The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Morrígan »

araceli wrote:What are the main objections to Szemerényi's reconstruction of PIE with one laryngeal /h/, five full vowels, and voiceless aspirates?
IIRC: For the laryngeals and vowels, he can only do this because he basically handwaves a bunch of initial vowels in Greek as prothetic. I think a similar thing is true for long syllabic *r *l *m *n. Which mechanism Szemerényi uses to explain the vowel color in Greek, I don't recall.

Also, I just found this paper but who knows when I'll be able to read it.
The Greek Prothetic Vowel and the Sanskrit Long-Reduplicant Perfect

Also, on the subject of Colarusso, I do have this one paper More Pontic: Further Etymologies Between Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

WeepingElf wrote:
Pole wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:So they may have been diphthongs */ai/ and */au/ in pre-ablaut Pre-PIE rather than high monophthongs; but I wanted to avoid a language stage which has only one vowel phoneme because that would be typologically highly peculiar and probably unstable.
There does not have to be a one-vowel stage here.

Say you have a language with four vowels, /i u ɛ ɑ/.
0. … and there is some kind of morphological lengthening employed. /i iː ɛ ɛː u uː ɑ ɑː/
1. High vowels get diphthongized to /ɛj ɛːj ɑw ɑːw/ and short low vowels are given high allophones [ɪ ə] in unstressed positions. (This kind of shift is not much probable, but IMHO it could happen.) /ɛ ɛː ɑ ɑː/
2. Reduced vowels are elided when applicable. Long vowels are shortened when unstressed, thus making [ɪ ə] phonemic. /ɪ ɛ ɛː ə ɑ ɑː/
3. Front and back vowels merge, leading to an unstable, Caucasian-like vertical system. /ə a aː/
4. /aː/ shifts to /ɛ/ and merges with the schwa. /a/ moves back. Voilà. /ɛ ɑ/
5. Or a bit more. Voilà. /e o/
You have just created a PIE-like ablaut system and never reached less than two vocalic phonemes. Gz.
Seems to work, but I need to look closer.
Upon closer look, it pretty much agrees with my model but adds some detail about which we can't know if its true (was the */e ~ o/ ablaut ever a length ablaut?; how do we tell old */ɛ/ from old */ɑ/?). My three-vowel model is just a model; there may be details it misses. Also, Pole's model does not meet Salmoneus's objection against reconstructing */ei ~ oi ~ i/ as */i/ (and accordingly for */u/).

This does not mean that Pole's model was worse than mine, but right now I don't really see where the improvements are.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Morrígan wrote:
araceli wrote:What are the main objections to Szemerényi's reconstruction of PIE with one laryngeal /h/, five full vowels, and voiceless aspirates?
IIRC: For the laryngeals and vowels, he can only do this because he basically handwaves a bunch of initial vowels in Greek as prothetic. I think a similar thing is true for long syllabic *r *l *m *n. Which mechanism Szemerényi uses to explain the vowel color in Greek, I don't recall.

Also, I just found this paper but who knows when I'll be able to read it.
The Greek Prothetic Vowel and the Sanskrit Long-Reduplicant Perfect
I have leafed through it. Apparently, there is a positive correlation between Greek prothetic vowels and Sanskrit long reduplicated perfects as the laryngeal theory predicts, though there is some "noise". Still, I'd consider the evidence for laryngeals so overwhelming that the laryngeal theory stands rock solid.
Morrígan wrote:Also, on the subject of Colarusso, I do have this one paper More Pontic: Further Etymologies Between Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian
This looks like banging things into shape with a BIG hammer to me. He especially likes to butter in extra laryngeals to make things fit. I am still of the opinion that whatever lexical resemblances exist between IE and NWC are most likely loanwords - mostly from IE to NWC, as in the case of 'horse' and 'wheel', which have fairly good derivations within PIE, but there are perhaps a few substratum loanwords from a language related to NWC in PIE.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Pole, the »

WeepingElf wrote:This does not mean that Pole's model was worse than mine, but right now I don't really see where the improvements are.
It's hardly a model, it's just an example how a language could plausibly develop leaving some morphological alternations closely resembling PIE.

