Dialectal loss of PIE voiced aspirated stops via Para-MIE dialect merger?

This is too big an idea for me to translate into words without writing a 20-page essay. I think I can spare you readers most of my inevitable pedantics with the following animated picture of what's on my mind lately, shown here in six basic steps as a colourful summary (click on image to see it animate):


My new brainstorm is a masala of my previous online thought experiments (cf. Proto-Semitic as a second language and Winter's Law in Balto-Slavic, "Hybrid Theory" and phonation - Part 2) that points me to a location of the Mid IE stage centered in the Balkans, rather than in the NW Pontic (surely the location of later PIE, by the way), and the most recent input from savvy reader Kiwehtin (read here) concerning a means of explaining PIE 'stop harmony' using breathy vowels as a vehicle for the phenomenon.

Having not thought deeply about PIE's curious phonotactic constraint that barred the tautosyllabic cooccurence of both a voiced aspirated stop such as *dh with a voiceless stop such as *t in a root, I've had no good explanation for it up to now. That is quite lazy of me and as I learn more I realize that every detail is a cerebral gem unto itself. I can only lament in futility that the day is not 48 hours long.

To the point, now. Kiwehtin (Christopher Miller) has brought up the issue of the possibility of breathy vowels in some stage of Pre-IE or PIE itself and while I would personally hesitate to reconstruct it for the finalmost PIE stage, I have to admit that breathy vowels solve the source of stop harmony without too much fuss. In fact, upon looking up 'stop harmony' as a keyword search, I found this gem from Google Books that precisely gives us a real-life language with the same phenomenon called Jabêm (Lynch/Ross/Crowley, The Oceanic Languages (2002), p.274)! Neato!

If it seems like I've been gone for a while, it's partly because this piece of the puzzle has been co-mingling with other thoughts in my brain that together were weaving a crazy tapestry of detailed mental images that has been fascinating me for days. Namely, if we combine the idea that Mid IE arose out of the Balkans and spread to the North-West Pontic from which the next stage of the language in turn spread outwards, and if Kiwehtin is pointing to a delicious possibility that breathy vowels had developped in some stage of Pre-IE (say, the middle of the Late IE period), could we perhaps further entertain ourselves with a wild speculation that as the Late IE dialect began to form from the NW Pontic, it percolated through "para-MIE dialects" (see graphic above) situated around it and caused some of the familiar features of PIE dialects such as those of Anatolian and Tocharian that both coincidentally merged the breathy stops into modal ones?

I know this is a flamboyant thought, but stay with me for a moment, readers. For this idea to work, I would have to presume that PIE stop harmony is a common artifact of breathy vowels in a shared past, regardless of dialect. In other words, breathy stops must have formed much earlier, regardless of what I previously suggested about some dialects never forming breathy stops at all in my 'Hybrid' proposal. Furthermore, given my views on MIE syllable structure which lacks consonant clustering altogether, I can only conclude that any such stop harmony due to breathy vowels is likeliest to have developped in the Late IE period. (Consider as an example *dheubh- that would have been two syllables prior to the event of Syncope occurring in the earliest point of Late IE.)

So, presuming at least a momentary adoption of breathy vowels within the middle of the Late IE period to induce stop harmony, it would then be a perfect time for Late IE to start spreading outwards to form the dialect area familiar to Indoeuropeanists. However, if Mid IE was in the Balkans originally (to best explain apparent Semitic areal influence) and Late IE spread from the NW Pontic, then it seems logically inevitable that the new dialects forged from Late IE innovations would collide back into the sister dialects formed from the bygone Mid IE period which lacked such innovations, i.e. my so-called "para-MIE" dialects.

To add, if breathy vowels only formed in Late IE, we should expect that living speakers of such theoretical paradialects were lacking these sounds in their speech inventory and therefore found it a little difficult to pronounce them when Late IE dialects began to popularize in these former para-MIE territories. As regional bilingualism would eventually lead to a single dominant dialect, it seems to me that this would produce new Late IE dialects in those regions located outside of the "Late IE epicenter" within which breathy stops or vowels were replaced with locally more familiar modal phonation (ie. substratal influence). Ergo, voiced aspirated stops would return to plain voiced stops, yet at a price. The price being an increased likelihood of merger of former voiced aspirated stops like *dh (now modal again) and *d (creaky) due to a reduction in perceptual distinction between the two series.

