply two ways of forming the nom sg case: adding -s or lengthening the root vowel. Sometimes both happened (*pōd-s). Beekes seems to be of this persuasion)
Yes, this is a possibility. If "Szemerényi's Law" occurs only in those lengthened-vowel nominatives, it is probably not a sound change at all, but a morphological process. Perhaps two cases merged here (the *-s case perhaps an ergative, related to the genitive?). Are there instances of Szemerényi's Law elsewhere in PIE? I can't think of any.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

User avatar
Sleinad Flar
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 124
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:18 pm
Location: Coriovallum, Germania Inferior

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

I can't think of any either, and even worse than that: proterokinetic n-stems and r/n-stems had genitives in *-en-s, as evidenced by Avestan and Old Irish examples.
"Was ist ist, was nicht ist ist möglich"
http://sleinadflar.deviantart.com

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

KathAveara wrote:Huh. I suppose that works. So then Szemerényi's Law only affected sequences with coronal resonants (though I doubt any examples with *l exist)
They ought to. PIE had l-stem nouns - just not very many, and most of them analogised away in most daughters. The one that springs to mind is *ghebho:l
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

hwhatting
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2315
Joined: Fri Sep 13, 2002 2:49 am
Location: Bonn, Germany

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by hwhatting »

Sleinad Flar wrote:I don't agree with R. Rusanov's proposal, because that would mean that the change -ms to -ns would be rather late (at least operating after Szemerényi's law, and also after *dheg'hōm was supposedly formed by analogy). But the ending -ns is actually irregular and very persistent (one would expect the more regular -ms to survive), so therefore must be really old. Besides, there is no evidence for m > n before s elsewhere. No, IMO a possible change -ms to -ns must have occured way before Szemerényi's law.
But is there any instance of **-ms# in late PIE?
We have: 1) The Szemerényi cases, where **-Vms# is supposd to have become *-V:m#
2) The accusative plural, where **-Vms# > *-Vns# or *-V:n(s)# (see below)
3) Greek despotes < *dems pot- , where seemingly **-Vms# > -*Vs# (this assumes that the position counted as word-final in what seems to have become one unanalysable word at a stage before attested Greek)
4) There is *me(:)mso- "meat"; in most sucessor languages, the nasal is lost or the PoA is not clear. But there is Gothic mimz, which if taken at face value, would confirm the sequence *-Vms- for late PIE. But here we have *-VmsV-, i.e. a different environment.
One could also look at forms of *gwem-, but there seems to have been some mixing with *gweH2- in the successor languages, and there is also regularisation to be expected (which is also true of formations that are derived by suffixing -s- to roots ending in -m; if they haven't become intransparent, there's alwys the possibility of analogical restoration).
So, one solution seems to be that **-Vms# simply wasn't an admitted sequence in PIE and when it arose at different points of time, was eliminated in different ways.
Sleinad Flar wrote:Let's take a closer look at the thematic acc pl ending. Fortson mentions an alternative form *-ōns, surviving in Sanskrit and Umbrian, which according to him may be of PIE date. Szemerényi himself posits this as the original PIE form, and *-ons as a post-PIE shortened form (by analogy with *-ins and *-uns). If we follow this line of thought, Szemerényi's law actually did apply here: *-ons > *-ō(n), and *-ns was added to this secondarily.
But you'd still have to account for *-ins and *-uns not becoming *-i:(n) and *-u:(n) in that scenario. It could be done, sure. OTOH, the forms with long vowel may be due to developments in Umbrian and Sanscrit, or due to influence of the Nom. Pl. *-o:s.
(Another possibility is that there is no such thing as Szemerényi's law, and that there were simply two ways of forming the nom sg case: adding -s or lengthening the vowel before the final consonant. Sometimes both happened (*pōd-s). Beekes seems to be of this persuasion)
Certainly possible. The neat thing about Szemerenyi's law is that it explains two different ways of forming the Nom. Sg. as going back to one formation historically, which IMO speaks for it.

User avatar
Sleinad Flar
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 124
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:18 pm
Location: Coriovallum, Germania Inferior

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

I was about to write a rebuttal to hwhatting's excellent points, but then I had a change of heart. In fact, the proposals as stated here could work:

1a. Szemér's law is often stated as *-VRs > *-V:R, but this isn't entirely correct: it also applies to the sequence *-Vss > *-V:s. A similar sound-law applies to the accusative of m-stems: *-Vmm > *-V:m. The latter might even be the pivot for nominatives in *-V:m by analogy, if Szemér's law didn't work on *-Vms.
1a. In fact, Szemér's law might have had an intermediate step: *-VRs > *-VRR > *-V:R, which would explain why it only works on coronal resonants and /s/, as their POA is the same.
2. Why didn't this work on proterokinetic and acrostatic genitives then? Simple, because those genitives originally ended in *-os or *-es (*genésos) and only later shortened to *-s in certain environments (*ph2wéns).
3. A sound change auslaut (or tautosyllabic?) *-ms > *-ns is probable, and even late. The mention of *dems potis is what ticked me off here: it's Avestan reflex is dǝ̄ṇg pati-, where ṇg points to *-ns IIRC. Given point 2, the development would have been *dem-os > *dem-s > *dens.

