The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by ObsequiousNewt »

Oh, shut up, I was being partially sardonic anyway.


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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by kodé »

Chagen wrote:
Moreover, the traditional three-way phoneme system - unvoiced unaspirate : voiced unaspirate voiced aspirate - is not merely unnatural, it seems to be unattested in any known language, as noted by Jakobson in 1958 (Miller 1977).
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Improbable_things_happen

Seriously. Improbable things happen. This "PIE couldn't have X because X is rare" is a non-sequitur. We don't care about what happens in other languages, we care about what happened in PIE.
It all depends on the source of the absence. If the absence of the above system is due to a principled grammatical reason (as opposed to merely low probability), then this sort of argument is valid. You're right though that a universal argument from negative evidence is rather weak: all it takes is one piece of counterevidence, and universality is broken. This sort of thing is pretty common in linguistics: take the widely assumed principle that onset consonants can't contribute to syllable weight, which is untrue in several languages.

Of course, the whole edifice gets shakier when it comes to reconstructed languages, like PIE. We really can't have any certain idea of the laryngeal features of the stops; we can merely hazard an educated guess. I personally think the glottalic theory makes more sense typologically, but, there are various problems with it, the biggest one being the lack of explanation for the appearance of breathy voiced stops. In my mind, that's not enough to invalidate the theory, but certainly enough to fuel decades of bitter debate.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

kodé wrote:
Chagen wrote:
Moreover, the traditional three-way phoneme system - unvoiced unaspirate : voiced unaspirate voiced aspirate - is not merely unnatural, it seems to be unattested in any known language, as noted by Jakobson in 1958 (Miller 1977).
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Improbable_things_happen

Seriously. Improbable things happen. This "PIE couldn't have X because X is rare" is a non-sequitur. We don't care about what happens in other languages, we care about what happened in PIE.
It all depends on the source of the absence. If the absence of the above system is due to a principled grammatical reason (as opposed to merely low probability), then this sort of argument is valid. You're right though that a universal argument from negative evidence is rather weak: all it takes is one piece of counterevidence, and universality is broken. This sort of thing is pretty common in linguistics: take the widely assumed principle that onset consonants can't contribute to syllable weight, which is untrue in several languages.
Yes. Many "universals" were posited for which counterexamples were soon found. I have read somewhere that there are known counterexamples for every single item on Greenberg's famous list of morphosyntactic universals. There are about 6,000 languages in this world, belonging to perhaps 300 families; the number of possible combinations of features is much larger. Does it surprise anyone that some perfectly valid and plausible combinations just accidentally fail to occur?
kodé wrote:Of course, the whole edifice gets shakier when it comes to reconstructed languages, like PIE. We really can't have any certain idea of the laryngeal features of the stops; we can merely hazard an educated guess. I personally think the glottalic theory makes more sense typologically, but, there are various problems with it, the biggest one being the lack of explanation for the appearance of breathy voiced stops. In my mind, that's not enough to invalidate the theory, but certainly enough to fuel decades of bitter debate.
Just that. Personally, I lean towards a two-stage model. Late PIE had the system as traditionally reconstructed; but an early stage may have had the system posited by the glottalists. This is sufficient to explain the root structure constraints and the rarity of */b/, yet keeps the well-established phonological trajectories of the IE branches intact. Early PIE (as it was spoken when Anatolian started going its own way) may have been some sort of intermediate. The pathway may have been either Pre-PIE */t t' d/ > Early PIE */th t d/ > Late PIE */t d dh/ or Pre-PIE */t t' d/ > Early PIE */t d' d/ > Late PIE */t d dh/ (*/d'/ = implosive stop). I lean towards the former, though the latter has the advantage of not requiring a back-and-forth movement of the voiceless pulmonic stops (but aspiration is a common feature of such stops in languages that also have ejectives, e.g. in Georgian; so it would just be a phonemicization and later dephonemicization of a feature that may have been there all the time, and the stops in question did not change at all phonetically).
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Terra »

