The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Sumelic wrote:There was a discussion of this relatively recently on the WordReference forums: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/horn.3391577/
ah, thanks. That brightened up my day. I didn't realize that the Arabic word for horn was borrowed from "corner" by way of an ancient Biblical manuscript. #til

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Why women? Just curious .... mitochondrial DNA I assume?
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I think the Ethiopian theory is based partly on that amharic is in the mtns, and mtns tend to preserve old relic civilizations and are the last to be conquered by agriculturalists.
Msg could be different in the tropics than the steppes though.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Soap wrote: Why women? Just curious .... mitochondrial DNA I assume?
Yes. Or, lack of Y-DNA, at least? The steppe population that apparently spoke PIE (or possibly PIE-minus-Anatolian) - that is, the steppe population that then invaded Europe and eventually India - is genitically about 50% eastern european hunter gatherers (i.e. the people who were hanging around there already) and 50% caucasians, with a few people from southwest europe thrown in for good measure. But the Y-DNA doesn't show any noticeable influx from the Caucasus. So the theory is, they must have bought/stolen a lot of wives from the Caucasus, and a few from elsewhere.

Or, of course, there may have been a mass migration of both sexes, but one way or another the Caucasian men were hugely outperformed sexually by the steppe men. The complication here is that it's the Caucasians who'd have been introducing technologies to the steppe, which you'd think would give them power. But there could have been some sort of Sumer/Akkad/Amorite thing going on.

[a similar problem arises in Europe in the middle neolithic, when suddenly male mesolithic people (big, dark-skinned, hunter-gatherers who had been pushed into the least desirable areas) suddenly started sexually outcompeting the neolithic men (smaller farmers, but much more numerous, with armies and weapons and human sacrifice and everything).]
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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It's not impossible. There are more signs of language contact between IE and Semitic than this.
http://paleoglot.blogspot.nl/2008/03/se ... c-how.html

And there has actually been some migration of Eurasians to Africa. Some tribes in Africa have Y-DNA haplogroup R1b.
See: https://aratta.wordpress.com/2015/04/11 ... group-r1b/.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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If it's a loan, it really has to be PIE > Semitic because the PIE root is also attested without the additional suffix. It would be odd for Semitic to add a meaningless /-n/ while PIE also added an /-n/ of a different meaning. Therefore since it is attested only with the suffix in Semitic, the PIE must be older. If there is any connection at all, that is. I think it's just a coincidence .... and not even thAt big of one... only 2 consonants, and can't compare the vowels, and that assumes the meaning hasn't shifted much in either language.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Salmoneus wrote:
Zaarin wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:Proto-Semitic was spoken probably in the Levant, probably thousands of years earlier.
Lipinski agrees with you, but a lot of Semiticists these days lean towards Arabia or Ethiopia. Which, of course, is even farther from the PIE homeland, no matter where you put it.
Why Ethiopia? Doesn't Proto-Semitic have words for things like camels, horses, figs, ice, oak trees, almonds and viticulture?
TBH I can't claim to know much about the Proto-Semitic lexicon. I believe the theory is based on genetics and the fact that South Semitic has preserved ejectives (though I freely grant that that argument is weak--evidence pretty strongly points to Akkadian, Phoenician, and Biblical Hebrew also preserving ejectives; I don't know whether Arabic or Aramaic developed pharyngealization first, but it pretty clearly spread from them as an areal feature). What I do know is that, of the literature I've read, a lot of Semiticists at present seem to favor Ethiopia/South Arabia over Syria/the Levant. (Though I also have to correct what I said before: Lipinski proposes the Proto-Semitic urheimat is in Western Sahara. That's not Lipinski's only weird idea. :p )
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

Salmoneus wrote:The steppe population that apparently spoke PIE (or possibly PIE-minus-Anatolian) - that is, the steppe population that then invaded Europe and eventually India - is genitically about 50% eastern european hunter gatherers (i.e. the people who were hanging around there already) and 50% caucasians,
Which of those includes the Ancestral North Eurasian "Hyperboreans"? I can never keep this stuff straight in my head.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Salmoneus wrote:But the Y-DNA doesn't show any noticeable influx from the Caucasus. So the theory is, they must have bought/stolen a lot of wives from the Caucasus, and a few from elsewhere.
Afaik, the usual theory is that the men stay home, and the women marry into neighbouring families (which is the usual pattern around the world). No need for buying and stealing. Every generation (which might very well be about 16 years or less in ancient times), the mitochondrial DNA could travel quite a bit.


