The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
User avatar
Howl
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 69
Joined: Sat Oct 07, 2017 7:43 pm
Location: Campinia

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Howl »

Tropylium wrote:
Howl wrote:Also, all but one (*bʰrekʷ) of these bʰRk roots have a question mark before them in LIV. The question mark means 'that the material from the individual languages is not enough to accept this root with certainty'.
Probably yes, but that makes the issue all the weirder. The individual daughter languages generally didn't continue to maintain the PIE root constraints, and if they have innovated some new roots mixing the former *Dʰ and *T series, there definitely should be also some similar cases looking like **bʰert-, **dʰenk-, **gʰret- etc.
I think that these other cases do exist, but that they are not in LIV. For example: bʰrēt -> English breath.

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Except "*bʰrēt-" isn't a root. breath < *brēþiz is a derivative of *brēaną "to fume, smell" < *bʰreh₁-.

User avatar
Tropylium
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 512
Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 1:13 pm
Location: Halfway to Hyperborea

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Tropylium »

That seems like a possibility, actually: maybe *Dʰ-t roots (secondary or not) have tended to get reanalyzed as *t-suffixed derivatives of shorter roots?
[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]

User avatar
Nortaneous
Sumerul
Sumerul
Posts: 4544
Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2009 1:52 am
Location: the Imperial Corridor

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Nortaneous »

In the Cao Bang theory, PIE would've had *b (> *bh) but no *ɓ (> *b).

Are there any languages with /b/ and /ɗ/ but no /ɓ/? PHOIBLE counts 21:
Dhangar
Garadjari
Kharia
Kinyarwanda
Ladakhi
Betta Kurumba
Burun
Maay
Otoro
Koalib
Balante
Keiga
Belanda Boor
Dime
Gamo
Aari
Cwaya
Arbore
Barein (Komiya)
Orma
Karajá

If we add a requirement that the language also have /ɠ/, the only precedent is Maay:

Code: Select all

p b t d   d̠ʒ k g ʔ
      ɗ   ʄ    ɠ
f   s   ʃ        h
  m   n   ɲ
      r   j    w
      l
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Strictly speaking, the statement that PIE had no *b < **ɓ is too strong - it probably did exist in native PIE words, it was just uncommon. Even still, even if late PIE had no *b, that doesn't rule out no **ɓ, as there could have been sound changes at any point that eliminated it.

Šọ̈́gala
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 172
Joined: Sun Oct 27, 2013 10:58 pm

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

Yeah, in what I thought was the default version of the Cao Bằng model, there would have been only a short period where PIE had /ɠ/ but not /ɓ/. It would have been first /ɓ/ > /w/ and/or /m/ and then /ɗ/ and all other implosives > /d/, etc. I seem to recall reading that there are examples of /ɓ/ unconditionally leniting, but I don't remember any examples and could be wrong.

Even still, it's a weakness of the Cao Bằng model that it can't explain the absence/infrequency of *b < **ɓ without additional provisos. I was thinking recently about Beckwith's voiced fricative (or affricate?) model, which has the advantage that it explains the *b gap. If the so-called mediae series was *β, *ð, *ɣ, etc., then it's reasonable that *β would merge with *w, while there was nothing comparable for the others to merge with. Is it possible that this stage happened in the middle of the Cao Bằng process? i.e., /ɓ/ > /β/ > /w/, /ɗ/ > /ð/ > /d/, etc.? Is there any precedent for general spirantisation of implosives?

Why combine this with Cao Bằng at all; why not just start with the voiced fricatives? For one thing, it doesn't have the articulatory markedness that could explain the prohibition on roots with two mediae. This is not very strong, however, since PIE seems to have had a general trend to avoid similar consonants in roots. More points against original fricatives:

would voiced fricatives really be so marked that they would be avoided in conjugation suffixes? One might think that fricatives would be favored in these positions. Perhaps the voiced fricatives in suffixes lenited further to ∅. But there's no evidence I know of that this affected the other fricatives (*s and probably some or all of the laryngeals).

voiced fricatives don't fit with the model of Proto-Balto-Slavic where mediae are preglottalised.