There is a minor point I wish to adress though:
But you'd still have to account for *-ins and *-uns not becoming *-i:(n) and *-u:(n) in that scenario.
Not necessarily, as PIE didn't have the sounds i: and u:. :mrgreen:

(I didn't only have a change of heart, but also the first BSOD (blue screen of death) during the making of this post. Luckily windows remembered the text, so I didn't have to retype. Yay windows!)
Last edited by Sleinad Flar on Wed Apr 15, 2015 1:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Was ist ist, was nicht ist ist möglich"
http://sleinadflar.deviantart.com

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

But that's just begging the question!

PIE only marginally had *o: as well - in some poorly-understand ablaut situations (where iirc it's thought it might have been quite late?), and as a result of sz's law.

So saying "Sz's law creates *o: but not *u: because PIE doesn't have *u: (because Sz's law doesn't create it)" is kind of circular!
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

hwhatting
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2315
Joined: Fri Sep 13, 2002 2:49 am
Location: Bonn, Germany

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by hwhatting »

Salmoneus wrote:So saying "Sz's law creates *o: but not *u: because PIE doesn't have *u: (because Sz's law doesn't create it)" is kind of circular!
Exactly.
PIE only marginally had *o: as well - in some poorly-understand ablaut situations (where iirc it's thought it might have been quite late?), and as a result of sz's law.
Another source of *o: is contraction, as in o-stem nom. pl. *-o:s < *-o-es, or in the subjunctive. But I think these contractions are later than Szemerényi's law.
@ Seinad Fleir: I think we need to look at the chronology here. E.g., I'm not convinced that the acc.pl. in *-ns is terribly old - the whole plural oblique case system of PIE looks like it developd later than the case system in the singular. Things like *dems or *pH2wens, OTOH, must have arisen when absence of stress still created zero grade. And as we are talking about *dems, if it really was *dens in late PIE, then despote:s is hard to explain - *-ens gives *-es only in some of the Greek dialects; in Ionic-Attic we would expect *deispote:s, which is not attested, though. Of course, *-ens > *-es could be explained as a one-off development in an etymologically opaque word. As for the Avestan form, could it also go back to *-ems? Anyway, as other forms of the root noun *dem- are attested in Avestan and in Sanscrit, there's a good chance that the root noun inflection was still alive in Indo-Iranian, and that dǝ̄ṇg reflects not the late PIE form of the genitive of *dem-, but a form where whatever nasal it reflects was restored by analogy with the other case forms. (I'm not arguing against your ideas here, I'm just trying to sort out my own thoughts.)

User avatar
Sleinad Flar
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 124
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:18 pm
Location: Coriovallum, Germania Inferior

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

EDIT: In reply to Sal:

It is, but I was jesting (hence the emoticon).

OTOH, a lot of reconstructions leave out and as independent phonemes (they're usually described as allophones of /j/ and /w/), and [i:] and [u:] are usually explained as post-PIE developments of *iH and *uH. Outside of those accusatives *-ins and *-uns, there are simply no cases to which Szemér's law could have applied to and , as there are no strong stems in *-ir or *-un or the like for Szemér's law to apply to.

And o: is quite common in the thematic inflection, usually by contraction, e.g. *-o:s < *-o-es, *-o:ys < *-oy-is?. The only time I've seen it in roots (outside of stuff like *po:d-s) is in LIV in causative/iterative verbs of the *Co:C-ye-type, which is not accepted by everyone, to put it mildly.

EDIT: hijacked by hwhatting. I'll respond to your points later.
"Was ist ist, was nicht ist ist möglich"
http://sleinadflar.deviantart.com

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Sleinad Flar wrote:OTOH, a lot of reconstructions leave out and as independent phonemes (they're usually described as allophones of /j/ and /w/), and [i:] and [u:] are usually explained as post-PIE developments of *iH and *uH. Outside of those accusatives *-ins and *-uns, there are simply no cases to which Szemér's law could have applied to and , as there are no strong stems in *-ir or *-un or the like for Szemér's law to apply to.

Because under those analyses, the endings are structurally *-yRs and *-wRs, which Szemerényi's Law doesn't apply to.

Incidentally, the assimilation a while back (I've only just seen it because I've been away on holiday the last few days) is a very neat explanation, IMO. If certain *Rs sequences were assimilated to *RR word-finally, the something perhaps related to Stang's Law simplified the final geminate with compensatory lengthening (cf. *Vmm > *V:m, *Vyi > *V:y, both often cited with Stang's Law).