What I was going to say was that there's something to be said for amateurs who are curious having more incentive (a hunger for knowledge) than professional linguists (money, probably) to do any sort of work. I certainly would work on PIE reconstruction myself if I had the basic knowledge to start with.
1) Stop making things up.
2) Linguistics is more than just reconstructing PIE.
3) Reconstructing is hard.
Seriously. Improbable things happen. This "PIE couldn't have X because X is rare" is a non-sequitur. We don't care about what happens in other languages, we care about what happened in PIE.
Even so, it proved rather unstable; The system collapsed in every daughter language, after all.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by ObsequiousNewt »

Terra wrote:
What I was going to say was that there's something to be said for amateurs who are curious having more incentive (a hunger for knowledge) than professional linguists (money, probably) to do any sort of work. I certainly would work on PIE reconstruction myself if I had the basic knowledge to start with.
1) Stop making things up.
2) Linguistics is more than just reconstructing PIE.
3) Reconstructing is hard.
So, there you go, my device went epileptic to stop me from saying something stupid (and then failed.)

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Terra wrote:
What I was going to say was that there's something to be said for amateurs who are curious having more incentive (a hunger for knowledge) than professional linguists (money, probably) to do any sort of work. I certainly would work on PIE reconstruction myself if I had the basic knowledge to start with.
1) Stop making things up.
2) Linguistics is more than just reconstructing PIE.
3) Reconstructing is hard.
Fair. If you are like me and do both historical linguistics and conlanging, you must always be aware which hat you are wearing in the moment. This is especially important if your linguistic research serves as input for your conlanging. You must restrict the information flow to one direction: from your linguistic studies to your conlang. If you let slip, you end up like Octaviano - a crackpot.
Terra wrote:
Seriously. Improbable things happen. This "PIE couldn't have X because X is rare" is a non-sequitur. We don't care about what happens in other languages, we care about what happened in PIE.
Even so, it proved rather unstable; The system collapsed in every daughter language, after all.
Sure. Indo-Aryan is the only branch which kept the breathy-voiced stops intact - apparently it stabilized them by innovating a set of voiceless aspirated stops, leading to a balanced four-way system in which voicing and aspiration are orthogonal. Everywhere else, it collapsed. The most common kind of collapse was to merge the *Dh and *D grades. The exceptions can be easily numbered:

1. Greek - the *Dh grade devoiced, creating a typologically unmarked *T *D *Th system.
2. Germanic and Armenian - the *D grade devoiced but the *T grade went out of the way by fricativizing (Germanic) or developing a phonemic aspiration (Armenian). (How about an IE conlang where *D devoiced but *T did not go out of the way so that both grades merged?)
3. Italic - the *Dh grade became fricatives (voiced ones, originally; the fact that Italic /f/ is written with a letter whose Greek value was /w/ probably means that it was originally voiced).
4. Tocharian - the largyngeal features were completely deleted, causing the whole system to melt down into a single set of voiceless unaspirated stops. (No, this is not an artifact of an underspecifying writing system. Tocharian is written in a Brahmi-derived abugida which has letters for all four grades of Indo-Aryan stops.)

This shows that the Late PIE system was unstable.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by sirdanilot »

vec wrote:
sirdanilot wrote:PIE was not a language.
What do you mean by this statement? Are you being facetious or do you have some specific opinions on the matter?
The problem with indo european comparative linguistics is that it's an 'academical island', so to speak. It seems to largely ignore developments in other fields within linguistics.

With stuff like generative linguistics, I think that's a good thing (because that's another field entirely), but not with things such as contact languages. IE assumes that languages descend from each other only in a genetic way; any borrowing is simply discarded as 'not fitting the system'. The reality is, as we are increasingly understanding, that contact phenomena are at least as important as the genetic relationships between langauges, and in many cases even more important.

What is also very annoying, is that they use their own terminology, rather than terminology that is common in other fields within linguistics. The IE terminology is often decades old, and any developments within linguistic typology go completely unnoticed.

