The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Morrígan »

jmcd wrote:I was reading a description online of Proto-Germanic by Lehmann
"holders of the glottalic theory face the problem of accounting for a glottalized labio-velar."
What do yous think of this? Is this an appropriate argument against the new kids on the block?
I don't see why this is that much of a problem per se, but less so for many here, where we are fond of the idea that velars were uvulars, and labiovelars were labialized uvulars, in which case being glottalized or ejective is quite normal, typologically speaking.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Morrígan wrote:Some Books
All I get is a login prompt :(
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Drydic »

WeepingElf wrote:
Morrígan wrote:Some Books
All I get is a login prompt :(
Yeah it does require you to have a google drive account. Just make a throwaway one, log out, and never use it again. Or keep it solely for this purpose.

Also setting one up is not difficult, I think I clicked a few boxes from my alt gmail account and had it ready.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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WeepingElf wrote:
Morrígan wrote:Some Books
All I get is a login prompt :(
Try it now, I may have posted the wrong URL. Otherwise, yeah you might need a gmail account, but I think I posted the wrong link, i.e. I posted the link to my folder, not the link to the public share.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Chagen »

WeepingElf wrote:The best one to start with is IMHO Indo-European Language and Culture by Benjamin W. Fortson IV. Then read Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction by James Clackson, which treats some matters in more depth. Indo-European Language and Culture by Thomas Gamkrelidze and Vjačeslav Ivanov is not an introduction; it presupposes familiarity with the standard model and presents some bold changes to it which in some parts make sense, but only for a prestage, and in some parts do not. It nevertheless is an interesting read, and it does have a nifty PIE glossary in the second volume, but rewritten in their glottalist reconstruction.

What regards dictionaries, Pokorny's Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch is not only in German, but also more than fifty years out of date. Unfortunately, a more up-to-date etymological dictionary has not appeared yet, so Morrígan's spreadsheet is still the best we have.
Thank you for the advice. Also, Morrigan, thanks for the books. I am now currently reading Indo-European Language and Culture. However, I wonder where you got this from, because this scan is just...what. This book was published roughly around 2005 yet it feels like I dug up something from the 1500's. I'm not getting mad at you or anything, you just collected the books, but whoever scanned this book put it through hell before doing so, either that or this thing was inked with spit, hopes and dreams.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Morrígan wrote:
jmcd wrote:I was reading a description online of Proto-Germanic by Lehmann
"holders of the glottalic theory face the problem of accounting for a glottalized labio-velar."
What do yous think of this? Is this an appropriate argument against the new kids on the block?
I don't see why this is that much of a problem per se, but less so for many here, where we are fond of the idea that velars were uvulars, and labiovelars were labialized uvulars, in which case being glottalized or ejective is quite normal, typologically speaking.
I don't see why this is a problem at all.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Morrígan »

Nortaneous wrote:
Morrígan wrote:
jmcd wrote:I was reading a description online of Proto-Germanic by Lehmann
"holders of the glottalic theory face the problem of accounting for a glottalized labio-velar."
What do yous think of this? Is this an appropriate argument against the new kids on the block?
I don't see why this is that much of a problem per se, but less so for many here, where we are fond of the idea that velars were uvulars, and labiovelars were labialized uvulars, in which case being glottalized or ejective is quite normal, typologically speaking.
I don't see why this is a problem at all.
And there's the research I didn't bother doing. In my defense, I was at work, not doing my job at the time.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

As nothing else is apparently going on here, I shall lay out what I mean by "Pre-PIE", "Early PIE" and "Late PIE". I shall present these three entities in reverse chronological order, as Late PIE is known best, and Pre-PIE least well, and the earlier stages are reconstructed starting from the later ones.

1. Late PIE is the latest common ancestor of the non-Anatolian IE languages, and probably was spoken north of the Black Sea around 3500 BC. This language is what most handbooks present as "PIE". It has three types of stops which can be represented by the formula "T-D-Dh": voiceless, voiced, breathy-voiced. Places of articulation of stops are labial, dental, front velar and back velar; there is also a labialized back velar series ("labiovelars"). Each of the five series except the labial one also includes a fricative; these are *s and the three "laryngeals". The vowel system was a five-vowel system with an ablaut series */e ~ o ~ 0/; *e was recoloured to *a by *h2 and to *o by *h3.

