The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

[KathTheDragon]

Positing a phoneme as bizarre as /ɢʱ/ is enough to give anyone pause, but it still reqires fewer miracles than the alternative.

Edit: Just asked a stupid question. Lemme say something else instead.

What if we supposed that the voiced aspirate series were actually voiced fricatives?

[Salmoneus]

Then you'd have voiced fricatives turning into voiceless aspirates, in at least two branches.

[Herr Dunkel]

It kinda works out for Greek and Italic, works out well for Germanic, Slavic, Celtic (?) but really messes up Indic (*/β ð ɣ/ /bʱ dʱ ɡʱ/ ouch) and I forgot where.

Pfft, ninja'd

[2+3 clusivity]

I am doing an areal cross-family study of Nuristani, Indo-Aryan (modern: Dardic, Romani-domari, others; past: Gandhari, etc.), eastern Iranian languages (with various odd-balls), and the oddly fitting Khotanese and tumshuqese. I plan to put it into L&L sometime.

So far, I am comparing personal pronouns, demonstratives, and numerals (1-11, 20, 100, 1000). I also intend to also include relatives and interrogatives.

Lexically, is there any other group of words with low potential for borrowing (keeping in mind some of the aforementioned are borrowed) that I might also target? If it changes your choice, many of these languages are really poorly documented. I feel like body part terms might work; family terms seem too changeable.

Grammatically, beyond o-stem declension, is there any other series that might be good to target for comparative purposes?

[hwhatting]

Lexically, is there any other group of words with low potential for borrowing (keeping in mind some of the aforementioned are borrowed) that I might also target? If it changes your choice, many of these languages are really poorly documented. I feel like body part terms might work; family terms seem too changeable.

Maybe you could look at Swadesh lists? They've been collected for many languages, so you may find some for the languages you're looking at.

[KathTheDragon]

Then you'd have voiced fricatives turning into voiceless aspirates, in at least two branches.

My theory is that they became affricates in all but Germanic and Italic, and then voiced stops in all but Greek and Indo-Aryan. In those last two, the affrication was changed into aspiration, and in Greek, the series was also devoiced. Yes, this whole thing is implausible, but so are voiced aspirates.

[vokzhen]

Then you'd have voiced fricatives turning into voiceless aspirates, in at least two branches.

My theory is that they became affricates in all but Germanic and Italic, and then voiced stops in all but Greek and Indo-Aryan. In those last two, the affrication was changed into aspiration, and in Greek, the series was also devoiced. Yes, this whole thing is implausible, but so are voiced aspirates.

Voiced bilabial affricates are all but unattested, voiced velar affricates are known nowhere in the world, affricates are not prone to fortification, and affricates even less so. I think a system where voiceless-voiced-glottalized becomes voiceless-breathy-glottalized, leaving an opening for glottalized (whatever it was) to become creak, then collapsing, relies and far fewer sketchy details.

[KathTheDragon]

Then you'd have voiced fricatives turning into voiceless aspirates, in at least two branches.

My theory is that they became affricates in all but Germanic and Italic, and then voiced stops in all but Greek and Indo-Aryan. In those last two, the affrication was changed into aspiration, and in Greek, the series was also devoiced. Yes, this whole thing is implausible, but so are voiced aspirates.

Voiced bilabial affricates are all but unattested, voiced velar affricates are known nowhere in the world, affricates are not prone to fortification, and affricates even less so. I think a system where voiceless-voiced-glottalized becomes voiceless-breathy-glottalized, leaving an opening for glottalized (whatever it was) to become creak, then collapsing, relies and far fewer sketchy details.

I never said it was stable. I have the whole sequence happening within a few hundred years. I'm not even convinced on the whole affricate business, but they're a convenient intermediary between fricatives, stops, and aspirate stops.

[CatDoom]

It seems likely that what we reconstruct as the last common ancestor of the Indo-European languages was a language already in the midst of a period of rapid change. By the time they're attested, the different sub-families all seem to have done weird things - collapsing plosive series together and/or innovating new ones, overhauling the inflection system to various degrees, and dropping several phonemes entirely, in some cases with little or no compensation. Proto-Indo-European presumably started out as something less bizarre, briefly turned into something highly unstable, and then broke up into a bunch of dialects that resolved the instabilities in different ways.