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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Howl wrote:It's not impossible. There are more signs of language contact between IE and Semitic than this.
http://paleoglot.blogspot.nl/2008/03/se ... c-how.html
What happens below in the comment section really lends the writer less credibility unfortunately. I couldn't stop laughing, it became so ridiculous. :?

----

Speaking of language links, what would you guys say is the status of Anatolian within Indo-European? I've read conflicting arguments over whether Anatolian split off early or not, although I was sure that the prevailing argument was that it did.

Also where does the -hi conjugation go? Is the Anatolian usage an innovation, or is it evident of earlier usage?
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Znex wrote:Also where does the -hi conjugation go? Is the Anatolian usage an innovation, or is it evident of earlier usage?
Depends on who you believe. Some people think it's a cognate of the perfect, others the middle, and still others that it's a reflex of a previously unknown distinct active conjugation.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by hwhatting »

KathTheDragon wrote:
Znex wrote:Also where does the -hi conjugation go? Is the Anatolian usage an innovation, or is it evident of earlier usage?
Depends on who you believe. Some people think it's a cognate of the perfect, others the middle, and still others that it's a reflex of a previously unknown distinct active conjugation.
The last new account of the development of the PIE verbal system that appeared on my radar screen.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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jal wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:But the Y-DNA doesn't show any noticeable influx from the Caucasus. So the theory is, they must have bought/stolen a lot of wives from the Caucasus, and a few from elsewhere.
Afaik, the usual theory is that the men stay home, and the women marry into neighbouring families (which is the usual pattern around the world). No need for buying and stealing. Every generation (which might very well be about 16 years or less in ancient times), the mitochondrial DNA could travel quite a bit.


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I don't think this works in this case. If it takes a generation to move one village all the way from Georgia to the Don, that's a very long time - particularly since they don't know what direction they're meant to go in (so only a fraction would move in the 'right' direction). And when they did get to the Don, they wouldn't be caucasian any more - a woman who is the product of one woman from Georgia and then a hundred generations of eastern european fathers no longer looks like women from Georgia anymore, genetically. It would take hundreds more generations to build up a noticeably caucasian genetic influence in the area - and why isn't it being diluted by women from everywhere else? And then in the end, if you've got 50% georgian genes on the Don, as the result of an unremarkable cline of generation-by-generation migration, you should see, say, 75% georgian genes closer to Georgia. And 25% georgian genes in, say, Carpathia. And how come in this process you don't equally end up with 50% eastern european genes in Georgia?

No, it seems pretty clear that there was large-scale importation of women specifically from the caucasus, specifically to eastern europe, directly (ie with individuals travelling long distances personally), and only in one direction. That doesn't fit the pattern of general diffusion through village-to-village intermarriage within a culture. That fits patterns like wife-buying, wife-stealing, wife-tributing - or, alternatively, mass migration followed by loss (violently or economically) of male genes.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Znex wrote:
Howl wrote:It's not impossible. There are more signs of language contact between IE and Semitic than this.
http://paleoglot.blogspot.nl/2008/03/se ... c-how.html
What happens below in the comment section really lends the writer less credibility unfortunately. I couldn't stop laughing, it became so ridiculous. :?
Glen Gordon, the guy behind the Paleoglot blog, is a well-known crackpot almost as howling mad as Octaviano. He has managed to deceive himself into believing that Etruscan was related to IE; he interprets Etruscan inscriptions in different ways than the academic scholars (often placing the IE-Etruscan relationship he assumes on the input side, and concluding from that that the language must be related to IE!), believes in a sister group of Semitic he calls "Semitish" and a few such things more. It is a fictional edifice that has nothing to do with the actual prehistory of the languages. His social skills are also as bad as Octaviano's; he attacks everyone who doubts his ideas, as usual with such lunatics.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Salmoneus wrote:
Zju wrote:The similarity between PIE *ḱerh₂- 'horn' and PS *qarn- 'horn' seems to have been noticed, but has anyone considered it in depth? Since the PIE word is a possible derivation of *ḱer- 'to grow, increase' maybe we're looking at a PIE borrowing in PS. But then the 'grow, increase' root is also reconstructed as *ḱerh₁- or *ḱreh₁-.
Proto-Indo-European was spoken probably in Ukraine. Proto-Semitic was spoken probably in the Levant, probably thousands of years earlier. They're not exactly obvious candidates for interchanging basic vocabulary (particularly vocabulary for things that would have been known to both groups - I mean, wine, sure, that word could travel a long way, but 'horn'?).