Late PIE was a fusional language with a nominative-accusative alignment. Nouns had three numbers and eight cases; verbs had three aspect stems (imperfective, perfective (aorist) and perfect) with about 20 ways of forming the imperfective stem, and 3 or 4 ways of forming the aorist stem.

Late PIE was not entirely homogenous, but had dialects, whose intersecting isoglosses can still be observed in the daughter languages. The main division seems to have been between a coastal dialect (> Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian) and an inland dialect (> Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Albanian?, Balto-Slavic, Tocharian), each with a western and an eastern subdialect.

2. Early PIE is the common ancestor of Late PIE and Anatolian, spoken also north of the Black Sea, but about 1,000 years earlier, around 4500 BC. The language differed in some ways from Late PIE; in which ways, is not always easy to say. The stop system may have been of the "Th-T-D" type, with aspirated stops corresponding to Late PIE voiceless, neutral stops to Late PIE voiced, and voiced stops to Late PIE breathy-voiced stops. In Anatolian, the voiced stops lost their voicing and merged with the neutral stops; in Late PIE, the system underwent a voicing onset time shift. The points of articulation are the same as in Late PIE. The vowel system is similar to the Late PIE one, but the existence of *a as distinct from *o is doubtful, and *e and *o probably were [æ] and [ɑ] (or [ɒ]) respectively. Ablaut works essentially as in Late PIE.

Early PIE was a fusional language, but closer to the agglutinating type than Late PIE, with a split alignment in which animate nouns inflect accusatively, and inanimate nouns ergatively. There are only four of five noun cases. Verbs have only one stem, from which a present and a past tense are formed. There are two sets of personal endings (*-m, *-s, -*t vs. *-h2e, *-th2e, *-e) which are assigned lexically, but with some tendency towards using the *m-set for active and the *h2e-set for stative verbs.

3. Pre-PIE is a yet earlier stage, perhaps spoken in the area where now is the Bay of Odessa before the Black Sea Flood around 6,000 BC (if that flood happened; otherwise, it was just spoken northwest of the Black Sea at that time). It is the common ancestor of Early PIE and a hypothetic language family I call "Aquan" which probably was the language of the Linearbandkeramik culture, the first farming culture of Central Europe, and preserved in some loanwords and river names (Old European Hydronymy). It has a "Th-T'-D" stop system (aspirated-ejective-voiced, as in the Glottalic Theory of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov) with the same five places of articulation as in Late and Early PIE. The vowel system consists of the three vowels */a/, */i/ and */u/, in which */a/ is by far the most frequent, without ablaut. The development from Pre-PIE to PIE is as follows:

*/a/ > */e ~ o ~ 0/
*/i/ > */ei ~ oi ~ i/
*/u/ > */eu ~ ou ~ u/

The main conditioning factor of this development is the accent, which in Pre-PIE seems to have fallen on the penultimate syllable. The vowels */i/ and */u/ do not occur before nasals, liquids or semivowels within the same morpheme. The vowel */a/ probably resulted from a merger of several non-high vowels in an earlier stage (Proto-Indo-Uralic?) in a sound change which I call the "Great Vowel Collapse" (GVC); the features of the collapsed vowels are partly preserved in the fronting and rounding of adjacent velar consonants (this is the origin of the three velar series; in the pre-GVC stage, there was only one velar series). Before the GVC, high vowels were lowered before resonants ("Resonant-Conditioned Lowering", RCL), which explains their limited distribution in Pre-PIE.

Pre-PIE is an agglutinating language with an active-stative alignment. Animate nouns have an agentive and an objective case for the agent and patient role, respectively; inanimate nouns may have lacked an agentive case. Verbs have two sets of personal endings for agents (*m-set) and patients (*h2a-set), transitive verbs are perhaps bipersonal with an *h2-set suffix for the object and an *m-set suffix for the subject.