[KathTheDragon]

Yup. The traditional reconstruction almost certainly includes ancient morphology, as well as morphology innovated after the break-up.

Phonology-wise, I have Pre-PIE as having the following:

/p t k q kʷ/
/b d g ɢ gʷ/
/(ɸ) s/θ x χ (xʷ)/
/β ð ɣ ʁ ɣʷ/
/m n r l j w/

/i e ə ɑ u/ (probably from older /i e a o u/)
/i: e: ə: ɑ: u:/

[KathTheDragon]

I've been toying with the idea that thematic nouns once upon a time behaved in the same manner as athematic nouns (ie. accent and ablaut alternations), but they just so happened to end in the thematic vowel. They then acquired the static paradigm from the pronominal inflection along with all the weird endings. How does this sound to you guys?

[hwhatting]

I've been toying with the idea that thematic nouns once upon a time behaved in the same manner as athematic nouns (ie. accent and ablaut alternations), but they just so happened to end in the thematic vowel. They then acquired the static paradigm from the pronominal inflection along with all the weird endings. How does this sound to you guys?

I dunno. To me, it looks more like they were special from the beginning, a pronominal / adjectival formation that was later turned into nouns.

[KathTheDragon]

It seems they imported their 'specialness' from the pronouns. I mean, static accent without ablaut is found only in thematics. The pronouns are the only class that probably didn't ever exhibit ablaut, so I reckon that's where the thematic nouns imported it from, on the basis of the two classes rhyming.

[2+3 clusivity]

Anyone have or have access to Tocharian historical phonology and morphology by Douglas Q. Adams (1998): http://www.worldcat.org/title/tocharian ... ht=edition

In particular, I am trying to read the chapter on pronouns.

[qiihoskeh]

Has anyone seen Kiparsky's "Compositional vs. Paradigmatic Approaches to Accent and Ablaut."? It's at
http://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Paper ... ed.new.pdf

One of his conclusions is that the proterokinetic type doesn't exist.

[KathTheDragon]

Yeah, I've seen that. I'm not convinced his conclusions are worth much.

[qiihoskeh]

Yeah, I've seen that. I'm not convinced his conclusions are worth much.

Why is that? I think he had a point about the current standard paradigms not matching the data.

[KathTheDragon]

Some of his statements about the daughters do not match up with what I have access to. Plus, a fair bit of what he claims have other explanations that are much neater than his propositions. All in all, I don't think what he writes as it is is better than the traditional model (or at least, the traditional model once I've fiddles with it). I do agree with some of his points, though.

[Sleinad Flar]

I'm a bit more positive on Kiparsky and quite like his compositional approach in comparison with Schindler's paradigmatic approach. His de-coupling of accent and ablaut explains stuff like accented zero grades, which are basically left unexplained in Schindler's model. However, I don't share his conclusion that PD ablaut simply didn't exist. It may have been a lot rarer (for instance, I agree with him that non-neuter eh₂-, i- and u-stems were simply barytone or oxytone, just like o-stems), but it played a role in a number of neuter nouns (*génos/*g(e)nés(o)s, *gónu/*gnéus; *wódr/*udéns, maybe *g^wénh₂/**g^wnéh₂s also belongs here, if this word was originally neuter ("Das Weib")). Surprisingly, Kiparsky mentions a few of these examples himself, so I'm not sure how he came to the conclusion that PD was non-existent.
Another drawback of Kiparsky's approach is that it's very heavily based on Vedic. He does use Avestan, Greek and Germanic examples, but I couldn't find any Hittite or Tocharian examples.

Melissa Frazier takes another approach: she uses modern phonological theories to explain the Schindler classification. Her thesis is nigh unreadable for me, as I lack the phonological basis to understand it, so I can't judge this writing in its value: http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/819-0406/8 ... ER-0-0.PDF.