Also, maybe some additional vowels could work well, like /ɑ ɑː/ → /ɑʕ ɑːʕ/ → /aH aːH/. (H — some laryngeal)
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Pole wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:This does not mean that Pole's model was worse than mine, but right now I don't really see where the improvements are.
It's hardly a model, it's just an example how a language could plausibly develop leaving some morphological alternations closely resembling PIE.
Sure. As a rule, in historical linguistics, as elsewhere in science, the simplest solution that explains the fact is usually considered the best. This is the principle known as Ockham's Razor, usually given as Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: 'Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. Historical linguistics is just not the same as conlanging; it is not about coming up with something fanciful, but about explaining observed facts with as few assumptions as possible.
Pole wrote:Also, maybe some additional vowels could work well, like /ɑ ɑː/ → /ɑʕ ɑːʕ/ → /aH aːH/. (H — some laryngeal)
There are many laryngeals that aren't adjacent to any vowel. Those things were just consonants, like any other, even if their precise values are not known. It is just that they were lost everywhere, leaving traces in vowel colours, and vowel lengthening where the laryngeal followed a vowel.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Morrígan wrote: Also, on the subject of Colarusso, I do have this one paper More Pontic: Further Etymologies Between Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian
Brilliant. Beautiful. Not the prime example of sound, but that doesn't stop it from being beautiful.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

WeepingElf wrote:
There are many laryngeals that aren't adjacent to any vowel. Those things were just consonants, like any other, even if their precise values are not known. It is just that they were lost everywhere, leaving traces in vowel colours, and vowel lengthening where the laryngeal followed a vowel.
It's also worth reiterating, although I'm sure everyone already knows, the importance of interconsonantal laryngeals. These mostly dropped, but in some places and in some languages they turned into vowels (/an epenthetic vowel was introduced before them and then they dropped). To a layman, this seems to be some of the best evidence for believing in laryngeals, rather than having more vowels instead.

Take the word for 'father'. This has the first vowel as *a in almost every daughter (or did, at once stage, and in almost every case still does)... but *i in Indo-Iranian. So we have to propose something that results in *a everywhere else but *i in Indo-Iranian. But normally those vowels don't correspond like that, so either we need another phoneme or it a known phoneme modified by something. So, let's say that this phoneme is a laryngeal.
Why is that good? Because other family words are also believed to contain a laryngeal, for entirely different reasons - the long *a in the words for mother and brother. Laryngeal theory tells us that that should come from *eh2. Assume that the laryngeal in the father-word is also *h2, and, low-and-behold, two words that don't seem that related but that semantically might be (eg Old Persian mátá, mother, and pitá, father) suddenly look more related - they're simply me-h2ter vs p-h2ter. So neat. And then we can look at 'daughter', and wonder whether there should be the same laryngeal in that, too. Here it's a bit more complicated, because many language don't have any vocalised laryngeal left, but some do - and, just as before, it's *a outside Indo-Iranian (eg Greek thugater) and *i inside Indo-Iranian (eg Sankskrit duhitr).

[Doesn't explain why 'father' and 'daughter' seem to have zero-grade and 'mother' and 'brother' seem to have had e-grade, but you can't have everything]
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Can anyone explain the laryngeal behind "*h4órǵhis" (testicle)? It's a fourth laryngeal, which I've seen extremely rarely.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Herr Dunkel wrote:Can anyone explain the laryngeal behind "*h4órǵhis" (testicle)? It's a fourth laryngeal, which I've seen extremely rarely.
*h4 means an a-colouring laryngeal (like *h2) which is lost in Hittite (unlike *h2, which is usually preserved in Hittite). Not all Indo-Europeanists, however, are convinced that this is a separate phoneme; many assume that it is actually just a *h2 whose loss in Hittite has other reasons (e.g., dialect mixing with or borrowing from a branch that has dropped its laryngeals).
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