In a nutshell, I'm suggesting that the merger of plain voiced and voiced aspirated stops may in effect be the result of a clash between two different stages of the same language, in a manner of speaking, by way of the preservation of archaicisms in surrounding para-IE dialects which surely existed but which are otherwise undetectable to the historian or archaeolinguist. Insanely complex? Sure. Nifty? You bet! All I can hope is that I explained my odd mental musings well enough for at least one other person on this planet to understand. Lol.

Still on the hunt for Semitic-PIE connections

I don't know why but I'm hooked on the eastern European Neolithic lately. Ever since I've overcome my denial that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Semitic (PSem) not only had linguistic and cultural contact with each other due to intercontinental trade between the Balkans and Anatolia but that these prehistoric contacts must have been significant enough to affect PIE in a way that linguists could only describe as "intensive contact" by all the markers linguists would use to define something as such, I've been on the neverending hunt for more evidence of Semitic loans in Proto-Indo-European. And not only that, but within the precise context of my pre-existing theory of Mid IE which I've independently arrived at by my own internal reconstruction of PIE proper. I was always dismayed by Allan Bomhard's ignorance of possible IE-Semitic loans in his rush to reconstruct Proto-Nostratic in Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996), but now I'm even more dismayed as I find other hints at this apparently extensive intercultural communication.

I think I've noticed another possible loan from PSem into PIE. Compare PIE *mesg- (possibly pronounced [mezɢ̰-]) "to dip in water"^[1] with PSem *māsiʔu, active participle of triliteral root *msʔ "to wash"^[2]. Interesting? I think so. The link would suggest that it entered Indo-European via Mid IE *mesg̃a-. The reinterpretation of Proto-Semitic glottal stop *ʔ as a creaky-voiced *g̃ by Mid IE speakers makes better sense if we theorize that word-medial glottal stops had already softened to a velar /h/ in Indo-European before contact with Semitic. I believe the other loans I identify in my pdf so far also suggest that this was the case. It all seems good but I admit there's one slight problem. Since I've already theorized that uvulars were only allophones of their velar counterparts at this stage, I've apparently treed myself into a logical pickle and I can't quite account for the source for the added uvularization (i.e. the velar stop is "non-palatalized" according to traditional PIE notation, thus according to the reinterpretation of the sound system I stand by, the *-g- in *mesg- would appear to be a uvular creaky-voiced stop). Hmmm, perhaps I'm still missing something in my theory. Exciting!


NOTES
^[1] Adams/Mallory, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (1997), p.160 (see link).
^[2] Greenfield/Paul/Stone/Pinnick, Al Kanfei Yonah: Collected Studies of Jonas C. Greenfield on Semitic Philology (1991), p.471 (see link).

The so-called imitative status of PIE *pneu- "to sneeze"

I don't have a lot of time to talk, folks, so I'll be brief about something bugging me lately. Recently, Bradshaw of the Future wrote in the article Sneeze and pneumatic about the origin of "sneeze" in PIE *pneu- calling it an imitative root. This is in fact a common description of this Indo-European root. However the question I'm posing here is: How do we really know that this is an imititative root?

The cold truth is that we don't. We only assume this to be true because of the semantic nature of the verb. So we should be cautious to distinguish solid facts from these sorts of unverified or unverifiable assumptions. I mean, I don't know about any of you, but personally my sneezes never sound anything close to "pneu".

I've been exploring an alternative origin of this word, not from an echoic origin, but rather as a possible Semitic loan. I've mentioned before in Pre-IE Syncope and possibly expanding the Metathesis rule that there may be some loans from Proto-Semitic that exhibit word-initial metathesis of consonants in PIE after experiencing the event of Syncope. Metathesis is one common tactic for renormalizing syllable structures after awkward clustering is caused by the disappearance of unstressed vowels. Such metathesis is guided by a universal rule in world languages known as sonorancy hierarchy. Certain clusters are universally avoided such as *rp- or *bft- for example. So if it's generally accepted that Pre-IE must have undergone Syncope, then it's naturally implied that awkward clusters like this should have occasionally arose and that there must have been a mechanism in place to restructure these roots.