[hwhatting]

It seems they imported their 'specialness' from the pronouns. I mean, static accent without ablaut is found only in thematics. The pronouns are the only class that probably didn't ever exhibit ablaut, so I reckon that's where the thematic nouns imported it from, on the basis of the two classes rhyming.

Well, my assumption is that originally certain adjective and pronoun classes were like this, and that the o-stems are nothing but adjectives that became nouns. If I understand you correctly, you assume that:
Stage 1: o-stem nouns had mobile accent and ablaut while o-stem pronouns hadn't ->
Stage 2: o-stem nouns are influenced by pronouns and obtain static accent and lose ablaut

My assumption:
Stage 1: There is a special suffix e/o used to form adjectives and pronouns; these adjectives and pronouns have static accent and no ablaut
Stage 2: Some of these adjectives are used as nouns, but keep the static accent and no ablaut*1)

[KathTheDragon]

That is essentially correct.

[TaylorS]

Non-linguist morons keep pushing the Anatolian Hypothesis.

Good fucking grief, why does the AH keep rising from the dead like a zombie? It it's always non-linguists who keep reviving it.

[qiihoskeh]

Melissa Frazier takes another approach: she uses modern phonological theories to explain the Schindler classification. Her thesis is nigh unreadable for me, as I lack the phonological basis to understand it, so I can't judge this writing in its value: http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/819-0406/8 ... ER-0-0.PDF.

That will take me quite some time to read. I'm not a phonologist either and Optimality Theory is always a challenge. Yet, I suspect that the Schindler classification will have to be revised.

[jal]

Good fucking grief, why does the AH keep rising from the dead like a zombie? It it's always non-linguists who keep reviving it.

Family Tree of Lemurs Has Roots in South Asia, Linguists Say

Linguists using tools developed for drawing linguistic family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in phylogenetics: the origin of the lemur family of primates.

The family includes the ring-tailed lemur and most other Madegascan primates, as well as the sifaka, red ruffed lemur and many others. Despite the importance of the animals, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.

Biologists believe that the first ancestors of the lemurs, known as Lemuriformes, were separated from the African mainland during the Eocene, after which they conquered Madagascar from the West and diversified. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Lemurs migrated from South Asia on rafts made of plant material arriving in the East, and dissemenated their genes by love, not war.

The new entrant to the debate is a historical linguist, Bilbo Baggins of the University of Hobbiton in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 41 lemur populations and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.

The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, is that “we found decisive support for an South Asian origin over an African origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of lemur species “fit with a genetic expansion from East Madagascar beginning 40 to 45 million years ago,” they report.

But despite its advanced statistical methods, their study may not convince everyone.

The researchers started with a menu of vocalizations that are known to be resistant to rapid change, like calls for certain natural enemies and food sources, and compared them with the inferred ancestral word in proto-Lemur. Calls that have a clear line of descent from the same ancestral call are known as cognates. Thus “oo-ah-oo-ah" (ring tales lemur call for snake),” “oowa-oowa” (diademed sifaka), “wa-wa” (mouse lemur) and “ooo-wa-ooowa” (greater bamboo lemur) are all cognates derived from the proto-Lemur vocalization “oo-wa-ah-oo-wa-ah.”

(...)

The computer was also given geographical information about the present range of each lemur population and told to work out the likeliest pathways of distribution from an origin, given the probable family tree of descent. The calculation pointed to East Madagascar, particularly to what is now the city of Manajari, in the Vatovavy-Fitovinany region, as the most plausible origin — a region that had also been proposed as the lemur origin by the phenologist Gandalf Grey, in 1987, because it was the source from which lemur diversity spread to the reast of Madagascar.



JAL

[CatDoom]

What I find even more vexing is that one of the four user comments on the AH article that's singled out as a "New York Times Pick" is from one "Turkoglu," who asserts that "Anatolia" is a recent term and that the whole region should be called the "Armenian Highlands," that Armenian is Proto-Indo-European, and that Basques are Armenian and the Basque language is a dialect of Armenian because the two languages supposedly share a (staggering!) 600 words in common.