zompist bboard

There recently have been some discussions of Proto-Indo-European phonology in this thread where it is a tangent, so I have decided to open a new thread here in L&L for such discussions (not only of phonology but also for all other things PIE).

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

1) Why does PIE lack *b in native roots? (Roots that are neither borrowings nor imitations nor cradle words.)
2a) Why can't a voiceless stop and voiced aspirated stop exist together in a root?
2b) Why can't two voiced stops exist together in a root?

It does?

Can someone explain to me how to figure out the different transcriptions and to switch between them when necessary?

I'm used to the h₁ h₂ h₃ system, but there are others that I see less frequently, and when compiling data, I find it hard to read.

Also, what is H, h₄, h_a and h_x?

I know Hamp/Sen use h_x and h_a, but Lehmann uses <ʔ> and that's just a bit confusing if you don't remember what it is.

Furthermore, my Dictionary of Proto-Indo-European Roots uses a different transcription (doesn't use laryngeals or palatals, I think), one that indicates a "later" PIE, but also uses the old H transcription to describe entries after the new transcription as well.

_________________
[bɹ̠ˤʷɪs.təɫ]
Nōn quālibet inīquā cupiditāte illectus hoc agō
Yo te pongo en tu lugar...
Taisc mach Daró

-- H is a laryngeal of unknown quality, so either h₁, h₂, or h₃.
-- h_a = h₂ (The a-coloring laryngeal.)
-- ʔ (a glottal stop) is for those who recostruct four laryngeals. The three laryngeal theory merges this with H₁. The reason is that sometimes h₁ reflects Anatolian h (with some squiggle underneath), and it sometimes doesn't. h₁ is for the times it does reflect h, and ʔ is for the times it does not.
-- I don't know what h₄ and h_x are. (I guess that I'd assume that h₄ is another symbol for the glottal stop.) (I could probably figure out what these laryngeals are if you posted some examples of words that they appear in.)

I believe h_x is another way of denoting H.

We don't know.
It certainly seems as though PIE had very few words with *b in them. Whether it had none is a bit different - because there are so few of them, people like to say 'it has *b in it so it must be a loanword', and then bingo, there are no native nonbabytalk words with *b in them.

[Eg. *bak (b2ek, whatever). Assumed to be a loanword, although it must either be early or widespread since it's in italic, celtic, greek, germanic, and possibly baltic]


hx is sometimes used as a laryngeal of unknown nature, I think.

_________________
Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Even if PIE did, the question just then becomes: Why did it have so few?

For the skeptical, there are other indications that a word is a loanword:
1) Limited/Regional distribution among IE languages.
2) Is a word for a new/regional animal/plant/technology.
3) Is a root-noun. (Doesn't have any verbs derived from it.)
4) Has /a/ (Which admittedly has the same problem as /b/ about whether/how it existed.)
Edit: One more:
5) Has irregular correspondences in languages it does show up in. ("nut": *knew-d- (Germanic), *knew-k- (Italic), *knew-H- (Celtic))

The glottalic theory (see wikipedia) attempts to explain the (almost) non-existence of /b/ and root structure (as well as stuff like Grimm's Law in Germanic and Armenian). IIRC the voiceless/voiced/aspirated becomes voiceless/ejective/voiced. Ejective /p'/ is apparently hard to pronounce [citation needed] and the root constraints seem to be typologically plausible in languages with such a glottalic system [citation needed].

h₄ is an a-coloring laryngeal, which is reconstructed in places were Hittite doesn't preserve the laryngeal. In contrast, the other a-coloring laryngeal h₂ is preserved in Hittite. To put it in another way: *h₂e becomes ha and *h₄e becomes a in Hittite. (I've also seen h_a in reconstructions, when the nature of the a-coloring laryngeal is uncertain, because the word isn't preserved in Anatolian). Personally I think reconstructing this extra laryngeal is unnecessary: *h₄e might as well be *h₁a or even simply *a.

I'm not going to touch the phonetic values of the other laryngeals, but h₁ is usually assumed to be the glottal stop.

_________________
"Was ist ist, was nicht ist ist möglich"
http://sleinadflar.deviantart.com

Yes, that is exactly how it is claimed to work. As you have indicated, neither the absence of /p'/ nor the non-occurrence of two ejectives in a single root is true of most languages with ejectives. Most Caucasian languages, for instance, have /p'/, and at least some of them allow two ejectives in a root. (I think I have seen such roots in Kartvelian - the family adduced most commonly as a model for "Glottalist PIE" - but I am not sure.) It is also not certain that PIE indeed lacked */b/. There are indeed not many words with it, and most of them have some etymological problems (such as an areally skewed distribution, e.g. *h₂abl- 'apple' which occurs only in Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic), but it is far from certain that all items with */b/ are spurious!