So in that light, here's yet another hypothetical Semitic loan path to discuss amongst ourselves:

Proto-Semitic *napāḥu "to blow" → Mid IE *napéwa-

This would then become late MIE *nᵊpéwᵊ- (via Reduction) and then *pneu- by early Late IE via phonotactically motivated Metathesis in order to avoid the less desirable outcome of **npeu-.

Enjoy that thought. I know I do.

Ejective or Pharyngealized Stops in Proto-Semitic?

An interesting side-effect of obsessing over these correspondances between Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Semitic (PSem) is that I've been noticing some potentially interesting and very minute details about Proto-Semitic pronunciation. There's one issue that's starting to get me excited involving the exact nature of “emphatic” stops.

From what little I've admittedly read on Proto-Semitic, my understanding so far is that emphatic stops are considered to have originally been either ejective stops (as in Amharic) or pharyngealized stops (as in Arabic). Regardless of which one they were, they apparently derive from the ejective stops of Proto-Afro-Asiatic, the ancestral proto-parent of the Semitic, Egyptian, Chadic, Cushitic and Berber languages. Interestingly, the Mid IE correspondances that I've identified so far seem to suggest to me that, rather than having ejectives stops, Proto-Semitic had pharyngealized stops as in modern Arabic. The reason why I think this regards equations like PSem *ḥāniṭu “ripening” based on the triliteral verb root *ḥnṭ “to ripen” (c.f. *ḥinṭu “wheat, barley”) and Mid IE (MIE) *xénda “to blossom” (> PIE *h₂endʰ-).

To an Indo-Europeanist or Nostraticist who may be simultaneously of the belief of both a Glottalic IE and a Glottalic Semitic, the two words may be associated only with some difficulty despite congruent semantics because PIE *dʰ is supposed to be underlyingly plain /d/ while Semitic emphatic *ṭ is presumed to be an ejective /tʼ/. However, I don't think this is the only rational option.

As stated earlier on my blog, I've come to the conclusion that MIE's inherited ejective stops had already deglottalized to stops with creaky voice, opposing the plain-voiced stops (i.e. The ones traditionally written with superscript “h”). In other words, I believe there was an intermediary stage lasting from the Mid IE period to well into Fragmenting PIE when the traditionally-described “plain stops” (or rather, the “ejective stops” of the Glottalic Theory camp) were in fact creaky voiced stops (i.e. half-voiced stops). Thus, even if PSem had ejective stops, MIE speakers should be expected to find more native approximates to these foreign sounds. And indeed, this appears to be the case from the examples I've shared so far in my continuously edited pdf of Semitic loans in PIE.

However, we still have problems equating these two aforementioned lexemes if one remains resolute in this adapted belief that MIE had creaky-voiced stops while PSem had ejective ones since it's hard to explain away such a phonetically implausible replacement of an entirely unvoiced ejective stop with a creaky voiced stop by any innocent speaker no matter how foreign they may be to the exotic sound of ejective stops. Yet, if we allow our minds to consider the possibility of pharyngealized emphatics in Proto-Semitic where concurrent voicing would still be possible, albeit delayed a moment after stop closure, then the mystery of the equivalence between MIE *d /d/ and PSem *ṭ /t^ʕ/ in the above example immediately disappears. In fact, elegantly so if I do say so myself (and I will because I'm playfully cocky that way). This can also explain what would otherwise be problematic correspondances regarding MIE creaky-voiced *g̃(ʷ) and PSem *q (if /k^ʕ/) as in the example of PSem *qawāmu “to rise up” vs. PIE *gʷem- “to come”.

Determining typical forms behind Semitic verbal loans in Pre-IE

If one looks to Norman French and Middle English as a typical example of intense linguistic contacts between two historical languages in order to understand better the Proto-Semitic and Proto-IE contacts during the Neolithic, one may notice that only a small number of verbal forms in French loans typically surface in English. For example, many verbs were simply borrowed from the presentive form (c.f. French (il) part vs. English to part). However there are also many verbs which were borrowed into English based on French infinitives (c.f. French rendre vs. English to render which fossilizes the infinitive ending in -re).

Given that, I start to wonder if maybe it would be more organized on my part to compare Semitic and PIE verbs according to only a few specific verbal forms. So I've been thinking about how to answer the question “If I were to pick only two Proto-Semitic verb forms as sources of PIE loans, which would I pick that would fit most or all of the data the best?”