Focus is also mostly on bare lexical items, rather than sentences. Historical syntax is a topic that is hardly written about.

So why was PIE not a language? Because reconstructions are not languages. Reconstructions are useful to make a 'common denominator' between cognate lexical items within a language group. But even a reconstruction of, say, modern-day West-Germanic languages was never at one time actually spoken.

Any articles on how the 'phoneme inventory of PIE was unstable' make little sense; of course it was unstable because PIE never actually existed as a spoken language.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

That's just sophistry, though, isn't it? Sure, "PIE" was never spoken if by "PIE" you mean "our reconstructed models of how PIE may have been". That's blazingly obvious, because reconstructed models aren't things that can ever be spoken. It's also not something we should care much about, because it has nothing to do with whether PIE itself was spoken or not. Which is was. Or whether it was a language or not. Which it was.

Similarly, Old English wasn't a language and was never spoken, if by 'Old English' you mean 'a reconstructed model based on surviving languages of what a predecessor language to English might have been like'. But we don't mean that by 'Old English', we mean actual Old English, which we have substantial evidence WAS a spoken language.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Terra »

The problem with indo european comparative linguistics is that it's an 'academical island', so to speak. It seems to largely ignore developments in other fields within linguistics.

With stuff like generative linguistics, I think that's a good thing (because that's another field entirely), but not with things such as contact languages. IE assumes that languages descend from each other only in a genetic way; any borrowing is simply discarded as 'not fitting the system'. The reality is, as we are increasingly understanding, that contact phenomena are at least as important as the genetic relationships between langauges, and in many cases even more important.

What is also very annoying, is that they use their own terminology, rather than terminology that is common in other fields within linguistics. The IE terminology is often decades old, and any developments within linguistic typology go completely unnoticed.

Focus is also mostly on bare lexical items, rather than sentences. Historical syntax is a topic that is hardly written about.

So why was PIE not a language? Because reconstructions are not languages. Reconstructions are useful to make a 'common denominator' between cognate lexical items within a language group. But even a reconstruction of, say, modern-day West-Germanic languages was never at one time actually spoken.

Any articles on how the 'phoneme inventory of PIE was unstable' make little sense; of course it was unstable because PIE never actually existed as a spoken language.
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Focus is also mostly on bare lexical items, rather than sentences. Historical syntax is a topic that is hardly written about.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Nortaneous »

WeepingElf wrote:(How about an IE conlang where *D devoiced but *T did not go out of the way so that both grades merged?)
I was going to guess this had happened in some dialect of Armenian, but it's apparently the only possibility that didn't, other than merging all three: Standard Eastern Armenian keeps all three distinct with *T *D *Dʰ > Tʰ T D, Standard Western Armenian has *T *D *Dʰ > Tʰ D Tʰ, and the Istanbul dialect has *T *D *Dʰ > Tʰ D D.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

If one could establish a relationship between IE and another language family, that would surely help clearing up what the (Pre-)PIE stops actually were. Unfortunately, such a relationship has not been established yet. The best candidate for the closest known kin of IE is the Uralic family, so it may be interesting to take a look at Proto-Uralic. This language has only one grade of stops - plain voiceless - but these occur both as single stops and (rarely) as geminates, and apparently, there was a set of voiced fricatives to match, if */ð/ actually was /ð/, */x/ was /ɣ/, and */β/ had merged with */w/. These contrasts are only found medially; in initial position, only single voiceless stops occur. It may be that PU medial */t/ corresponds to PIE */t/, PU medial */tt/ to PIE */d/ and PU medial */ð/ to PIE */dʰ/ - but as long as regular sound correspondences have not been established, this remains sheer speculation.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Proto-Uralic is, at least for me, the most plausible next step.
Both groups have their Urheimaten in close vicinity of one another, both share some morphological and syntactical features and tendencies and possibly also some vocabulary. Their age matches up more or less (that is, I think it was Proto-Indo-European that had already split up somewhat when Proto-Uralic began splitting), they have sound systems that generally show similarities etc.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Is PU reconstructed as being active-stative, as IIRC PIE is?

