Giving and having in Indo-European

In my last post, I was noticing the link between Etruscan genitives in "give" constructions which mark the recipient of a gift and clauses conveying "having", as per John's Newman's Give: A cognitive linguistic study (1996). On that note, there are some extraneous connections that come to my mind in other ancient languages I know of.

I've reasoned for a while now that the source of Indo-European's thematic genitives in *-osyo like *h₁éḱwosyo 'of the horse' is quite simple: the athematic genitive *-ós plus endingless relative pronoun *yo-. This construction would have first developed in Pre-IE (specifically Late IE) as *-asya, replacing former accented genitive *-ás, when Acrostatic Regularization risked making the nominative and genitive identical in the thematic paradigm. The addition of *ya (the original endingless form of the relative pronoun used for nominative, locative and inanimate accusative cases) helped disambiguate and reinforce thematic genitives. This resultant construction, instead of conveying the direct but potentially ambiguous phrase "of X", used the circumlocution "(with) which [is] of X".

With Newman's insights, we might even reinterpret "which [is] of X" as "which X [has]" since a lack of "to have" in Proto-Indo-European encourages a speaker to use the verb "to be" plus a genitive noun to express the possessor. The distinct but semantically equivalent phrases we take for granted in English like "the horse's speed", "the speed [which is] of the horse" and "the speed [which] the horse has" all become a little blurry in such languages.

Then I wonder further. I've already noticed that there's no rational motivation to reconstruct a distinct dative case in pre-IE, if not in IE itself^[1]. The dative in *-ei must have only later originated from the pre-existing locative ending in *-i and/or from analogy with *h₁ei- 'to go (to)'. So in pre-IE or IE, without an available dative form, what case is left to express the recipient in phrases using the verb *deh₃- 'to give'?


NOTES
^[1] Francisco Adrados, On the origins of the Indo-European dative-locative singular endings published in Languages and cultures: Studies in honor of Edgar C. Polomé (1988), p.29 (see link).

Japanese dialect mirrors suspected PIE development of sibilantization between two dental stops

So I was looking on the internet for something else, and as it often happens, I came across something unrelated to what I was looking for but which nonetheless had value for another problem that I pondered on several moons ago, the origin of the intervening PIE sibilant in a sequence of adjacent dental plosives *-TT- (eg. *h₁ḗdti [ʔé:d̰ˢtʰi] 'he eats')^[1]. My instinct has always been to attribute it to the age of the Syncope rule when unstressed schwas were deleted. The theoretical deletion of intervening schwa between two dental stops, I reasoned, might likely have left traces of friction stemming from a devoiced vowel, lost by the latemost Proto-IE stage.

Lo and behold, it turns out that the Hirara dialect of Japanese located on the island of Miyako shows just such a development according to Masayoshi Shibatani in Languages of Japan (1990), p.409 who offers the example of 人 hito 'person'. In this unique dialect we see the development of [pɨtu] > [pɨ̥tu] > [pˢtu] which is strikingly parallel to my Pre-IE explanation of the development of sibilantization in *h₁ḗdti. That is, Mid IE *éd̰atai ['ʔed̰ətʰəj] 'he eats' > ['ʔe.d̰ᵊ̥tʰi] (via Reduction) > early Late IE *ʔḗd̰ti ['ʔe:d̰ˢtʰi] (via Syncope).

I love how (pre)history repeats itself.


NOTES
^[1] Fortson, Indo-European language and culture: an introduction (2000), p.63 (see link): "A sequence of two dental consonants was pronounced with an added sibilant inserted between them"

Where do Narten presents come from?

I'm currently typing up a grammatical primer of Proto-Indo-European, largely for myself for now. I know that sounds a little neurotic but my philosophy here is that there's no better way of recognizing the flaws in one's reasoning than trying to put every detail of one's thoughts on paper (or in this case, on computer screen). Sufficed to say, it's no wonder that my obsessive-compulsive exercise bore fruit as I predictably got stumped on a few details which challenged me to get to the bottom of things. It's also sufficed to say that many of these issues in question are still being debated by the most clever of Indo-Europeanists.