So, it's a laryngeal that colours both /e o/ into > /a/
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Herr Dunkel wrote:So, it's a laryngeal that colours both /e o/ into > /a/
Nope, it colours /e/ into /a/; /o/ stays /o/.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Yeah, I found that a bit weird, but if that is so, how do we know it's /h4/ when the next vowel is /o/?
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sleinad Flar »

From the wikipedia article on Laryngeal Theory:
Some scholars suggest the existence of a fourth consonant, *h₄, which differs from *h₂ in not being reflected as Anatolian ḫ [1] but being reflected, to the exclusion of all other laryngeals, as Albanian h when word-initial before an originally stressed vowel. E.g. PIE *h₄órǵʰiyeh₂ "testicle" yields Albanian herdhe "testicle" but Hittite arki- "testicle" whereas PIE *h₂ŕ̥tkos "bear" yields Alb. ari "bear" but Hittite hart(ag)ga- (=/hartka-/) "cultic official, bear-person".[2]
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Ah, thanks. I seem to have missed that.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Going back to the idea that traditional /e o/ are actually /ə a/, what comes of traditional /a/?

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by sangi39 »

On the note of /ə a/, I've wondered (on and off for a while, but never seriously) if this is at all plausible:

ə h1ə h2ə h3ə > ə h1ə h2a h3o > e h1e h2a h3o
a h1a h2a h3a > ɑ h1ɑ h2ɑ h3ɑ > ʌ h1ʌ h2ʌ h3ʌ > (H)o

So that the realisations of traditional *e are actually the result of rounding/backing/lowering of a central vowel (in a similar way to the allophonic realisations of /ə/ in languages like Abkhaz) while traditional *o is the result of an original /a/ moving further back as the allophones of /ə/ spread out until it eventually mergers with /o/.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Adam Hyllested did some fun work on Indo-Uralic. It looks quite good, but I've only skimmed it instead of reading in detail.

Edit: having a more detailed look gives me the idea: it's about correspondences between Indo-European laryngeals and Uralic dorsals (generally velars), but also includes bits on Indo-European velars as well as some guesses on pre-Proto-Indo-European morphology and some tentative Indo-Uralic reconstructions and thoughts on vowel correspondences.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Herr Dunkel wrote:Adam Hyllested did some fun work on Indo-Uralic. It looks quite good, but I've only skimmed it instead of reading in detail.

Edit: having a more detailed look gives me the idea: it's about correspondences between Indo-European laryngeals and Uralic dorsals (generally velars), but also includes bits on Indo-European velars as well as some guesses on pre-Proto-Indo-European morphology and some tentative Indo-Uralic reconstructions and thoughts on vowel correspondences.
Yes, that is an interesting paper.

What regards the laryngeals and why *h2 doesn't colour *o, this is easy to understand in terms of phonological features.

*h1 does not add or remove any vowel quality features; it only lengthens the vowel when it follows it.

*h2 deletes the feature [+front], thus changing *e into *a; as *o is already [-front], its quality doesn't change.

*h3 deletes the feature [+front] and adds the feature [+round], thus changing *e into *o; as *o is already [-front] and [+round], its quality doesn't change.

*h4, if it existed at all, behaves like *h2.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Ah, thanks for the featural breakdown. Quite useful and good to know.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Tropylium »

Herr Dunkel wrote:Adam Hyllested did some fun work on Indo-Uralic. It looks quite good, but I've only skimmed it instead of reading in detail.
It's a rather thought-provoking article with some clever new comparisions, but as usual, it has some problems with using roots found only in one subfamily, or irregularly behaving roots found in only one end of a family — which will be frequently loans rather than inherited even from the PIE/PU level.

In several cases superior loan etymologies have already been proposed. E.g. "PU *kurk- 'throat, neck'" (#32) is only attested in Finnic *kurkku ~ Mordvinic *kərga, which neither correspond to each other nor are possible root shapes for inherited vocabulary, and can be explained satisfactorily as Germanic (*kʷerkō) and Slavic (*kъrka, IIRC?) loans respectively.
WeepingElf wrote:What regards the laryngeals and why *h2 doesn't colour *o, this is easy to understand in terms of phonological features.