Instead of voiced fricatives, we could consider a prenasalised series instead, which would answer some of these objections. So, /ᵐb/ > /m/, /ⁿd/ > /d/, etc. But, if /ᵐb/ could merge with /m/, why not /ⁿd/ with /n/? Perhaps /n/ was alveolar while /ⁿd/ was dental, and speakers didn't feel those were similar enough to merit the merger.

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Or you could just have ejectives. [Or preglottalised stops]
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

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!

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

The problem there is that they're diachronically inconvenient, see this paper.

User avatar
WeepingElf
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1630
Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:00 pm
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Contact:

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

One possibility is that they were ejectives in an earlier stage, but shifted to implosives still before the break-up.
...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

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

It's possible, yeah, but ad-hoc at this point.

User avatar
WeepingElf
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1630
Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:00 pm
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Contact:

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

KathTheDragon wrote:It's possible, yeah, but ad-hoc at this point.
I think the constraints work better with ejectives. Yet, I am not convinced about ejectives - these sounds could have been anything. It would be helpful to find out what they correspond to in Uralic.
...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

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Realistically, Uralic need not tell us very much - assuming a shift ejective > implosive > voiced stop, there's no reason to assume that it was still in the 'ejective' phase in PIU.

User avatar
WeepingElf
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1630
Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:00 pm
Location: Braunschweig, Germany
Contact:

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Fair. The main reason for ejectives rather than implosives is the paucity of the labial member, which is a trait more characteristic for ejective rather than implosive systems. But it may just be due to the kind of process that led to the emergence of what I prefer to call, agnostically, "emphatic" stops. Perhaps *d is from an affricate, and *g from a uvular, and there simply was nothing that would give a *b. But this particular suggestion is of course nothing but speculation!
...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

User avatar
Tropylium
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 512
Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 1:13 pm
Location: Halfway to Hyperborea

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Tropylium »

Continuing from what I just wrote in the Nostratic thread:
I wrote:At this point we should consider that much like Germanic retains inherited ablaut besides innovative umlaut, what we call "PIE ablaut" is also too complex to have a single origin: it probably contains a few different layers, the main ones of which are clearly innovative, but some parts could be older. For example, research has by now teased away many "long grades" as being due to lengthening in monosyllables, compensatory lengthening due to final cluster simplification, generalization of vr̥ddhi as a derivation mechanism, etc. So they're not really independent grades: they're 2-3 separate length alternations, which occur on top of whatever base vowel quality was already in place at that point.
Late PIE as reconstructible also has *a ~ *ā ablaut (*sal- ~ : *sāl- 'salt', etc.; note that Sanskrit salila '(flowing) water' cannot be from either of *sə₂l- or *saHl-; though full grade *sh₂al- would work). This could mean that some rounds of lengthening were simply later than laryngeal coloring. In theory we could then even toss *VH > VV back into the same category, and say that, yes, laryngeal loss quite simply produces one type of a "long grade".

For that matter, I wonder if some cases of *CVh₁ or *CVh₃ roots could not be actually simple *CV roots after all that developed compensatory lengthening in various positions. We'd expect to see some differences from actual CVH roots in morphology: e.g. some formations of a type *Ce-CV… would probably retain a non-zero non-colored grade, while a real laryngeal root should yield either *CeH-CV… > *Cē-CV…, or *CH-CV… > *Cə-CV… > *Ca-CV… .
[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Oh. Oh, hang on.

As you may have gathered, I'm skeptical of "Indo-Uralic". My reasoning is at core:

- the proposed reflexes seem easily explained through a mixture of borrowing and coincidence
- genetically and archaeologically, Uralic is clearly associated with a migration from the east, making it a poor match for IE, which came from eastern europe
- even if the pronouns WERE relicts of a deep connexion, there's no reason to assume specifically Indo-Uralic, given the broader MT area and its families

I still think this. HOWEVER. What if we DID accept the relationship? In that case, my points 1 and 2 actually might explain each other...