User avatar
Sleinad Flar
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 124
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:18 pm
Location: Coriovallum, Germania Inferior

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

@hwhatting:

I can only respond on the Old Avestan forms for now, and I'm following Skjærvø's Old Avestan Primer here:
1. According to him, *-ǝ̄ṇg comes from proto-Avestan *-anh, but he sadly doesn't go further back, so there's no way of telling (yet) if this comes from *-ems or *-ens.
2. More importantly, the root noun *dom/dem- has left only two attested forms in Avestan: aforementioned genitive dǝ̄ṇg (and only in this "compound") and locative da,m, and the nasal doesn't match, so there can be no analogical restoration at work here. In that case, I would have expected a more regular !damo: or something similar, instead of the extremely rare genitive *-ǝ̄ṇg termination (elsewhere only found in r/n-stems). I think it's safe to say dǝ̄ṇg reflects a PIE form, whether this form was *dems or *dens.
"Was ist ist, was nicht ist ist möglich"
http://sleinadflar.deviantart.com

hwhatting
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2315
Joined: Fri Sep 13, 2002 2:49 am
Location: Bonn, Germany

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by hwhatting »

Sleinad Flar wrote:I can only respond on the Old Avestan forms for now, and I'm following Skjærvø's Old Avestan Primer here:
1. According to him, *-ǝ̄ṇg comes from proto-Avestan *-anh, but he sadly doesn't go further back, so there's no way of telling (yet) if this comes from *-ems or *-ens.
2. More importantly, the root noun *dom/dem- has left only two attested forms in Avestan: aforementioned genitive dǝ̄ṇg (and only in this "compound") and locative da,m, and the nasal doesn't match, so there can be no analogical restoration at work here. In that case, I would have expected a more regular !damo: or something similar, instead of the extremely rare genitive *-ǝ̄ṇg termination (elsewhere only found in r/n-stems). I think it's safe to say dǝ̄ṇg reflects a PIE form, whether this form was *dems or *dens.
Thanks!
On 2: I was not assuming analogical restoration in Avestan, but in an earlier stage. According to EWA, there are also some case forms of the root noun *dem- attested in Sanscrit. It is clear that in both Sanscrit and Avestan, these are relics, not part of a full inflectional paradigm. But taken together, these forms may indicate that the root noun *dem- was still fully inflected in Indo-Iranian, and the analogical restoration of the nasal may have happened after PIE, but before Avestan (in Indo-Iranian, or Proto-Iranian). IMO, it's harder to explain the specific nasal-less form in Greek as innovation or by ad-hoc-soundlaw, while the forms with nasal in Indo-Aryan - Sanscrit has a genitive sg. dan in pátir dán- are easier to explain as analogical restorations.

Richard W
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 363
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2010 8:28 pm

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Richard W »

hwhatting wrote:But you'd still have to account for *-ins and *-uns not becoming *-i:(n) and *-u:(n) in that scenario. It could be done, sure. OTOH, the forms with long vowel may be due to developments in Umbrian and Sanscrit, or due to influence of the Nom. Pl. *-o:s.
Could it just be something as mundane as a lengthening law just not applying to high vowels, as in the East Midlands Middle English lengthening of vowels in open syllables?

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Richard W wrote:
hwhatting wrote:But you'd still have to account for *-ins and *-uns not becoming *-i:(n) and *-u:(n) in that scenario. It could be done, sure. OTOH, the forms with long vowel may be due to developments in Umbrian and Sanscrit, or due to influence of the Nom. Pl. *-o:s.
Could it just be something as mundane as a lengthening law just not applying to high vowels, as in the East Midlands Middle English lengthening of vowels in open syllables?
Probably, given that PIE high vowels were structurally consonantal /j w/.

User avatar
2+3 clusivity
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 454
Joined: Fri Mar 16, 2012 5:34 pm

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by 2+3 clusivity »

[corrected in next post]
Last edited by 2+3 clusivity on Sun Apr 19, 2015 3:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
linguoboy wrote:So that's what it looks like when the master satirist is moistened by his own moutarde.