*h1 does not add or remove any vowel quality features; it only lengthens the vowel when it follows it.

*h2 deletes the feature [+front], thus changing *e into *a; as *o is already [-front], its quality doesn't change.

*h3 deletes the feature [+front] and adds the feature [+round], thus changing *e into *o; as *o is already [-front] and [+round], its quality doesn't change.

*h4, if it existed at all, behaves like *h2.
I'm seriously skeptical on if *h₃ can be considered [+round]. Mainly because I'm also skeptical on if this can be considered to have been distinctive for *o (versus *e and *a) at the time laryngeal coloring occurred. Coloring was clearly completed much earlier than the loss or possible mergers of laryngeals, and might mesh together with early vowel system developments in a complex fashion.

There's amazingly little evidence that *o was more round than *e; if anything, the widespread mergers with *a, no apparent examples of *kʷ → *k before *o specifically, and Brugmann's Law lead me to suspect that it's actually *o that was the low vowel /a/. *a itself, if this existed separately, would then have been something else like *æ or *ə. The development of these into /o a/ in Greek + Italic + Celtic would be a common type of chainshift.

The difference between the coloring effects of *h₂ and *h₃ I'd guess could then have been chronological rather than phonological. E.g.
1) *h₃e → *h₃a
2) *a → *o
3) *h₂e → *h₂a

Cf. English. OE /ēaɣ/ goes to ModE /aɪ/ in eye, while OE /ēax/ goes to ModE /eɪ/ in eight; this isn't because /ɣ/ was more strongly a-coloring, it's because this started on the whole vocalization → monophthongization → (re)diphthongization path earlier.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Surely the a/o mergers are good evidence for it being o? Since a/o mergers are immensely common.
It's also tempting to think that *o was rounded because in roots it seems more common adjacent to rounded consonants (in my layman's impression). But this could indicate the opposite (dissimilation), or just be an artefact of later sound-changes.

Your idea about chronology, however, is fascinating!
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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So I'm trying to get Lusitanic up to a vocabulary of at least 500 words by the end of this month for the Zeeb Awards. The problem is, I don't really have any resources at my disposal for derivational morphology, which I pretty badly need. Could somebody put together a short list of the most common derivational suffixes and processes applied to roots, with suffixes, ablaut and anything else that happens?

Second question: in roots with an initial sC cluster or s-mobile, how did initial reduplication of the root happen? For example, in whatever form it was that underlies the Sanskrit desiderative (which had, basically, CVC -> CíCVCs), would, say, *sleydʰ reduplicate to sísleydʰs- ?

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Hallow XIII »

Salmoneus wrote:Surely the a/o mergers are good evidence for it being o? Since a/o mergers are immensely common.
That is another reason why I think the scenario of a Caucasoid (Pre-)PIE is rather likely. The reconstruction of two underlying vowels /e o/ that ablaut seems odd at first but if you consider that that may well have come from an earlier /ə a/ things suddenly make a lot more sense (and provide a good argument for [a] being underlying /eh2/ to boot; the original low vowel shifted to o and the vowel-laryngeal sequences shifted to create a functional five-vowel system).
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Hallow XIII wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:Surely the a/o mergers are good evidence for it being o? Since a/o mergers are immensely common.
That is another reason why I think the scenario of a Caucasoid (Pre-)PIE is rather likely. The reconstruction of two underlying vowels /e o/ that ablaut seems odd at first but if you consider that that may well have come from an earlier /ə a/ things suddenly make a lot more sense (and provide a good argument for [a] being underlying /eh2/ to boot; the original low vowel shifted to o and the vowel-laryngeal sequences shifted to create a functional five-vowel system).
The problem with that, to me, is that it seems counter-intuitive for all stressed vowels to become schwa, and unstressed vowels to shift from schwa to /a/...
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Nortaneous »

How can it be Caucasoid? Is there any evidence of rounding and palatalization on non-velar consonants?
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