We know:
- a "Macro-IE" language is likely to have been spoken by the Afanasievo culture (it's genetically and archaeologically indistinguishable from Yamnaya in the west)
- Afanasievo was later swamped by the Okunev culture, migrants from the east and north

So how about this model:
1) two sister languages develop on the steppe: Yamnaya in the west, and Afanasievo in the east. Yamnaya is what we now call 'PIE'.
2) speakers of Afanasievo are overrun by speakers of, let's call it "Proto-Siberian".
3) speakers of Afanasievo almost completely replace their vocabulary with that of Proto-Siberian, leaving only inherited morphology and a small amount of core vocabulary
4) the resulting language - an Afanasievo core with an almost entirely Siberian vocabulary - is "Pre-Proto-Uralic"
5) Pre-Proto-Uralic continues to migrate into Europe. It encounters the Andronovo and Sintashta cultures (let's say "Proto-Tocharian" and "Proto-Indo-Iranian" on its root and borrows a bunch of words from them
6) Pre-Proto-Uralic becomes Proto-Uralic
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

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!

User avatar
Soap
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1228
Joined: Sun Feb 16, 2003 2:57 pm
Location: Scattered disc
Contact:

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Soap »

One thing I noticed is that the PIE speakers are assumed to be culturally more advanced than the Uralic, and that it has been this way for more than 4000 years. Your model is difficult to explain given that all or nearly all loanwords seem to have gone the opposite direction.
Edit: I misread but the same applies further east... The branches of Uralic with the best vocab preservation are generally assumed to be th European ones, even Hungarian with its massive tables of sound changes.... so it doesn't really explain the vocab differences between Uralic and PIE since it doesn't explain the vocab differences in Uralic itself.
Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:
Image

User avatar
Tropylium
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 512
Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 1:13 pm
Location: Halfway to Hyperborea

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Tropylium »

Soap wrote:The branches of Uralic with the best vocab preservation are generally assumed to be th European ones, even Hungarian with its massive tables of sound changes...
This "general assumption" is news to me. Hungarian is pretty much the Albanian of Uralic, with a generally poor track record of retention of anything at all. Mansi and Khanty in western Siberia have much better vocab preservation, superceding both Hungarian and all of the small languages in western Russia.

(I'm not sure if I would call Hungarian sound changes especially numerous either, it just has some fairly thorough changes like the general deletion of *s and general medial lenition of everything)
[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Tropylium wrote:Late PIE as reconstructible also has *a ~ *ā ablaut (*sal- ~ : *sāl- 'salt', etc.; note that Sanskrit salila '(flowing) water' cannot be from either of *sə₂l- or *saHl-; though full grade *sh₂al- would work). This could mean that some rounds of lengthening were simply later than laryngeal coloring. In theory we could then even toss *VH > VV back into the same category, and say that, yes, laryngeal loss quite simply produces one type of a "long grade".
Szemerényi's law was probably later than colouring, in which case we can explain the "salt" root at least as from *sh₂él-s ~ *sh₂(e)l- > *sh₂ál-s ~ *sh₂(a)l- ~ *sh₂ā́l ~ *sh₂(a)l- ("*sā́l" ~ "*sal-").

Šọ̈́gala
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 172
Joined: Sun Oct 27, 2013 10:58 pm

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

is there anything especially appealing about an unmotivated general ejective > implosive shift, other than that it explains the dearth of /b/? Is this shift typologically common?