All this is just a working hypothesis, and it may be false ;)
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Particles the Greek »

How much of this your own work? It's very good.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Drydic »

The framework of it is based on accepted work in the field, with much of the details his own, I believe. It doesn't explain how Anatolian got where it is imo (the spread via the Mouth of the Danube and Thrace across the Dardanelles possibility, as I currently understand it, doesn't quite work for me), but as that's the biggest problem in pinning down the IE Urheimat I don't count as a mark against WeepingElf. (I do in fact think that non-Anatolian IE was north of the Black Sea; I just don't know how best to jive that with Anatolian).
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

The reconstruction of Pre-PIE is largely my own work, but building on some work by Jens Elmegård Rasmussen, Alwin Kloekhorst, Thomas Gamkrelidze, Vyacheslav Ivanov and others. The terms "Great Vowel Collapse" and "Resonant-Conditioned Lowering" were coined by me. Early PIE also includes some of my own insights, such as noticing that Anatolian shares only four or five cases (nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative; the others aren't actually cognate) with other IE languages, and shows no trace of the tripartite aspect system of Late PIE; though at least the latter point has been noticed by other scholars as well, as James Clackson notes in his 2007 book Indo-European Linguistics.

There are still a number of things that need to be worked out. For instance, I am far from able to trace the origin of ablaut in all details. It is one thing to recognize what kind of vowel was where we now see ablaut; it is another to find out which conditions did lead to which grade. Also, it may be that */a/ actually was the only monophthong in Pre-PIE and my */i/ and */u/ actually were */ai/ and */au/, respectively; but such a system would be so typologically odd that I prefer a reconstruction with monophthongs.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Drydic »

WeepingElf wrote: Early PIE also includes some of my own insights, such as noticing that Anatolian shares only four or five cases (nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative; the others aren't actually cognate) with other IE languages
Really now? Interesting. Got anything linkable on that?
and shows no trace of the tripartite aspect system of Late PIE
I need to refresh my Hittite, I can't remember enough to have more than vague thoughts on this :(
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

Hmm... the Hittite dative is a merger of PIE dative and locative, the Hittite ablative -az(a) is ultimately from PIE *-od or *-ad (see thematic ablative *-ōd), so that just leaves allative -a and instrumental -it (and 'ergative' -anza) as unique Hittite case markers, and I seem to recall both have cognates in other IE languages (as adverbs). So no, the Hittite case system isn't drastically different from other IE languages (and even if it was, 5 out of 8 isn't too bad; Tocharian is worse).
(The plural endings are another matter, but outside of the nominative, accusative and genitive, there isn't much agreement between the other IE languages either.)

To say that Hittite shows no trace of the tripartite verb system also seems a bit too drastic. Contrary to popular opinion, there is a semi-inflectional way to form imperfective verb stems from perfective ones (with the suffix -sk-), but not the other way around (not too shocking, as everyone seems to agree that the s-aorist is a secondary development). Also, there is an analytic perfect tense in Hittite, while the morphological perfect of course is in some way related to the hi-conjugation. The verbal system of Hittite isn't any more weird than that of the Germanic languages; the difference being that the Hittite preterite continues the aorist/imperfect and the Germanic preterite the perfect.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Sleinad Flar wrote:Hmm... the Hittite dative is a merger of PIE dative and locative, the Hittite ablative -az(a) is ultimately from PIE *-od or *-ad (see thematic ablative *-ōd), so that just leaves allative -a and instrumental -it (and 'ergative' -anza) as unique Hittite case markers, and I seem to recall both have cognates in other IE languages (as adverbs). So no, the Hittite case system isn't drastically different from other IE languages (and even if it was, 5 out of 8 isn't too bad; Tocharian is worse).
(The plural endings are another matter, but outside of the nominative, accusative and genitive, there isn't much agreement between the other IE languages either.)
Hittite z AFAIK doesn't match Late PIE *d. But maybe the Hittite and Late PIE ablatives are indeed connected somehow.
Sleinad Flar wrote:To say that Hittite shows no trace of the tripartite verb system also seems a bit too drastic. Contrary to popular opinion, there is a semi-inflectional way to form imperfective verb stems from perfective ones (with the suffix -sk-), but not the other way around (not too shocking, as everyone seems to agree that the s-aorist is a secondary development). Also, there is an analytic perfect tense in Hittite, while the morphological perfect of course is in some way related to the hi-conjugation. The verbal system of Hittite isn't any more weird than that of the Germanic languages; the difference being that the Hittite preterite continues the aorist/imperfect and the Germanic preterite the perfect.
Yes, but the means with which these forms are formed aren't cognate. Late PIE does not productively form presents from aorists by tacking on *-sk-, and the Hittite perfect is, as you say, analytic, not involving reduplication and stative endings as in Late PIE.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by zompist »