Based on the handy Semitic Binyanim pdf, my answer at this point would now have to be: 1) the nominative-declined active participle of the shape *CāCiCu and 2) the nominative-declined infinitive of the form *CaCāCu. This could account for almost all Semitic verbal loans that pop up in Mid IE, if we assume that Mid IE speakers simply ignored vocalic length (i.e. interpreting both PSem *a and *ā as MIE *e), that MIE employed a fixed penultimate accent, and that the rule of Proto-Semitic accent by contrast was that it was to be either placed on the first available non-wordfinal “heavy syllable” (i.e. CV: or CVC) from left-to-right or on the initial syllable by default. Predictably, the irregular essive verb *yiθ (becoming PIE *h₁es-) would be an outlier from this general pattern and “to be” is a rather oddball verb cross-linguistically speaking.

So, I guess I need to update my SemiticPreIEloans.pdf document on esnips to reflect this. I hope that sounds a bit more organized than what I've been saying so far. Little by little, I'm gettin' there hopefully. Cross fingers.

A list of possible Proto-Semitic loanwords in PIE

I decided to get organized and produce a pdf that I plan on updating as new information comes forth concerning Proto-Semitic (PSem) loanwords in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Hopefully, if anything, it will provoke interesting discussion or cause one to ponder on the exact cultural and linguistic relationship between Proto-Semitic and Proto-Indo-European during the Neolithic... or perhaps disgust and ire from the peanut gallery. Oh well, it's worth a try:

SemiticPreIEloans_20080817.pdf

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"Mid Indo-European", Semitic and Neolithic numerals

Maybe I'm obsessive but this whole thing about bad Nostratic reconstructions and ancient numerals deserves more discussion. Lots more. I have a love-hate relationship with the Nostratic theory. On the one hand, I'm convinced by its basic premise of certain language groups being related together in the past 15,000 years, and yet I'm also irritated by the results arrived at by people who don't seem to take enough time to work out the details. I especially appreciate some of Allan Bomhard's contributions to Nostratic and yet I'm also left wanting for something more in-depth from him. I want to know exactly what happened in the past without it being doctored up with wishful, half-thought-out thinking and I don't believe for a second that we know all there is to know.

Regarding Bomhard's general reconstruction of Proto-Nostratic, I believe that many of these "Nostratic" roots are not genuine. However, I also think that some of these listed items may rather be potential evidence of loanwords adopted from Proto-Semitic (PSem) into a stage of Pre-Indo-European (Pre-IE) . To me, the example of IE *septm̥ from PSem *sabʕatum is the clearest and most undeniable case of Pre-IE borrowing, which is why I must sound like a broken record when I repeat it so often. So now let's get serious and propose something more realistic than 15,000-year-old numerals.

I suggest that the likeliest time for such an adoption of borrowings is the height of the neolithic around 6000-5500 BCE when trade is known to have flourished across Eastern Europe and the Near East. The neolithic was not just about a wide network of traded goods, but a newly expanded exchange of ideas and a greater sharing of common religious beliefs across larger spans of geography. This I believe would be the main reason behind the spread of "7" from Proto-Semitic into Pre-IE and other languages. Marija Gimbutas wrote about the neolithic period, although in my view she sometimes got too corrupted by feminist revisionism to be taken seriously. For instance, it's too simplistic to say that Indo-European speakers were all patriarchal warriors and native Europeans were all matrifocal pacifists. This sensationalism sells lots of books but the study of ethnology is far more complicated than this modern idealism.

During the neolithic, I envision a network of various groups speaking a number of Pre-IE dialects over a large territory surrounded by some "Para-Pre-IE" dialects (i.e. indirect "cousins" of IE that were later taken over by expanding IE) and non-IE languages. Pre-IE speakers would also have had a number of different traditions, belief systems and genetic origins dependent on the region one is speaking of. The core of Pre-IE would have been the areas west of the steppes. I seperate the Pre-IE stages of Indo-European arbitrarily into three sections to keep things tidy in my head:

Old Indo-European (OIE) - 7000-6000 BCE
Mid Indo-European (MIE) - 6000-5000 BCE
Late Indo-European (LIE) - 5000-4000 BCE