To get them even vaguely close, you'd have to assume that PIE came to Ukraine through a mass migration of Georgian women, and Georgia and the Levant still aren't exactly next to one another.

If there is common vocabulary, the parsimonious solution would be a third language as the source. In particular, we know there was massive migration of women from the Caucasus to Ukraine, and we also know there was substantial migration from the Caucasus westward to Anatolia, the Levant and the western Mediterranean. We might hypothesise an Ur-Caucasian that lent vocabulary to both Semitic and Yamnaya pastoralists.

But random chance is still probably the simplest explanation.
There is some evidence for PIE-PS linguistic contact. The PIE words for star, bull (the taurus word), seven and maybe six have all been proposed as borrowings from PS. Having that in mind, adding one more to that list isn't all out insane.

But yes, I concur, it's strange given the distance. I was perplexed for a while when learning about those aforementioned etymologies, but apparently they're good enough to be considered by some.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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WeepingElf wrote:
Znex wrote:
Howl wrote:It's not impossible. There are more signs of language contact between IE and Semitic than this.
http://paleoglot.blogspot.nl/2008/03/se ... c-how.html
What happens below in the comment section really lends the writer less credibility unfortunately. I couldn't stop laughing, it became so ridiculous. :?
Glen Gordon, the guy behind the Paleoglot blog, is a well-known crackpot almost as howling mad as Octaviano.
Blech! I shouldn't have linked the first site that appeared in Google. The point I wanted to make that there are more wandering words that appear in both Semitic and the earliest layers of IE. But some of his examples are indeed out there.
Salmoneus wrote: No, it seems pretty clear that there was large-scale importation of women specifically from the caucasus, specifically to eastern europe, directly (ie with individuals travelling long distances personally), and only in one direction. That doesn't fit the pattern of general diffusion through village-to-village intermarriage within a culture. That fits patterns like wife-buying, wife-stealing, wife-tributing - or, alternatively, mass migration followed by loss (violently or economically) of male genes.
Many of those patterns have been documented in antiquity. And there is no reason to suppose that people in the stone age were more civilized in that respect.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Salmoneus wrote:It would take hundreds more generations to build up a noticeably caucasian genetic influence in the area
From the discussion above, I thought we were merely talking about Y-chromosomal DNA and mitochondrial DNA. Both can spread very quickly as they are passed on from a single parent only.
No, it seems pretty clear
Do you mean "this is my personal believe" or "scholars overwhelmingly support"? Two quite different things.
Howl wrote:Many of those patterns have been documented in antiquity. And there is no reason to suppose that people in the stone age were more civilized in that respect.
The main problem being that the "antiquity" period is technologically way, way more advanced than the neolithic, having means of mass transport and the like. In contrast, it would be very difficult for people in the stone age to execute a large scale slave trade that would transport these 1000s of women across the vast distances proposed.


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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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jal wrote: Do you mean "this is my personal believe" or "scholars overwhelmingly support"? Two quite different things.
It's what appears logical to me, and what this layman interprets the scholars as seeming to support.
The main problem being that the "antiquity" period is technologically way, way more advanced than the neolithic, having means of mass transport and the like. In contrast, it would be very difficult for people in the stone age to execute a large scale slave trade that would transport these 1000s of women across the vast distances proposed.
Not in the slightest. Mobility was extremely high. A short while later, these people conquered Europe, and then some of them went back and conquered India. And specifically, it's believed that there are remains in central Europe of people who grew up on the Steppe, and vice versa - individuals did travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles. [we can tell from the isotope ratios in their enamel, which fingerprints adults with the area where they grew up]. There are individual remains from Steppe burials who clearly come from thousands of miles away. Which shouldn't be a great surprise - this is a world, after all, where there was trade between the Levant and Scandinavia. At this time (or even earlier) in central Europe, people were transporting dead bodies hundreds of miles! (or possibly transporting living people hundreds of miles just to kill them).