Eight cases in PIE? Lehmann's Theoretical Bases of IE Linguistics offers arguments against this, which IIRC is only fully supported by Sanskrit. He thinks there were just three cases.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by R.Rusanov »

Lehmann sounds as mad as the nostraticists, then.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

WeepingElf wrote:Hittite z AFAIK doesn't match Late PIE *d. But maybe the Hittite and Late PIE ablatives are indeed connected somehow.
It does with palatisation (*-od-i > -aza).
Yes, but the means with which these forms are formed aren't cognate. Late PIE does not productively form presents from aorists by tacking on *-sk-, and the Hittite perfect is, as you say, analytic, not involving reduplication and stative endings as in Late PIE.
Present stems in *-sk'- are found in other languages as well (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Tocharian), with varying levels of productivity. And as for the perfect, Germanic has an analytic perfect too. The point was that the morphological "perfect" was retained in both Anatolian and Germanic, just not as a perfect tense.
zompist wrote:Eight cases in PIE? Lehmann's Theoretical Bases of IE Linguistics offers arguments against this, which IIRC is only fully supported by Sanskrit. He thinks there were just three cases.
He might be right for a pre-stage (nom/gen, acc, dat/loc), but for PIE defined as the last common ancestor of the IE languages: most certainly not. Nominative and genitive are already divided by the time Anatolian split off (as evidenced by retention of the gen pl ending *-om as -an in Old Hittite), dative and locative are still united (or have merged again). But there are four other cases (vocative, ablative, instrumental, allative), of which at least one (voc) has cognates in other IE languages. This gives at least 5 and at most 9 case forms (the exact number of cases isn't terribly interesting or relevant in this discussion).
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Buran »

WeepingElf wrote:Also, it may be that */a/ actually was the only monophthong in Pre-PIE and my */i/ and */u/ actually were */ai/ and */au/, respectively; but such a system would be so typologically odd that I prefer a reconstruction with monophthongs.
Could the diphthongs have been /a/ plus an offglide? This reduces the system to one vowel (which is still pretty unusual, but less unusual, I think, than /a/ /ai/ /au/).

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Adjective Recoil wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Also, it may be that */a/ actually was the only monophthong in Pre-PIE and my */i/ and */u/ actually were */ai/ and */au/, respectively; but such a system would be so typologically odd that I prefer a reconstruction with monophthongs.
Could the diphthongs have been /a/ plus an offglide? This reduces the system to one vowel (which is still pretty unusual, but less unusual, I think, than /a/ /ai/ /au/).
Yes, the diphthongs could have been /a/ + offglide. Still, a one-vowel system would be very unusual.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

I have thought again about the PIE laryngeals, prompted by an article by Paul S. Cohen and Adam Hyllested (in the volume The Sound of Indo-European edited by Benedict Nielsen Whitehead, Thomas Olander, Birgit Anette Olsen and Jens Elmegård Rasmussen).

So far, I have been thinking that the three PIE laryngeals are just the fricative members of the three velar series. While this certainly makes sense for Pre-PIE (there seem to be correspondences between PIE laryngeals and Uralic */k/ in the same way as between PIE */s/ and Uralic */t/), the laryngeals in Late PIE do not really behave like velar fricatives. Especially assuming *h3 to be a labiovelar fricative poses a problem: why don't labiovelar stops have an o-colouring effet then as well?