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

It's, uh, not quite well-reconstructed really :s
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

As I understand Beckwith's hypothesis (which fits with what was described earlier in this thread) he argues that there was originally a simple voiced/tenuis distinction in pre-Late PIE stops. He apparently believes there was a major conditioned allophonic bifurcation of the voiced series, although if specifies what the conditioning factor was, I missed it. He emphasises that the split in the voiced series did not become phonemic in the Indo-European languages except for in Germanic, Italic, Greek, Indic, and Armenian (which he calls Group B). However, he does seem to believe that the split did become phonemic in all of Indo-European for the bilabials only.

Beckwith argues that the variant allophones of the voiced stops were voiced fricatives or affricates. Thus, in most Indo-European languages, the fate of the two realisations of the stop series would be something like this:

(a note on notation. Sorry if any of this is confusing. I am using asterisks to mark the conventional/standard/default values assumed for the two Indo-European "voiced stop" series. I'm using **b for the more deeply hypothetical early PIE b phoneme which Beckwith believes underlies some instances of *w. Superscript numbers represent unspecified phonetically conditioning environments operating otherwise identical phonemes. I have used *g and g below to stand in for analogous developments in the labiovelar and palatalized velar sequences.)

**b == b1 --> b͡β --> w
*d == d1 --> d͡ð --> d
*g == g1 --> g͡ɣ --> g

*bʰ == b2 --> b --> b
*dʰ == d2 --> d --> d
*gʰ == g2 --> g --> g


However, the development in Germanic (one of Beckwith's Group B languages), would be more like this:

**b == b1 --> b͡β --> w
*d == d1 --> d͡ð --> ð
*g == g1 --> g͡ɣ --> ɣ

*bʰ == b2 --> b --> b
*dʰ == d2 --> d --> d
*gʰ == g2 --> g --> g

It's worth noting (and, as far as I know, Beckwith does not point this out) that the hypothetical Germanic developments differ from the "standard IE" (non-Group B) developments only in the case of d1 and g1. Everything else is identical. Furthermore, the Germanic developments are not particularly similar to the Italic, Greek, and Indic developments, except that they both phonemicized the voiced stop split generally, not just in the bilabials. I'm ignoring Armenian in this part of the summary because I don't know what Beckwith would say about it.

So, in Italic, Greek, and Indic, the development of the b1, d1, g1 series was identical to in the "standard IE"/"non-Group B" languages. However, while those developments were going on the , b2, d2, g2 series developed a mandatory murmur (/ʱ/) which meant that d1 continued to be distinct from d2, etc. I'd say the development of this murmur might be comparable to the shift in medieval Sinitic and Tibetan along the lines of b --> pʱ (etc. for the other voiced stops in those languages). So, in Italic/Greek/Indic:

**b == b1 --> b͡β --> w
*d == d1 --> d͡ð --> d
*g == g1 --> g͡ɣ --> g

*bʰ == b2 --> bʱ
*dʰ == d2 --> dʱ
*gʰ == g2 --> gʱ

In Indic, these consonants are pronounced roughly like this down to the present. In Greek and Latin, the murmured voiced stops first devoiced, becoming voiceless aspirated stops, and subsequently became fricatives (in Greek, this spirantisation occurred after their language was written down; in Latin, it was before).

*bʰ == b2 --> bʱ --> pʰ --> f
*dʰ == d2 --> dʱ --> tʰ --> θ (--> f)
*gʰ == g2 --> gʱ --> kʰ --> x (--> h)

(shifts in parentheses apply only to Latin).