User avatar
2+3 clusivity
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 454
Joined: Fri Mar 16, 2012 5:34 pm

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by 2+3 clusivity »

Ugh, the board ate a long response. Anway, in short --
Sleinad Flar wrote:I don't agree with R. Rusanov's proposal, because that would mean that the change -ms to -ns would be rather late (at least operating after Szemerényi's law, and also after *dheg'hōm was supposedly formed by analogy). But the ending -ns is actually irregular and very persistent (one would expect the more regular -ms to survive), so therefore must be really old. Besides, there is no evidence for m > n before s elsewhere. No, IMO a possible change -ms to -ns must have occured way before Szemerényi's law.
Not so -- at least on the left periphery. /**m̥s-/ -> <*n̥s-> in the 1st pl pronouns outside of the nominative has been discussed before. Indeed, Szemerényi himself notes in Sz. 1996 at 217, ". . . since repetition is a favored means of expressing emphasis, *n̥smes seems to be simply *n̥smés, i.e. [*]*mes-més with weakening to [*]*m̥s in the unaccented part; for *n̥s from *m̥s cf. the ending -n̥s of the acc. pl. For the 1st pl. the nom. *mes is proved also by its identity with the verbal 1st pl. ending -mes; it is of course, the regular plural *(e)m-es of *em 'I'."

Using Sihler and Beekes' reconstructions of the 1st singular and plur non-nominative pronouns and athematic verb terminations as a comparison, I am inclined to agree that the free pronouns also underwent /**m̥s/ -> <*n̥s>.

Sihler: /*m-/, /*n ̥h₁-wé/, /*n̥s-mé/; Beekes: /*h₁m-/, /?/, /*ns-mé/

Sihler: /*-mi/, /*-wos/, /*-mos/; Beekes: /*-mi/, /*-ues/, /*-mes/

---

Notes and points of interest:

(1) It is curious to note that the verb terminations agree with the oblique stem in most PIE languages, with two notable exception. First, Hittite's mi- and hi- ends with /-weni/ agreeing with the nominative /we:s/ rather than oblique /ants-/. Additionally, Luvian, Lycian, and Lydian verbal First singular show /-w/u(-)/ in at least the hi- conjugation. Toch. A & B show verbal /-m-/ whereas their pronouns show nominative /w-/ generalized to all cases, suggesting prior oblique pronoun forms in /*m~n-/. A third major exception would be the dual verbal forms in /*-w-/ rather than in the expected /*-nH1-/!
(2)Latvian and Lithuanian first plural pronoun forms in /m-/ in all cases are interesting -- Lith.: Nom. /mes/, Acc. /mus/, gen. /mu:sũ/, dat. /mums/. Lat.: nom /me:s/, acc. /mu:s/, gen. /mu:su/, dat. /mums/. These forms agree with their verbal counterparts in /-m(-)/.
(3) Similarly, Modern East and Western Armenian show Nom. /me-nkʰ/ [meŋkʰ]. Oblique cases are formed in /me-/. Verbal forms in Modern Eastern and western Armenian show /-nkʰ/. Interestingly, Classical Armenian showed verbal <-mkʰ>.
linguoboy wrote:So that's what it looks like when the master satirist is moistened by his own moutarde.

Zju
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 243
Joined: Tue May 08, 2012 11:10 am

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zju »

So I have stumbled upon the following reconstruction of the Basque word for goat - ahuntz < *anunz < **kamons. It was implied that it was borrowed at some stage and therefore it was likely a cognate with chamois < *kamo:s. So if **kamons was an IE word, or borrowed from an IE language, could it be related to *h₂éḱmon-? You know, mountain goats just love to climb rocks.

User avatar
WeepingElf
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1630
Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:00 pm
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Contact:

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Zju wrote:So I have stumbled upon the following reconstruction of the Basque word for goat - ahuntz < *anunz < **kamons. It was implied that it was borrowed at some stage and therefore it was likely a cognate with chamois < *kamo:s. So if **kamons was an IE word, or borrowed from an IE language, could it be related to *h₂éḱmon-? You know, mountain goats just love to climb rocks.
Ah, the 'chamois' word. This item is often held to be a substratum loanword from a pre-IE language of the Alps. Yet, it looks quite a bit like PIE *h₂éḱmon- 'stone'. Well, perhaps that pre-IE language was related to PIE; indeed, I suspect the languages of the Bell-Beaker people in the Early Bronze Age to have been so, as the Old European Hydronymy (a network of recurring river names whose distribution closely matches the Bell-Beaker culture) seems to be interpretable by means of IE, but from a pre-ablaut stage with an /a/-centered three-vowel system as Pre-PIE would have had before the rise of ablaut. I call this hypothetical family "Aquan", because it is attested best in the river names, and its word for 'river' seems to have been *akhwa, the antecedent of Latin aqua and Gothic ahwo among others. The 'chamois' word may be from a branch of that language family.

But that is more speculation than anything else.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

User avatar
Artaxes
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 27
Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2010 3:31 pm
Location: Anshan Imparatorlugu
Contact:

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Artaxes »

What is known about potential influences on Proto-Indo-European language from side of Yeniseian peoples, or similarities between those languages ?

Zju
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 243
Joined: Tue May 08, 2012 11:10 am

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zju »

So it is said that all laryngeals were lost outside Anatolian, but what is the stance about PSl. *kostь < *h₃ésth₁ and *koza < *h₂eǵós, how are they explained?

Post Reply