The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by hwhatting »

Wait... what? In the standard reconstruction, the /i/ in the reduplication syllable in the reduplicating presents (*CiCeC) has nothing to do with the laryngeal. Some argue that it's the same as the nearness indicator /i/ that also shows up in the presnt tende endings (-mi, -si, -ti). As you rightly say, the type is attested in branches where the laryngeals don't become /i/, so the /i/ can't go back to the laryngeal. Whether the Vedic presents with a reduplication vowel other than /i/ (dada:ti, dadha:ti) are an innovation or an archaism is a different question (I assume the latter).

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by kanejam »

dhok wrote:Wait...τίθημι is a present, not a perfect; its perfect is τέθηκα.
Oops again, so is dádhāti apparently. I just blindly grabbed from the wrong section - she doesn't actually cover Greek reduplicated perfects except in passing.
dhok wrote:And none of this explains very well why Greek would have fixed ι-reduplication in presents, since it doesn't have /i/ as the reflex of interconsonantal laryngeals. I can't think of a single root *Cer(C)- that has a reduplicated present in Greek, but there probably is one...
The author also doesn't offer a very satisfactory answer for this, other than the fact that /i/ is the most common vowel in fixed-vowel reduplication cross-linguistically.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

What do people here think of the idea that the reflexive *swe (clitic *se-) and *so, the suppletive nom.sg of *to- "that", could go back to the original third person pronoun?

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zju »

KathTheDragon wrote:What do people here think of the idea that the reflexive *swe (clitic *se-) and *so, the suppletive nom.sg of *to- "that", could go back to the original third person pronoun?
I know that demonstratives quite frequently become thirdpersonal pronouns, but is the opposite even attasted? I can't imagine he/she/it shifting semantically to that.

To me *so looks like the result of lexical contamination with another pronoun, maybe ultimatelly cognate to *to- via assybilation in some earlier stage of the language.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by garysk »

Indeed many languages (IE ones) use demonstratives as pronouns: "that dog barks" >> "that (one) barks". Depending on the history of demonstratives and pronouns in a particular language, one might expect to see extension in either directions. So I see little reason why there should be an uncrossable barrier between demonstrative and pronoun. While pronouns are a special, closed class in some languages, others freely migrate the usage. It is easy to imagine a language with no pronouns, but one without demonstratives would be odd.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Zju wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:What do people here think of the idea that the reflexive *swe (clitic *se-) and *so, the suppletive nom.sg of *to- "that", could go back to the original third person pronoun?
I know that demonstratives quite frequently become thirdpersonal pronouns, but is the opposite even attasted?
Yes, in English, where "them" had become the dominant form of the demonstrative adjective almost everywhere by around 1900 - although it's since retreated in prestige dialects in Britain, and I gather also in the US.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Travis B. »

Them as a demonstrative strongly marks social class at least here, as does forms like ain't; in the varieties I am familiar with here them is not used as a demonstrative, but I have encountered more working or lower-class people who use them as a demonstrative.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

As I understand it, it's similar in Britain to what Travis describes.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

KathTheDragon wrote:As I understand it, it's similar in Britain to what Travis describes.
What I've gathered is that it's become much rarer in the US, more geographically limited, and is continuing to decline. In the UK, on the other hand, it's considered more or less universal in "urban" English in England (though not in Scotland). [a survey from a couple of decades ago identified it as the most widespread feature of urban English among children (found in 97.5% of the schools surveyed)*]


*the other general urban features found in more than 80% of schools were:
- should of (91%)
- absence of plural marking on counters after numeral (two pound of flour)
- what as the subject relative pronoun (the cat what bit me)
- never as a general negator in the past tense (eg "I never did!" instead of "I didn't!")
- there was and (a little less widespread) there is occuring with plurals (there was frogs everywhere)
- sat and stood, rather than their active participles, occuring with copulas (he was stood by the door)
- quick used as an adverb (and presumably other adjectives too)
- ain't or in't
- give me it (also common in higher registers of course, but less common in older regional dialects)
- was generalised to all persons
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Travis B. »