One of the things I came face to face with the other day was the matter of "the look" of athematic versus thematic verb stems in the earliest stage of Common Proto-Indo-European. Only today have I reminded myself that I might have already solved this puzzle, but first let me explain the conundrum. Jay Jasanoff maintains that thematic present-future stems ending in the characteristic *-e-/*-o- morpheme are originally subjunctives marked by the same morpheme. I've come to agree with this reasoning since the solution is most trivial and there is indeed a semantic link between subjunctives describing hypothetical situations ('I would go') and verb forms describing future actions which are by their very nature hypothetical ('I am going/I will go').

Yet, for all the careful reasoning and evidence behind this clever solution, Jasanoff's scheme seems to give us a curious overabundance of durative 'Narten stems' (ie. verbs showing *ē/*e ablaut rather than *e/*∅). What's going on? Are the verbs which eventually become 'athematic stems' in non-Anatolian dialects also originally Narten stems? Why don't non-Narten stems outnumber Narten ones which have marked vocalic length? Did Jasanoff make a mistake along the way? Did I? What would have made *h₁ei- 'to go' (3ps *h₁éi-ti / 3pp *h₁y-énti) different from *bʰer- 'to carry' (3ps *bʰḗr-ti / 3pp *bʰér-n̥ti)?

I'd say that while the presence of Narten stems make no sense in PIE itself, it does start to make sense if we understand them as one of the many relics of Syncope in early Late IE when unstressed vowels were deleted. I suggest that while a monosyllabic root when stressed in Mid IE (MIE) of the form *CVC- retained the same structure after Syncope since there were naturally no unstressed vowels in it to vanish, the unstressed final syllable of MIE roots of the form *CVCV(C)- on the other hand was syncopated to produce *CV:C(C)- complete with long vowel due to compensatory lengthening. This must in turn be contrasted with the result of roots of the form *CVCCV- which shortened to *CVCC- with no concommitant lengthening because the onset consonant of the unstressed syllable in this latter example blocked the ability for the disappearing vowel to leap to the previous syllable by simple metathesis as was readily possible in *CVCV(C)- (ie. *CVCVC- > *CVCəC- > *CVəCC- > *CV:CC-).

What my Pre-IE hypothesis has been implying for a while now is that the non-Narten roots in PIE of the simple form *CVC- (eg. *h₁es-, *h₁ei-, *gʰʷen-, etc.) are best derived from monosyllabic roots before Syncope. Narten stems such as *bʰer- however arose only after the syncopation of former polysyllabic verb roots. From this, we may reconstruct monosyllabic roots in late MIE such as *es-, *ei- and *gwen- (for later PIE *h₁es- 'be', *h₁ei- 'go' and *gʰʷen- 'kill') with 1ps/1pp duratives respectively as *és-mai/*as-ménai, *éi-mai/*ai-ménai and *gʷén-mai/*gʷan-ménai. This contrasts with MIE polysyllabic roots conjugated in the 1p like *béra-mai/*bara-ménai which would later become 'Nartenized' to early Late IE *bḗr-mi/*ber-méni before secondarily acquiring acrostatic accentuation in the heart of the Late IE period.

It also tingles me to no end that it just so happens that my predicted monosyllabic root *es- in Mid IE could be further corroborated by the Proto-Semitic existential copula *yiθ 'there is'^[1], also coincidentally monosyllabic and thus quite plausibly borrowed into Mid Indo-European during the Neolithic.


NOTES
^[1] Lipinski, Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar (2001), p.488 (see link): *yṯw 'to be (present)' and its reduced copula form, *yṯ; read also Paleoglot: To be or not to have. That is the question (9 Feb 2008) and Paleoglot: Proto-Semitic as a second language (14 Mar 2008)

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.

PIE "look-alike stems" - Evidence of something or a red herring?