I use Proto-Indo-European (PIE) to refer to the very last state of the language before it began to fragment into dialects like Proto-Anatolian. I believe that it was MIE that first adopted Semitic vocabulary, including a few numerals. In this chronology, MIE is a stage of Proto-Indo-European immediately before the event of Syncope (i.e. the point at which unstressed vowels were dropped or reduced in all positions causing clustering and important changes to IE phonotactics). I place Syncope at the beginning of the Late Indo-European period, circa 5000 BCE. Before Syncope, MIE had far less clusters than LIE and had a predictable accent fixed on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable. Now on that note, I would like to shamelessly propose my following theory for discussion that I've been developing for years:

word	MIE (PIE)	Semitic
'three'	*tareisa (*treis)	*θalāθu
'six'	*sʷeksa (*sweḱs)	*šidθu[1]
'seven'	*septam (*septm̥)	*sabʕatum

As we can see, the pre-Syncope vowels are necessary to fully understand what has happened. Having only *e and *a to fill syllables in MIE, final *-a was pronounced as schwa, thereby mimicking the Semitic nominative in *-u. The PSem stress accent was probably also predictable, being placed on the lastmost, non-final "heavy syllable" (a syllable that was either closed (CVC) or contained a long vowel), or failing this, the accent was placed on the initial syllable. In "three", the long front vowel *ā of PSem was naturally heard by MIE speakers as a diphthong *ei since this was the closest approximation in a language without long vowels. The Semitic dental fricative (*θ) was normally interpreted as initial *t- or medial *-s- in MIE (shown in both "3" and "6"), both of which are again natural approximations in a language that lacks this sound (n.b. consider how many French speakers pronounce voiced /ð/ in "that" as /z/ or /d/ instead).

The word "six" needs further explanation because it has confused many linguists as to why it should be that the Semitic cluster *-dθ- ended up as *-ḱs- in PIE^[2]. First of all, we should notice that PSem *d is not the same phoneme as PIE *d. The important difference is that PSem *d was alveolar (as in English) while it was dental in PIE (as in French). This means that the Semitic sound as well as the following dental fricative were pronounced further back in the mouth than IE speakers were used to. In its place then, a velar stop would be an understandable replacement for the dental stop here and coincidentally, the *s in *-ks- would have necessarily been alveolar next to a velar stop since it's near impossible to pronounce a dental *s immediately after retracting the tongue. So now we can see why this was an optimal solution for IE speakers and furthermore there are many borrowings in other languages where stops are switched like this (note the history of the name Carthage). There is also the fact that from the perspective of markedness, to make a long story short, PIE *ḱ must logically be reinterpreted as a plain velar stop *k (not palatalized) while *k must have been a uvular or pharyngeal *q. However until the traditional notation is abolished, the topic of velar stops in IE will remain confusing and misunderstood.

I've probably raised more questions than answers with this topic of Mid Indo-European but hopefully this will inspire more discussion on the topic of Pre-IE because I think this untouched aspect of Indo-European linguistics is full of interesting possibilities. My roughly hewn theory may not be perfect but I think this is a better answer to the problem than Bomhard's implausible Nostratic roots, *sʷakʰsʷ- "six" and *sab- "seven" ^[3].


NOTES
^[1] Semitic reconstructions are from Gray, Introduction to Semitic Comparative Linguistics (1934). p.70. As an interesting aside, one may appreciate Klimov's Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages for a run-down on Proto-Kartvelian šwid- "seven" which is derived from a Semitic masculine, non-mimated form of the numeral, *sabʕatu (Akk. šibit).
^[2] Page 106 of Bernal Martin's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is a perfect example of how many authors confuse rather than inform us on the topic by simply offering a raw dump of completely conflicting ideas that fail to answer to any appreciable degree how the words might or might not be plausibly related.
^[3] Bomhard/Kerns, The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship (1994).

UPDATES
1. (Oct 9/07) Please note that while some may feel that the realization of PSem *š as MIE *sʷ is strange, there is precedent in English, French and Italian pronunciations of the sh-sound /ʃ/ as /ʃʷ/. See Ball/Müller, Phonetics for Communication Disorders in Chapter 14: English fricatives. Based on this, we may surmise that PSem *š was similarly pronounced as /ʃʷ/.