User avatar
Zaarin
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1136
Joined: Sun Aug 15, 2010 5:00 pm

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zaarin »

Šọ̈́gala wrote:is there anything especially appealing about an unmotivated general ejective > implosive shift, other than that it explains the dearth of /b/? Is this shift typologically common?
It happened in Yucatec Maya (/pʼ/ > /ɓ/ only), and it happened several times independently in Afroasiatic. There doesn't seem to be anything strikingly unusual about the change.
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Salmoneus »

Zaarin wrote:
Šọ̈́gala wrote:is there anything especially appealing about an unmotivated general ejective > implosive shift, other than that it explains the dearth of /b/? Is this shift typologically common?
It happened in Yucatec Maya (/pʼ/ > /ɓ/ only), and it happened several times independently in Afroasiatic. There doesn't seem to be anything strikingly unusual about the change.
But then, ejective to voiced stop has also happened multiple times.

And preglottalised voiceless > voiceless non-aspirate > voiced [i.e. in contrast to non-preglottalised voiceles > voiceless aspirate] is even more straightforward.
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

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!

User avatar
kanejam
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 257
Joined: Sat Mar 30, 2013 1:16 pm
Location: New Zealand

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by kanejam »

Šọ̈́gala wrote:is there anything especially appealing about an unmotivated general ejective > implosive shift, other than that it explains the dearth of /b/? Is this shift typologically common?
It's also appealing due to the constraint of one ejective per root, which is attested in at least Akkadian, and also that they don't appear in suffixes except word finally, cf word-final ejectives in some English dialects.
If you cannot change your mind, are you sure you have one?

Here's a thread on Oscan.

Šọ̈́gala
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 172
Joined: Sun Oct 27, 2013 10:58 pm

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

Zaarin wrote: It happened in Yucatec Maya (/pʼ/ > /ɓ/ only)
Well, (/pʼ/ > /ɓ/ only) is almost the inverse of what's being posited for Early PIE. The glottalic model is that /pʼ/ was largely or totally lacking. /pʼ/ > /ɓ/ looks like it would be motivated by bilabial ejective avoidance.
, and it happened several times independently in Afroasiatic.
Hmm, one could almost get the sense that ejective > implosive is an areal "Nostratic" tendency. This would require us to posit close IE<>AA links (geographic if not genetic), which I have no particular opinions about.
kanejam wrote: It's also appealing due to the constraint of one ejective per root, which is attested in at least Akkadian, and also that they don't appear in suffixes except word finally, cf word-final ejectives in some English dialects.
This is only an advantage of implosives < ejectives over implosives < anything else if we conclude that implosives don't tend to have the same constraints. I'm not disputing this, just pointing out that it wouldn't be surprising to find ejectives and implosives are similar, as they are both marked glottalic articulations.

User avatar
Frislander
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 836
Joined: Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:34 am
Location: The North

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Frislander »

I mean technically we can't actually know for sure how the Akkadian "emphatics" were pronounced; I've even heard it proposed that they were in fact aspirates developed under Sumerian influence, which would turn the constraint against multiple emphatics in a root into something more like Grassman's Law. Honestly if you asked me I'd say that the distributional argument is one of the weaker arguments for the glottalic theory in any form, because most of the languages I know with ejectives/implosives have no such restrictions, and indeed one of the language groups often cited as having such a restriction doesn't at all.
https://frislander.tumblr.com/

First known on here as Karero

User avatar
Zaarin
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1136
Joined: Sun Aug 15, 2010 5:00 pm

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zaarin »

Frislander wrote:I mean technically we can't actually know for sure how the Akkadian "emphatics" were pronounced; I've even heard it proposed that they were in fact aspirates developed under Sumerian influence, which would turn the constraint against multiple emphatics in a root into something more like Grassman's Law.
I find that...difficult to support, from what I know of Sumerian and Akkadian. I'm perfectly familiar with the theory that Sumerian contrasted aspirated/unaspirated stops, but if so it borrowed Akkadian emphatics as unaspirated, as did Greek. This also has the problem that other Semitic languages like Phoenician should invert Akkadian emphatic/plain unvoiced stops in borrowings, which they don't. I think the preponderance of evidence supports Akkadian ejective emphatics, just like other Semitic languages outside Aramaic/Arabic.
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Post Reply