The non-co-occurrence of voiceless and voiced-aspirated stops in roots would then simply be the output of a voicing assimilation rule which would only apply to pulmonic stops.

Another glottalist argument is that allegedly, breathy-voiced stops never occur without voiceless aspirated stops, and that the traditional model of PIE was therefore typologically bizarre. But such stops are generally almost vanishingly rare in the world's languages outside Indo-Aryan, and it has been claimed that counterexamples have been found (about which I don't know, however).

It tells a lot that after a vivid discussion in the 1970s, most Indo-Europeanists now feel that there is no need for such a hypothesis.



Wherein we hit upon another "problematic" PIE phoneme, */a/. Many instances can be explained away by way of laryngeals; some others have limited distribution and may be loanwords; but there are quite a few items which do not easily admit to such explanations.



Often, yes; but */h/ is also often assumed. Anything that just cleanly goes away without affecting neighbouring vowels

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

Wait, I thought *eh₁ gave *ē?

_________________
퇎

Ο ορανς τα ανα̨ριθομον ϝερρον εͱεν ανθροποτροφον.
Το̨ ανθροπς αυ̨τ εκψον επ αθο̨ οραναμο̨ϝον.
Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν. Θαιν.

Of course. But the quality of the vowel is unaffected, in contrast to the other laryngeals.

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

That's still affecting the vowel...

_________________

Common Zein Scratchpad & other Stuffs! OMG AN ACTUAL CONPOST WTFBBQ

Formerly known as Drydic.

Sure it is. I worded wrongly; should have written, "... without affecting the quality of neighbouring vowels".

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

What's up with the 1st.sing.nom pronoun? It seems to fit oddly into the pronoun paradigm. For roughly the same reason, what is up with the /*s/ of the masc. and fem. 3d.sing.nom v. /*t/.

_________________

I think there is no definite answer yet. 1sg. nom. *h₁eǵoh₂ may once have been a verb form meaning something like 'I am here'. Note that in a language like PIE that inflects its verb for the person and number of the subject and may have been a pro-drop language, nominative pronouns had an emphatic function and can therefore be expected to be irregular.

The distinction between */s/ and */t/ in the 3rd person pronouns may have once been an animate/inanimate suppletivism (note that neuter form has */t/ in the nom.sg. as well), but why then did the inanimate forms invade the animate paradigm?

_________________
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

Here's something which concerns me. Some sources - Beekes for example - deny the existence of /a/ in PIE, and many deny /b/ also. Szemerényi mentions that the existence of /c/ (an affricate more commonly known as /ts/) has been tried to be proved and failed. Next up for removal is presumably /d/. So, how long will it be before PIEists eventually work their way through the entire alphabet and conclude that PIE had no phonemes at all?

_________________
Non fidendus est crocodilus quis posteriorem dentem acerbum conquetur.

Lies. It had /ʔ ʕ ʢ ɰ ɲ ʀ/ and probably also /ɶ ɞ/

_________________

Obviously it wasn't a spoken language, and thus not a language with phonemes.

_________________
Bearlandic - Kunesian - Nåmúþ

PIE was not a language.

Well, talk now goes it was a dialect continuum, so no it wasn't a single language it seems.

_________________

It would've been if it'd had a navy.

_________________

Common Zein Scratchpad & other Stuffs! OMG AN ACTUAL CONPOST WTFBBQ

Formerly known as Drydic.

What do you mean by this statement? Are you being facetious or do you have some specific opinions on the matter?

_________________
vec

So I'm doing a short bibliography project for my intro linguistics course, and I've chosen Indo-European stuff as my topic. One of the articles I'm reviewing is by a fellow named Beckwith, who has titled his work On the Indo-European Obstruent System. The board won't let me attach the pdf, but the basic gist of his argument is that the usual division of T vs. D vs. Dʰ is untenable, even going so far as to state that



Which is news to me! Beckwith argues that when the traditionalists argue that the three-way distinction of voiceless vs. voiced vs. voiced aspirated is maintained by Germanic, Italic, Greek and Indic, while the voiced and voiced aspirates collapse together in Celtic, Balto-Slavic and Iranian, they've got it backwards- in point of fact there was a two-way voiced vs. voiceless distinction, and the former group of languages actually innovated an aspirated/breathy-voiced series from an allophonic distinction later on. This does have the convenient advantage that it explains, kind of, the weird constraints on roots that disallow formations like **deg- or **dʰek-, as well as the near-absence of /b/. He's not very clear on just what the conditions were for the phonemicization of the aspirated stops were, though, and the whole thing just plain strikes me as really unlikely. (He also doesn't reconstruct a palatovelar or labiovelar series of stops). I can send the PDF to anyone who wants a look-through- but what's going on here?

how does that explain the near-absence of /b/? does he say it all shifted to bh or?

_________________
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.