Both pastoralist nomads and some sorts of hunter-gatherer can be extremely mobile; and large-scale, even intercontinental trading routes have existed for thousands of years.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Salmoneus wrote:Not in the slightest. Mobility was extremely high. (...) (or possibly transporting living people hundreds of miles just to kill them).
The latter is the only thing that would support a hypothesis of trading slaves. All the others is about people transporting themselves. I'm still not convinced though that large scale women trading could be a thing, given the lack of infrastructure and vehicles.
Both pastoralist nomads and some sorts of hunter-gatherer can be extremely mobile; and large-scale, even intercontinental trading routes have existed for thousands of years.
Trading routes can exist without people moving much, only the goods need to be moved. Living people however, need food, even if they walk themselves, which makes them quite expensive and difficult to trade.


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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Salmoneus wrote:
Zju wrote:The similarity between PIE *ḱerh₂- 'horn' and PS *qarn- 'horn' seems to have been noticed, but has anyone considered it in depth? Since the PIE word is a possible derivation of *ḱer- 'to grow, increase' maybe we're looking at a PIE borrowing in PS. But then the 'grow, increase' root is also reconstructed as *ḱerh₁- or *ḱreh₁-.
Proto-Indo-European was spoken probably in Ukraine. Proto-Semitic was spoken probably in the Levant, probably thousands of years earlier. They're not exactly obvious candidates for interchanging basic vocabulary (particularly vocabulary for things that would have been known to both groups - I mean, wine, sure, that word could travel a long way, but 'horn'?).
That's only a problem for loaning between PIE proper and PS proper. But they both had ancestors that were likely spoken somewhere else.

These are also roots with fairly stable consonants. The similarity will hold just as well between e.g. modern Breton karn and modern Tigre kʼärn, even though these are spoken even further away from each other. So there will be easily a few millennia to spare. Which is not to suggest that we're dealing with Nostratic inheritance though — it may also be a loan from pre-PIE into pre-PS, or vice versa.
Salmoneus wrote:To get them even vaguely close, you'd have to assume that PIE came to Ukraine through a mass migration of Georgian women, and Georgia and the Levant still aren't exactly next to one another.
I've always assumed that, at a deep enough time level, pre-PIE probably came counterclockwise around the Caspian Sea, from an ancestor spoken in NE Levant. An Anatolian route seems to be ruled out, and the Caucasus is just too difficult to go through at a time depth when it will have been already populated.

For very long-ago routing, it will be a problem that Semitic is a part of Afrasian and only comes into the Levant well after agriculture etc. were in progress; but, if IE did come from the Levant long ago enough, there would likely have been now-extinct relatives left behind along the way, which could have retained a common word for 'horn'. So the loaning event could be relatively recent, while the divergence of the IE and Semitic words might still be older.

This will be compareable to something like Skolt Sami mie´lǩǩ 'milk' being eeriely similar to Russian молоко 'id.' — not because the two languages have been in contact ages ago (they haven't), but because the Sami languages have been in contact with a distant relative of Russian, i.e. Germanic.
Soap wrote:If it's a loan, it really has to be PIE > Semitic because the PIE root is also attested without the additional suffix. It would be odd for Semitic to add a meaningless /-n/ while PIE also added an /-n/ of a different meaning. Therefore since it is attested only with the suffix in Semitic, the PIE must be older.
In principle it's possible that the *-n- part is chance resemblance, while the *KVr- part is not.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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jal wrote:
Salmoneus wrote: Both pastoralist nomads and some sorts of hunter-gatherer can be extremely mobile; and large-scale, even intercontinental trading routes have existed for thousands of years.
Trading routes can exist without people moving much, only the goods need to be moved. Living people however, need food, even if they walk themselves, which makes them quite expensive and difficult to trade.
They did have boats in the stone age.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Howl wrote:They did have boats in the stone age.
I'm aware of that, but those were no trading vessels that could hold a good quantity of women and food.


