For the record, I hate the abuse of laryngeals. What I mean by "abuse" is when people, unsatisfied with a protolanguage proven to contain seemingly exotic laryngeals with accompanying vocalic effects, decide to add laryngeals to every stem to account for all long vowels, whether it can be justified or not, and end up succeeding only in muddling the whole grammatical system in the process, obscuring the very thing they attempt to clarify.
A quick and easy example of this is Bhadriraju Krishnamurti's use of laryngeals in the 1st and second pronouns *yān 'I' and *nīn 'you' (or in his view, *yaHn and *niHn[1]) to account for lengthening in the nominative which opposes oblique stems *yan- and *nin- lacking added vocalic length. Without laryngeals, it should be already clear to a knowledgeable linguist that many languages simplify stems in oblique case forms without the need to appeal to arcane infixation of one 'miracle phoneme' or another. We see this same simplification of pronominal stems between noun cases in PIE when *tu with back high vowel in the default nominative case opposes *twe. What was once *u throughout the entire 2ps pronominal paradigm must have apparently weakened at some point to a lower vowel *e in oblique cases. The phenomena exhibited in these two protolanguages are surely one and the same and therefore do not require laryngeals to explain them.
So to the topic now, there's a succinct reason why the 2nd person singular perfect ending *-th₂e contains a laryngeal that apparently even many IEists, so seduced by their own ideas, forget to take into account. It's given this laryngeal because of the Sanskrit reflex -tha whose added aspiration should otherwise not be present. As a result, we obtain a nice symmetry on the PIE level between 1ps perfect *-h₂e and 2ps perfect *-th₂e.
Yet further, it's precisely that very phonemic symmetry embedded in the perfective system that ultimately helps to explain the emergence of laryngeals in 2ps endings and stems at all! It can be readily seen from this pattern that the true reason for the laryngeal in the 2ps perfect is analogical levelling with the adjacent 1ps ending. While the laryngeal of the 1ps is legitimately ancient and stemming from the earliest stages of Pre-IE, the 2ps laryngeal cannot be. It should also be noted that without a laryngeal in this ending, it would otherwise be identical with the corresponding 2nd person plural ending *-te, adding further motivation to this irregular change[2].
Coincidently, there is no other evidence for laryngeals elsewhere in second person morphemes, whether it be in *tu (2ps. nom.), *twe (2ps.acc.), *tene (2ps.gen.) or *-s(i) (2ps.dur.). Putting laryngeals in places they needn't be is a grave misanalysis on the part of a comparative linguist who's obligated by Logic to find the simplest solutions possible given the available evidence.
NOTES
[1] Krishnamurti/Emeneau, Comparative Dravidian linguistics - Current perspectives (2001), p.336.
[2] I should add that my theories on syllabic structure in Mid IE (ie. the stage before stress-motivated Syncope) forbid onset clustering at all via Occam's Razor. No Semitic loans identified during this period seem to require tautosyllabic consonant clustering in Mid IE either. All clusters in PIE seem to be the result of later Syncope and the changes in legal syllabic structure that ensued. Yet if we're obligated to side with this typological simplicity of Mid IE, this is yet one more reason why the onset cluster seen in *-th₂e cannot be any older than the early Late IE period. We may then presume the singular form to have been *-te before this time.
24 Jul 2009
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I could reply with 'I fully agree', but since that would be rather boring, I guess I'll throw in some food for thought.
ReplyDeleteKortlandt in 'The Indo-Uralic Verb' (see http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/) also says that the 2sg ending must have been *-t+h2e, but in the *h2e he sees an Indo-Uralic dative particle *ka as an object marker of sorts. He isn't explicit whether he feels like those were added to multiple forms analogically or regularly.
He also thinks that the kappa we find in greek perfects is related to this. Which I personally find rather far-fetched. Saying laryngeals come from Indo-Uralic velars/uvulars is one thing, implying that there was an alternation retained in Indo-European still seems out there.
Nevertheless I am starting to feel more for the laryngeals from velars theory of Kortlandt. much like how the gen. *-s comes from *-ti
according to Kortlandt dual ending *-h1 comes from *-ki. Whether this dual marker existed in Uralic, I wouldn't know, but if it did, I find it quite convincing.
It's interesting that you actually propose just the same result of both those particles, except you call it word-final lenition while for Kortlandt it's pre-*i lenition.
Well this comment had no real purpose of me trying to prove something, just throwing you some food for thought, showing I'm still alive, since the activity on my blog might suggest otherwise. ;-)
As for my recent inactivity. First version of my Bachelor Thesis is finally done, it still needs some work, but purely style, the contents are done. It probably won't surprise you that after spending hours and hours on consonant gradation, I may have become a bit more skeptical than I was in the beginning.
I'll of course publish my thesis as soon as it is done, on my blog, then you can read all about it. I still haven't excluded the possibility of consonant gradation completely, but it definitely needs more research, and the theory of Kortlandt as it stands now does not fully cover the phenomenon.
Hey PhoeniX (sorry for butting into this laryngeal discussion without adding to it) are you attending any of the Indo-European classes in the Leiden Summer School next week?