On his blog, Phoenix has been dwelling on several suspicious stem look-alikes in Proto-Indo-European. While he's been attempting to work up a case for consonant gradation in PIE or Pre-PIE, I am far too skeptical to accept this Kortlandt-inspired view. In relation to this topic, Frederik Kortlandt has suggested that Proto-Uralic too had consonant gradation when in fact most Uralicists today accept that consonant gradation was a post-Uralic innovation^[1], one of many flaws in his work that makes it difficult for me to take seriously. (Other important flaws in his theories being a flamboyant artistic license in his reconstruction of familiar words in both Uralic and IE).

However my busy mind also can't resist exploring a new perspective. We can at least say that while the roots Phoenix identifies do indeed appear to "look alike" (although this is assessment is a little too subjective for my tastes), there is no clear pattern in voicing or devoicing that we can immediately ascertain:

#1 *pieh₂- ~ *bʰeiH-
#2 *pleh₂g- ~ *bʰleh₂g-
#3 *trep- ~ *strebʰ-
#4 *treup- ~ *dʰreubʰ-
#5 *terp- ~ *(s)dʰerbʰ-

Yet what if there is actually something behind these pairs? For the sake of brainstorming, the third and fifth pairs in Phoenix's list appear to suggest a possible solution that might be enticing for future examination. In reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, just like in any living language, there appear to be phonotactic pressures which determined how sounds could validly fit within a word.

One important curiosity whose origins I have yet to solve to my satisfaction is that there appears to be some sort of "voicing harmony" such that voiced stops (ie. voiced aspirated stops, traditionally speaking) can only appear in a verb root with other voiced stops while voiceless stops can only appear with other voiceless stops. Creaky stops (ie. traditional plain voiced stops), no doubt descendants of ejectives, could occur with both voiced and voiceless stops but not with other creaky stops. So *tep- or *ped- are valid root shapes yet **dʰep- or **deg- are not. Putting aside how this pattern arose in the first place, I wonder if this well-known phonotactic constraint in unison with the presence or absence of the so-called mobile *s-prefix could be to blame for these apparent pairs above.

Here's how I imagine this could work. We start with a root like *dʰerbʰ- which has an *s-marked variant, *sterbʰ-. Following *s in an onset cluster, the voicing of a subsequent stop is neutralized as in English but otherwise the phonotactic constraint I mention above is unaffected. Now what if PIE speakers begin to drop the *s in *sterbʰ-? I'd imagine that, if the phonological constraint still holds, a resulting form *terbʰ- might be pressured into becoming *terp- to maintain the stop voicing harmony of yore. This then could especially help to explain the fourth stem pair in this list: *treup- ~ *dʰreubʰ- (via an *s-marked intermediate variant of *dʰreubʰ-, namely **streubʰ-).


NOTES
^[1] Denis Sinor, The Uralic languages: description, history, and foreign influences. Handbuch der Orientalistik, v.8 (1988), p.274: "Relating gradation to Uralic or even Finno-Ugric has been criticised because it is only a feature of the languages mentioned above and is not found in any other Uralic language. Scholars have therefore seen gradation in Balto-Finnic and Lapp as the result of parallel, but separate development to the gradation in Samoyed." (see link).

PIE Uvulars: A revised solution of their origin

I've been frought with stress this past week due to something ridiculous that happened to me. I'll recount my ordeal in the very next post coming up. At any rate, after deep relection, I think I have an awesome way to rework my theory to account for the uvular phonemes in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) much better than I had before and with the least amount of added complexity. As usual, you may want to consult my continually updated document Diachrony of Pre-IE to get a grasp of what I'm suggesting. Listen to this latest crazy idea of mine.