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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Znex »

I'm just reading through Kloekhorst's etymological Hittite dictionary, and I can't find one mention of where the Anatolian -ni plural verb marker comes from; by which I'm referring to as in both the -mi and -Hi paradigms, such as in ʔés-:
  • *ʔés- {be}
    1sg *ʔésmi pl *ʔsmé-ni
    2sg *ʔési pl *ʔsté-ni
    3sg *ʔésti pl *ʔsénti
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Tropylium wrote: That's only a problem for loaning between PIE proper and PS proper. But they both had ancestors that were likely spoken somewhere else.
Which would seem to make things worse - probability suggests the foremother of PIE was still in north eurasia, while the foremother of PS pretty clearly seems to have been in Africa. Moreover, we don't know that apparent similarities at PIE/PS level actually reflect similarities at foremother level, given that both families would have been experiencing their own linguistic changes. In fact, the further back you push any connexion, the more likely it is that PIE/PS similarities are TOO conveniently close to reflect actual descent...
Which is not to suggest that we're dealing with Nostratic inheritance though — it may also be a loan from pre-PIE into pre-PS, or vice versa.
Or from a third party. What's the reason for assuming direct loaning, rather than loaning from a third family? The third family approach makes it much easier to get the parent languages in the right place, since we know both families were in positions that experience large-scale demic migration from the same sort of area.

Or, of course, the handful of not-that-surprising resemblances could just be coincidence.
Salmoneus wrote:To get them even vaguely close, you'd have to assume that PIE came to Ukraine through a mass migration of Georgian women, and Georgia and the Levant still aren't exactly next to one another.
I've always assumed that, at a deep enough time level, pre-PIE probably came counterclockwise around the Caspian Sea, from an ancestor spoken in NE Levant. An Anatolian route seems to be ruled out, and the Caucasus is just too difficult to go through at a time depth when it will have been already populated.
Oh, now that is an interesting idea.
So far as I'm aware, though, it's a very improbable one, since I don't think there's any trace - genetic or archeological - of that sort of Iranian influence on the steppe, so the language would have to be transmitted by some very small elite; and Iran was, like the Caucasus, a populous and expansive area, so it's less likely that there would have been a migration from the levant through Iran. Nor is there any archeological or genetic influence from the Levant (which before Semitic and the Caucasian expansion would have had a population cousin to that in Europe at the time) onto the steppe.

I suppose my reaction would be: that's a clever way to get people from the Levant to the Steppe. But on the one hand, it has to assume a string of improbable things; and, on the other, it doesn't seem to have any motivation, other than perhaps religious (I know a lot of people want the Indo-Europeans to be from the Holy Land one way or another). What shred of evidence is there for seeing PIE as the language of Levantine exiles? A couple of chance resemblances with Proto-Semitic? But those only look like loanwords if we assume the languages were once neighbours, so using that as evidence of them being neighbours seems like begging the question.
For very long-ago routing, it will be a problem that Semitic is a part of Afrasian and only comes into the Levant well after agriculture etc. were in progress; but, if IE did come from the Levant long ago enough, there would likely have been now-extinct relatives left behind along the way, which could have retained a common word for 'horn'. So the loaning event could be relatively recent, while the divergence of the IE and Semitic words might still be older.
This is also clever. But this also seems undermotivated. Why invent such a complex procedure to explain two vaguely similar phonemes in one lexical item? This is a literal violation of Ockham's Razor, supposing the existence of languages lying around the middle east, for which there is no other archeological, genetic or linguistic evidence, just so that they can lend a word or two to a later-arriving Semitic.

Here's an alternative solution: PIE k'er, "head", from which "horn" is derived, and Afroasiatic qar, "horn" (seen in Egyptian and Omotic as well as in Semitic), are simply two words in unrelated languages that simply happen to look somewhat alike if you squint.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Pabappa »

I remember a paper once that said milk tolerance was from nw Iran, and had spread into Europe from the east. I wouldn't call nw Iran the Levant but it provides a explanation for the roundabout passage around the Caspian sea.

https://www.nature.com/news/archaeology ... on-1.13471 <----------- this may have been what I saw

Genetic evidence is weak because the originally distinct founding population mixed with its neighbors over time. .... both the settlers in Europe and the ones who stayed behind in nw iran.