I now think that the laryngeals, while being just voiceless front, back and labialized velar fricatives in Pre-PIE, shifted later, perhaps already by Early PIE, to different values, namely *h1=/h/, *h2=/ħ/, *h3=/ʕʷ/. This is not a particularly strange sound change, I think; velar fricatives tend to "go down the throat" quite often, as in Germanic and Latin American Spanish /x/ > /h/. These sound values, I think, explain the behaviour of the Late PIE laryngeals better than something like *h1=/x/, *h2=/χ/, *h3=/χʷ/. Pharyngeals are more likely to cause vowel colourings, and there apparently are reasons to assume that *h3 was voiced. Also, the consonants */h/, */ħ/ and */ʕʷ/ are flimsy enough to get lost in all daughter languages. I don't know what to make of *h4, though, if it ever existed. Perhaps it was something like */ʕ/.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Drydic »

Sleinad Flar wrote:Hmm... the Hittite dative is a merger of PIE dative and locative, the Hittite ablative -az(a) is ultimately from PIE *-od or *-ad (see thematic ablative *-ōd), so that just leaves allative -a and instrumental -it (and 'ergative' -anza) as unique Hittite case markers, and I seem to recall both have cognates in other IE languages (as adverbs). So no, the Hittite case system isn't drastically different from other IE languages (and even if it was, 5 out of 8 isn't too bad; Tocharian is worse).
(The plural endings are another matter, but outside of the nominative, accusative and genitive, there isn't much agreement between the other IE languages either.)
Melchert holds (or at least held when this book* was published) this about the ergative marker:
Craig Melchert, in a listing of common Anatolian morphological isoglosses, wrote:
  • Development of an ergative case marker *-anti from the ablative-instrumental of neuter r/n-stems (Garrett, 1990, pace Carruba, 1992c).
I don't know yet if that ablative-instrumental ending is IE in origin, but the r/n-stems sure are. I'll report back here if I find out more in the course of the book.

*Anatolian Historical Phonology, 1994, p. 7 and possibly more later on; I'm re-reading it again to finish, which I didn't last time.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Dewrad »

WeepingElf wrote:I now think that the laryngeals, while being just voiceless front, back and labialized velar fricatives in Pre-PIE, shifted later, perhaps already by Early PIE, to different values, namely *h1=/h/, *h2=/ħ/, *h3=/ʕʷ/. This is not a particularly strange sound change, I think; velar fricatives tend to "go down the throat" quite often, as in Germanic and Latin American Spanish /x/ > /h/. These sound values, I think, explain the behaviour of the Late PIE laryngeals better than something like *h1=/x/, *h2=/χ/, *h3=/χʷ/. Pharyngeals are more likely to cause vowel colourings, and there apparently are reasons to assume that *h3 was voiced. Also, the consonants */h/, */ħ/ and */ʕʷ/ are flimsy enough to get lost in all daughter languages. I don't know what to make of *h4, though, if it ever existed. Perhaps it was something like */ʕ/.
Personally, I think there's much to be said for the view that what we reconstruct as *h1 was actually two phonemes: something like /h/ and /ʔ/.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

I thought it was very probable that /o/ (and therefore, also /h3/ ) was not rounded, given that /u/ delabialises velars but /o/ does not.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

KathAveara wrote:I thought it was very probable that /o/ (and therefore, also /h3/ ) was not rounded, given that /u/ delabialises velars but /o/ does not.
This is possible. PIE *o is reflected as a rounded vowel distinct from *a only in Italic, Celtic, Greek and Armenian. All other branches of IE have merged *o and *a. If PIE *o was not rounded but merely further back than *a, there is no reason to assume that *h3 was rounded.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

Nessari wrote: Melchert holds (or at least held when this book* was published) this about the ergative marker:
Craig Melchert, in a listing of common Anatolian morphological isoglosses, wrote:
  • Development of an ergative case marker *-anti from the ablative-instrumental of neuter r/n-stems (Garrett, 1990, pace Carruba, 1992c).
I don't know yet if that ablative-instrumental ending is IE in origin, but the r/n-stems sure are. I'll report back here if I find out more in the course of the book.
That's interesting. Although I'm aware of an alternative ablative ending -anza (e.g. ishananza instead of ishanaz), I would have expected a relation of ergative -anza with the suffix -ont-, especially since the plural ergative is -antes.
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