I would like to now propose that distinct uvular phonemes had already existed by the end of Old IE (OIE) when unstressed vowels merged phonetically to schwa. They were, as I stated before, initially produced by allophonic differences dependent on the neighbouring vowel. Originally at the Proto-Indo-Aegean stage (before 7000 BCE), a velar sound (ie. any of *x, *xʷ, *k, *kʷ, *g̰, *g̰ʷ, *g, or *gʷ) neighbouring the low vowel *a acquired an allophone with a [+low] quality (ie. *x → [χ], *xʷ → [χʷ], *k → [q], *kʷ → [qʷ], *g̰ → [ɢ̰], *g̰ʷ → [ɢ̰ʷ], *g → [ɢ], or *gʷ → [ɢʷ]). I've already mentioned that the Mongolic language, Khalkha, exhibits the same alternation. There are also the examples of Even and Yakut that are both undergoing similar processes of phonemicization of uvulars as I describe for earlier stages of Pre-IE^[1]. So when unstressed vowels merged in OIE, the nature of the uvularization automatically became obscured.

However to add to this idea, I also propose that Indo-Aegean's Decentralization of the inherited vowel system hadn't caused merger of former accented *ə to *a just yet. Rather, the two vowels must have remained distinct for a while in OIE until phonemicization of uvulars was complete.

With these revisions come some interesting changes to my views concerning some important roots and their prehistoric etymologies. For example, the well-known PIE root for "dog", *ḱwon-, might then ultimately originate from Proto-Steppe *kə-huni "tamed canine" (not *ka-huni, as I believed before), thus becoming Indo-Aegean *kəxʷanə and then MIE *kaχʷána due to Penultimate Accent Shift (PAS). The vowel *ə in that example, not being a low vowel, didn't uvularize the preceding word-initial velar stop to *q-, although the following laryngeal was uvularized by the second vowel. To explain another example, PIE *kreuh₂- "raw flesh", we must reconstruct MIE *qaréuxa- to account for it with a distinct uvular stop at the beginning to yield later PIE *k-. If this was a native term used in the earliest stages preceding PAS, then only *a may be prescribed in the first syllable in order to explain the later uvular, thus we should presume earlier *kárəuxə-.

This also has an impact on Proto-Semitic (PSem) loans that I identify in my online pdf. With the allowance of uvulars at this stage of cultural and linguistic contact between PIE and PSem, the interaction between the two will have to be revised slightly. For example, PSem participle *māšiʔu is now more understandably converted to MIE *mésɢ̰a- (> PIE *mesg- "to dip in water") with uvular stop *ɢ̰ because it would have been the closest approximation possible to a word-medial glottal stop for an MIE speaker. I maintain that word-medial glottal stops did not exist in the language at this stage.

I'll save my solutions concerning the possible geneses of the poorly reconstructed PIE particle *[ǵ/g](ʰ)[e/o] and the mystery verbal extension -g- for a later post.


NOTES
^[1] Fortescue, Language Relations Across Bering Strait (1998), p.72 (see link) explains that uvularization of velars neighbouring low and/or back vowels is quite linguistically natural.

Confused about PIE's intensive particle *ge

I'm so confused about the "intensive particle" in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) right now. The exact nature of the particle is related to my previous ponderings on uvulars and their Pre-IE origins. It seems that some Indoeuropeanists reconstruct *ǵe^[1] and some reconstruct *ge. Then there's also *gʰe which appears to be reconstructed alongside *ǵʰi as in the emphatic negation *né-ǵʰi "not at all"^[2]. All of them are supposedly "intensive" particles with the same function.

What makes this more confusing is that I'm pretty sure that the pronoun *h₁éǵoh₂ "I" has to be the product of *e, *ǵe [intensive particle] and *-oh₂ [old 1ps subjunctive]. Yet if so, everything in that word implies that the velar was originally *ǵ, not *g (see Paleoglot, The Origin of Indo-European Ego, Apr 07 2008). Yet if it started out as *ǵ, it can't explain what appears to be an intensive or punctual suffix *-g- used on verbs like *yeu-g- "to join" (c.f. *yeu- "to join") and *bʰoh₁-g- "to bake" (c.f. *bʰeh₁- "to warm"). Surely this is connected, no? It also seems suspect that a productive particle or suffix would have used such a marked phoneme (i.e. As I've stated earlier, *g is likely to me to be a uvular, creaky-voiced stop rather than a "plain" one as per traditional reconstruction). My instinct is telling me that it surely must have once been *ǵ (i.e. a plain voiced velar stop in the revised reconstruction) but then this denies a link to the verbal extension in uvular *-g-.