I still think Semitic itself is from Africa but Thats irr3levenat here.

I missed didnt know that the r9ot was attetzeted without the N but it's still just w2 consonants either way.w
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2+3 clusivity
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by 2+3 clusivity »

*ʔés- {be}

Present -------
For both of the following, between step one and two: (1) the stress fixes on the penultimate vowel , (2) the non-stressed vowel is elided – I use <ə> for these vowels
1sg -- *ʔes-məi̯ -> *ʔésmi -> e:smi
2sg -- *ʔes-(s)əi̯ ->*ʔés(s)i - > e:ssi
3sg -- *ʔes-(H2)əi̯ -> XX -> *ʔes+ti -> e:stsi

The verbal extension is a reduced form similar to the instrumental pronouns and various enclitic forms in *-i – “by X”. In the second phase, the reformed *t-/*-s form replaces the original *H2e- ending.
Alternatively, *-i is simply added to preserve syllable structure

pl -- *ʔVs-mé-n-ə -> *ʔsmén+i -> ??asweni (?not attested?)
pl -- *ʔVs-té-n-ə - *ʔstén+i -> ??asteni (?I see Wiki gives <e:steni> is that correct??)
pl -- *ʔVs-(H2)é-n-ə -> *ʔs(H2)én+ti -> asantsi

In the first step, *-n- is added as a plural marker. Perhaps additional material followed allowing the accent to be pulled back.
In the second step, mirroring the singulars, *-i is added, but the same reformed *-ti added to the 3sg is added to the 3pl.


Preterite -------
1sg -- *ʔés-Ø+H2e -> *ʔés-H2e+un -> e:sun (analogical addition via 1pl)
2sg -- *ʔés-t+H2e ->*ʔés-th2e > e:sta
3sg -- *ʔés-t+H2e -> *ʔés-th2e -> e:sta

In a broad reading of –H2e theory, it seems the preterite singular endings were formed by adding -*H2e- in the singular. In the earliest part of step one, perhaps it was treated as a separate word and the forms were /*ʔés-Hə H2e, *ʔés-tə H2e, *ʔés-tə H2e/.
Is the original pronominal material pulling off a fossilized nominative case?

pl -- *ʔVs-m-én-ə -> *ʔs-mén -> e:swen
pl -- *ʔVs-t-én-ə -> *ʔs-té(r/n) -> e:sten (-n is restored?)
pl -- *ʔVs-(H2)-én-ə -> *ʔs-(H2)ér -> eser

The plurals’ –n/-r variation probably part of a broader rule parallel to –n/-r stems.
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KathTheDragon
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

@Znex: Someone (either Kloekhorst or Melchert I believe, though I don't recall exactly where I saw this) compares the -n(i) with the final -ν of the Greek 1pl -μεν. It's likely to be some particle with a meaning that made it possible to become fused to plural verbs.

@2+3: Unfortunately, much of that explanation is likely to be incorrect. Firstly, there's no reason to assume that *h₁es- ever inflected as a *h₂e-verb. While it is attractive to compare the *n extension found in Hittite and Greek with the *n in the 3pl (especially since it does look like the 3pl contains the 3sg) there's no real evidence to support it since the *n extension is widely not found. The preterite endings are again just the normal mi-endings, we don't need the assumption of original *h₂e-conjugation, and the 2/3sg are to be read as /est/ - the a is graphic. The syncretism is just a synchronic fact of Hittite. And then your understanding of *h₂e-conjugation theory is imperfect, that definitely is not how the preterite endings are formed. In fact, as usual, the preterite endings are the basic ones, and the present endings were derived from them by the same *i as in the *mi-conjugation endings. It is possible that the 2sg *-th₂e does contain the 1sg *-h₂e, but this is impossible to know without valid external comparisons. I should also point out that the 3pl preterite ending comes from PIE *-ḗr with a long vowel, which Jasanoff derives from *-érs by Szemerényi's law.

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