The English I am used to here must be much, much closer syntactically and morphologically to formal Standard English than the urban English you see there; of all those, the only ones that appear to be common here is "should of"... except that that is just an informal spelling of should have, as grammar words very frequently lose initial /h/ here, especially when unstressed... and there was and there is with plurals and give me it - and all of these things are universal in everyday spoken NAE (give it me is actually ungrammatical here). (The only really markedly non-standard things morphologically or syntactically I can think of about the speech here are past participles like boughten, aten, dranken, etc., and things that are still non-standard but not markedly so, such preserving a distinction between present participles and gerunds in informal speech, or which are non-standard, strictly speaking, but are practically universal in everyday speech like kinda and sorta as adverbs.)
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by garysk »

"them" as a demonstrative is regarded as a sign of an uneducated country bumpkin in my experience. Often used by the educated as a humor device. In concurrence with Travis B., "should of" is the only commonly heard usage. Though "give me" usually is pronounced "gimme". IIRC, Travis's dialect is Great-Lakesy. Mine is Texas->Colorado->California (I won't bore you with the mergers, except to say my dad was astounded when he learned that I have no "L" in talk, chalk, walk, but do in balk and caulk).
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Travis B. »

"Uneducated country bumpkin" sounds like way too much of a value judgement for me to be comfortable with it. You could say similar things about my tendency to use a hard [t] for initial /ð/, and sometimes initial /θ/, not preceded by a vowel, nasal, or sibilant when I am not intentionally speaking carefully or formally.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by garysk »

It is a value judgment. In my experience it is the uneducated who regularly use "them" as a demonstrative, other than, as I said, by some in humor. "T'ing", "dat", etc are accent variations, not wholesale grammatical solecisms, like "them". I don't care a fig about "any usage used is ok". That's not how communication works.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Travis B. »

You're a prescriptivist, and you think that prescribed standards are the "correct" language, as implied by your usage of the word "solecism", and that people that don't use them are necessarily uneducated - and when you say "uneducated" you mean so pejoratively.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by jal »

Though this is an interesting discussion, I don't think it belongs in the GIE thread. Perhaps a moderator can split it of?


JAL

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

garysk wrote:In my experience it is the uneducated who regularly use "them" as a demonstrative
Then your experience here is sorely limited. I have certainly heard it from educated speakers of regional British dialects, for example.

Bringing this back on topic, I think we've established that it's feasible for a 3sg.nom *so to become a suppletive nom.sg of "that", giving us the familiar *so/*to- demonstrative. What about the remainder of the paradigm turning reflexive? I imagine Kuryłowicz's fourth law of analogy could be invoked here, where some other demonstrative shifting to 3sg usage causes the old 3sg to adopt a secondary function, but this requires *swe- to already have the reflexive as a function.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Pole, the »

KathTheDragon wrote:Bringing this back on topic, I think we've established that it's feasible for a 3sg.nom *so to become a suppletive nom.sg of "that", giving us the familiar *so/*to- demonstrative. What about the remainder of the paradigm turning reflexive? I imagine Kuryłowicz's fourth law of analogy could be invoked here, where some other demonstrative shifting to 3sg usage causes the old 3sg to adopt a secondary function, but this requires *swe- to already have the reflexive as a function.
I don't know.

I could imagine it being a regular personal/demonstrative pronoun, then the 3rd person being supplanted by other pronouns in the subject position, leaving *swe- to objects. Then *swe- specializing to mean specifically the same person as the verb's subject (feasible if the “new” 3rd person pronouns developed from demonstratives). Then the new reflexive meaning becoming the only one, and then the 3rd person reflexive spreading to other persons by analogy. (The extreme case being Polish „się” developing into some kind of a generic medio-passive and/or impersonal quasi-particle.)
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

My pet theory is that the PIE reflexives are based on the personal pronouns with a *-w- suffix. I seem to remember reading somewhere that such a reflexive suffix exists in Uralic, but I don't know where.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by ---- »

Twenty in PIE shows loss of initial *d in the 'two' portion: many branches reflect *wi- or *Hwi-. What's the explanation for this? Is it just plain old cluster reduction or is there some other motivation for this? Do other words show *dw- > *w-?