The charts above represent my attempts to wrap my brain around what Beckwith is describing. They represent his opinions only the extent that I've been successful in grasping them; otherwise, they represent my mistakes.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Is there any reason not to posit a tʰ-t/d-dʱ distinction of the sort that currently exists in some dialects of Armenian for PIE, other than that Armenian is the absolute worst language in all of IE to base anything on? [even though said dialects perfectly reflect the phonation distinction reconstructed for PIE, except with aspiration on the t-series]

Where did Indo-Aryan get its unvoiced aspirates?
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by dhok »

Nortaneous wrote:Is there any reason not to posit a tʰ-t/d-dʱ distinction of the sort that currently exists in some dialects of Armenian for PIE, other than that Armenian is the absolute worst language in all of IE to base anything on? [even though said dialects perfectly reflect the phonation distinction reconstructed for PIE, except with aspiration on the t-series]

Where did Indo-Aryan get its unvoiced aspirates?
From sequences of a voiceless stop plus a laryngeal, IIRC. For example, the second person dual ending in Sanskrit is -thaḥ, while the third person dual ending is -taḥ. These are reconstructed as *-th₁es and *-tes.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by hwhatting »

Terra wrote: - He argues that the occurrence of Grassman's Law in both Greek and Sanskrit shows that it was originally a PIE thing, not a separate and identical innovation.
I don't know when I'll have time to read the paper, but does he say anything on why the outcomes of Grassmann are different in Greek and Sanscrit? In Sanscrit, Grassmann works on the (in the traditional model) unchanged voiced aspirates and produces unaspirated voiced stops, while in Greek it works on the devoiced aspirates and produces unvoiced stops (e.g. Scr. dadha:mi vs. Gr. tithe:mi < PIE *dhVdhe:mi "I put"). Also, in Greek Grassmann also works on /h/ from PIE */s/ (which cannot happen in Sanscrit because it generally keeps /s/ in positions where it could be affected by Grassmann). These facts are normally taken as evidence that Grassmann was a parallel development, not inherited, so he ought to to address that issue.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Herr Dunkel wrote:Proto-Uralic is, at least for me, the most plausible next step.
Both groups have their Urheimaten in close vicinity of one another, both share some morphological and syntactical features and tendencies and possibly also some vocabulary. Their age matches up more or less (that is, I think it was Proto-Indo-European that had already split up somewhat when Proto-Uralic began splitting), they have sound systems that generally show similarities etc.
Indeed, PIE and PU were geographically probably quite close to each other. As you say, PU is somewhat younger than PIE. The similarities that speak most clearly in favour of a common ancestor are the resemblances in morphology, especially pronouns and verbal suffixes, but also the accusative singular in *-m. While it is not out of the question that elements of morphology get borrowed, when entire paradigms match, that is a less likely explanation than the assumption that the two languages share a common ancestor.
hwhatting wrote:
Terra wrote: - He argues that the occurrence of Grassman's Law in both Greek and Sanskrit shows that it was originally a PIE thing, not a separate and identical innovation.
I don't know when I'll have time to read the paper, but does he say anything on why the outcomes of Grassmann are different in Greek and Sanscrit? In Sanscrit, Grassmann works on the (in the traditional model) unchanged voiced aspirates and produces unaspirated voiced stops, while in Greek it works on the devoiced aspirates and produces unvoiced stops (e.g. Scr. dadha:mi vs. Gr. tithe:mi < PIE *dhVdhe:mi "I put"). Also, in Greek Grassmann also works on /h/ from PIE */s/ (which cannot happen in Sanscrit because it generally keeps /s/ in positions where it could be affected by Grassmann). These facts are normally taken as evidence that Grassmann was a parallel development, not inherited, so he ought to to address that issue.
Yes. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov also try to project Grassmann's Law back to PIE, but that too doesn't make sense for the same reason you state above. There are some other bits in G&I's book Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans which IMHO do not make sense, such as the Armenian homeland and the extra phonemes (uvular and labialized dental stops, and a labialized and a palatalized sibilant). What IMHO does make sense, but only for a Pre-PIE and not for PIE proper, are the glottalic theory and the idea that the language was active-stative (though G&I's argumentation for the latter is flawed).
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Basilius »