ReplyDeletePhoeniX: "[...] but in the *h2e [Kortlandt] sees an Indo-Uralic dative particle *ka as an object marker of sorts."
ReplyDeleteI still hold tight to my theory that the PIE perfective set of endings is directly inherited from a Proto-Steppe stage circa 9,000 BCE that contained a special intransitive conjugation (See Paleoglot: A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system, part 2). I can account for how the system evolves from a transitive-intransitive one to an imperfective-perfective one. I don't see that same level of detail regarding the slow evolution of these grammatical systems over the aeons that I personally crave in Kortlandt's work. (And he's simply wrong about laryngeals since it's understood now that laryngeals sometimes surface later on as velar stops in Greek and Latin, as in the case of later reflexes of *-eh₂-s. The fortition of laryngeals before the sibilant is just commonsense linguistics and doesn't require a more fanciful explanation beyond that.)
"It's interesting that you actually propose just the same result of both those particles, except you call it word-final lenition while for Kortlandt it's pre-*i lenition."
By solving the nature of Indo-European mobile accent with a fixed penultimate accent via QAR before the event of large-scale Syncope, *i cannot be the instigator of the sibilantization rule.
This hypothetical *t of earlier times just so happens to sibilantize in precisely those cases where QAR predicts *word-final* position before Late IE Syncope. Plus, it helps that the underlying stop in the Proto-Steppe plural marker *-it is confidently word-final as both Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut show.
"Whether this dual marker existed in Uralic, I wouldn't know, but if it did, I find it quite convincing."
Fear not. The Uralic dual in *k (shared also with Eskimo-Aleut) is not just a Nostraticist's romantic tale. See Sinor, The Uralic Languages: Description, History, and Foreign Influences from Handbuch der Orientalistik, v.1 (1988), p.557: concerning Collinder's Proto-Uralic suffix *-ka.
"I'll of course publish my thesis as soon as it is done, on my blog, then you can read all about it."
I miss your entries so it's great that you're still plugging away at it and discovering new stuff. I'd be interested in that consonant gradation paper of yours. I personally think of Kortlandt's views as just roughly hewn ideas thrown out there with not enough regard for detail. That doesn't mean I think they're wrong or useless per se, only unpolished as yet.
There's a proposed connection between Indo-European and Eskimo-Aleut (other than Nostratic)?
ReplyDeleteAlso, what sort of consensus is there on k<*H?
Sergei,
ReplyDeleteYes, there are alternatives to Nostratic such as Joseph Greenberg's Eurasiatic Hypothesis, although I think its inclusion of Ainu is a serious flaw.
"Also, what sort of consensus is there on k<*H?"
Assuming you're talking about the fortition of Indo-European *h₂ before *s, Martinet proposed it initially with some people open to it (as here) while others criticizing it.
However, if you're talking about the tendency for such a change in general, it's perfectly expected since fortition preserves and augments the saliency between the two adjacent fricatives in the same syllable coda.
Interesting. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteHey PhoeniX (sorry for butting into this laryngeal discussion without adding to it) are you attending any of the Indo-European classes in the Leiden Summer School next week?
ReplyDeleteToo bad I'm only reading this now! I am not attending the Summer school, but have been occasionally in Leiden for work on the Greek Etymological dictionary. But after Friday my work on the dictionary should be done, thankfully, it was getting rather boring.
From the question I take it you will be?
I personally think of Kortlandt's views as just roughly hewn ideas thrown out there with not enough regard for detail. That doesn't mean I think they're wrong or useless per se, only unpolished as yet.
Absolutely, Kortlandt seems to actually intend it like that. I sent him an e-mail asking him to explain some stuff in his articles, and he did, but finished off the e-mail with roughly: 'this is what I could come up with, maybe you can find a better explanation'.
I wish his articles would reflect this uncertainty about his own work. Right now at times his articles feel messy, without it being clear that Kortlandt knows it is.
But maybe expressing such uncertainties about your own theories is considered not done in academic writing? I'm not sure.
Phoenix: "But maybe expressing such uncertainties about your own theories is considered not done in academic writing?"
ReplyDeleteAcademic writing should be about truth or finding truth, not about ego and the egotistic fear of being incorrect. We're all flawed. We're all wrong, one way or another. So we need to get over ourselves. ;o)
On the other hand, I can't help but feel that Kortlandt could do far more than making a non-committal list of comparanda. I think too of Allan Bomhard who merely glossed over some overall theoretical changes that he thought took place between Nostratic and IE in Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1994), making his long list of alleged roots the focus instead. No real detail. No real information. It's still interesting but it has no meat to its bones.
I'm looking for the same kind of obsessive detail that I'm offering in Diachronic development from Indo-Aegean to Indo-European. I believe we can reconstruct a lot more here, in great detail, than we currently are.
PhoeniX: Yeah, it was a little late but I thought I might try to say hi to another linguistics student if you were around and taking courses.
ReplyDeleteIt is a little late I suppose, anyway it's been a bit of an Indo-European overload this week and it's been hard to get back to the internet.
Anyway, Cheers.