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Pole, the »

What about *dḱm̥tóm → *ḱm̥tóm?
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Short answer: controversial

Longer answer: Some people ascribe it to the "Kortlandt effect", whereby *d and *h₁ seem to alternate throughout the protolanguage - in particular, Kloekhorst states very specifically that in this case it's a dissimilation *d > *h₁ from a later dental. Others claim that the *d was simply lost without going through *h₁, and still others that there never was a *d in the first place. The case for reconstructing *d in each of these two words is wholly inferential - for 20 it depends on decomposing the word as *(d)wi-(d)ḱm̩tih₁ "two tens", which is plausible but not universally accepted (due to the aformentioned disagreement), and for 100 it depends on the derivation from *déḱm̩t "10", again plausible but not universally accepted.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Neek »

WeepingElf wrote:My pet theory is that the PIE reflexives are based on the personal pronouns with a *-w- suffix. I seem to remember reading somewhere that such a reflexive suffix exists in Uralic, but I don't know where.
Your theory is more than likely correct, based on an analysis of the pronominal systems:
  • 1st person sing/dual/pl accusative: (h₁/m)mé, n̥h₁wé, n̥smé
  • 2nd person sing/dual/pl accusative: tué (<tu-wé?), uh₁wé, usmé
Oblique pronominal forms are a). zero-grade roots, b). pluralize on the root (-h₁-/-s-), and c). feature a biliabial pronominal suffix (-m-/-w-). The demonstratives are absent the -m-/-w- personal suffix in the accusative and genitive, but in Sihler's reconstruction we see the -m- forms in the dative/locative in the singular (anyone able to corroborate this? Because I'm pulling the pronominals from Wikipedia.)

I'd wager that the pronominal suffix was -b- in Pre-PIE, but destabilized into m after labials and w after coronals and velars and possibly velars (-h₁b- > -h₁w-, but -sb- > -sm- in the dual and plural numbers) How this corroborates with Proto-Uralic pronominal reconstructions, as well as any other evidence of related -m-/-w- pairing, is not something I can defend at the moment, but it's my pet theory nevertheless.

It's nevertheless entirely possible that the oblique forms in *s- root, along with the pronominal suffix, was analyzed as the reflexive pronoun (why with -w-? I can't rightly say, unless there's a lost laryngeal in that position.)

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Richard W »

Salmoneus wrote:Yes, in English, where "them" had become the dominant form of the demonstrative adjective almost everywhere by around 1900 - although it's since retreated in prestige dialects in Britain, and I gather also in the US.
It sems strange that this is from the 3rd person pronoun rather than a survival of the OE demonstrative dative plural þǣm, contrasting with Modern English 3rd person pronoun 'em.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Tropylium »

WeepingElf wrote:My pet theory is that the PIE reflexives are based on the personal pronouns with a *-w- suffix. I seem to remember reading somewhere that such a reflexive suffix exists in Uralic, but I don't know where.
There certainly is such a suffix, but it derives reflexive verbs (e.g. nearly all u-stem verbs in Finnish). No Uralic languages have special reflexive pronouns, mostly they employ possessed forms of a word meaning 'self' (not too much unlike English, I suppose).
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Tropylium wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:My pet theory is that the PIE reflexives are based on the personal pronouns with a *-w- suffix. I seem to remember reading somewhere that such a reflexive suffix exists in Uralic, but I don't know where.
There certainly is such a suffix, but it derives reflexive verbs (e.g. nearly all u-stem verbs in Finnish). No Uralic languages have special reflexive pronouns, mostly they employ possessed forms of a word meaning 'self' (not too much unlike English, I suppose).
I see. That does not completely rule out a connection, but it seems tenuous and doubtful.
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