hwhatting wrote:
Terra wrote: - He argues that the occurrence of Grassman's Law in both Greek and Sanskrit shows that it was originally a PIE thing, not a separate and identical innovation.
I don't know when I'll have time to read the paper, but does he say anything on why the outcomes of Grassmann are different in Greek and Sanscrit? In Sanscrit, Grassmann works on the (in the traditional model) unchanged voiced aspirates and produces unaspirated voiced stops, while in Greek it works on the devoiced aspirates and produces unvoiced stops (e.g. Scr. dadha:mi vs. Gr. tithe:mi < PIE *dhVdhe:mi "I put"). Also, in Greek Grassmann also works on /h/ from PIE */s/ (which cannot happen in Sanscrit because it generally keeps /s/ in positions where it could be affected by Grassmann). These facts are normally taken as evidence that Grassmann was a parallel development, not inherited, so he ought to to address that issue.
Valid.

And there are other cases where Grassman seems to depend on specific developments in each branch, like in 'daughter': Gr. thugater- (without Grassman) vs. Skr. duhitar- (with Grassman).

Even more importantly, there are many PIE roots with just one plosive (*Per, *Pel, *seP etc.), and these appear to have *three* contrastive series.

Also, Terra's argument about *DheG vs. *DeGh.

No, I won't waste my time on reading it unless someone tells me that Beckwith has something really witty to say on each of the above points.

(Besides, no-one will care as usual, but plain velars are rare only initially.)
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

So a hidden society appears (I don't know how; this is just hypothetical) and seems to speak an Indo-European language, except that it doesn't appear to be related to any other IE language group (i.e. "isolated"). Also, there are no old texts to see how it evolved in the past (they might exist, but none are known), though it is written now.
What sort of things might we expect of an "isolated" IE language?
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Since Satemization is an areal thing, it depends on the location. Going east, you can expect /v/ as a reflex of /*w/, a merger of the velar and labiovelar rows, RUKI backing of /s/ and the transformation of palatovelars into sibilants. Since Centum languages do not share any characteristic sound changes, you can only expect the merger of palatovelars and velars since everything else was pretty much a separate development. Anatolian languages preserved the laryngeals and the three rows of dorsals, Tocharian merged the rows into a simple velar system.

Edit: you could take a look at Albanian, Armenian and Ossetian. They all are oddball languages in the IE phylum, although Ossetian is an Iranian IIRC language.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Drydic »

Herr Dunkel wrote:Since Satemization is an areal thing, it depends on the location. Going east, you can expect /v/ as a reflex of /*w/, a merger of the velar and labiovelar rows, RUKI backing of /s/ and the transformation of palatovelars into sibilants. Since Centum languages do not share any characteristic sound changes, you can only expect the merger of palatovelars and velars since everything else was pretty much a separate development. Anatolian languages preserved the laryngeals and the three rows of dorsals, Tocharian merged the rows into a simple velar system.

Edit: you could take a look at Albanian, Armenian and Ossetian. They all are oddball languages in the IE phylum, although Ossetian is an Iranian IIRC language.
Ossetian is Iranian, but it's Eastern Iranian - compared to Persian, the batshit crazy branch. And it's the descendant of Scythian/Saramatian (probably moreso the latter), the Steppe lords of old.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Also the rulers of large parts of Europe - the Alans were Sarmatian, but they lost their language everywhere they settled (iirc, southern spain, southwest france, southern italy, north africa, etc).

Anyway, I don't understand the premise of "IE but not related to any IE group". All the IE families are related, that's what makes them IE. Naturally, they have things in common with one another. And as for what we might expect... well, if the only premise is that it's not like any other IE group, we can't expect anything. Presumably it's a trigger system language with clicks and linguolabials.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Astraios »

Salmoneus wrote:Anyway, I don't understand the premise of "IE but not related to any IE group".
Duh, it means in a subfamily of its own.

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