I'm so confused and so far I can't make heads or tails of it yet I know that all of these things must be connected somehow.


UPDATES
(November 13 2008) Corrected the definition of *bʰeh₁- from "to burn" to "to warm". It's just a slight technicality that doesn't affect my above reasoning.


NOTES
^[1] Beekes, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (1995), p.222 (see link).
^[2] Both unpalatalized *gʰe and palatalized *né-ǵʰi with different voiced velars are shown boldly on the same page of Mallory/Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006), p.69 (see link), emphasizing my point that something may be a little wonky with the reconstruction of this particle which appears to have too many possible forms: *ǵe, *ge, *ǵʰe, *gʰe, *ǵʰi or *gʰo.

Phonemicization of uvulars in Old IE?

I just had a nifty idea that I'm trying out. Bear with me. Again, this all refers back to my pdf containing my latest summary of theories of detailed chronology in Pre-IE so it might be interesting for any of you to take a gander who have not done so already: click here.

I'm doing another thought experiment here. Instinctively, I just can't let go of the idea that uvulars in PIE (Proto-Indo-European) were born at some point out of allophones of velars and that this allophony was initially triggered by neighbouring vowels. This is similar to what goes on in Khalkha (Mongolian). So in other words, *k when neighbouring a low vowel, *a, would once have yielded a uvular allophone /q/ (which is also phonetically speaking [+low]) while next to higher vowels, the more common /k/ would surface.

However, since I love simplicity and Occam's Razor so much, I wanted to see if I could cut it to the bare minimum and have this uvularization only possible in accented syllables in Mid IE. This almost explains everything since clusters like *kC- (i.e. phonetically /qC-/) are pretty rare in PIE. Unfortunately, they do occur nonetheless and, not only that, so do other well-established roots like *yeug- "to join" which imply pretty heavily that I'm wrong about uvularization only occuring in unaccented Mid IE (MIE) syllables since the corresponding MIE form of *yeug- could only have been *yéuCa- and yet a plain *g in place of this *C is insufficient to explain the later uvular we see in PIE. I've avoided this problem too long obviously so today's the day!

Ergo, if I'm correct that vowels triggered this uvularization in the first place and yet if I'm also correct that unaccented vowels merged into a single schwa by Mid IE, I'm forced to admit that uvulars must have already been phonemicized in the language by the time of contact with Proto-Semitic, circa 5500 BCE. Egad! I'll see where that idea takes me. It's just a titulating thought for now so forgive the mess.

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 trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings (3)

(Continued from The trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings (2).)

When we look at the pair *-mén(i)/*-tén(i), the so-called plural *-n- appears to be only explainable as the product of analogy with early MIE 3pp ending *-éna before the time when *ta “that” (> PIE *to-) was employed to extend the 3^rd person singular and plural endings. This termination may once have spread from the third person plural active to the rest of the plural terminations at an early date. QAR predicts accent on *e and the etymology of these endings is transparent indicating that *-mén(i) and *-tén(i) date to at least the Mid IE period before Syncope had yet to take effect.

Now, if we know that *-mén(i) and *-tén(i) are quite ancient, it follows that the accentuation of *-més and *-té can be explained as analogy with older *-mén and *-tén. However, the lack of *-i in primary *-més and *-té still begs an answer. Logically, whatever the source of these unextended endings, they must have once had no need for the indicative *-i. This may indicate a particular usage outside of the primary conjugation. I believe that a possible reason for this is that these latter pair of endings were taken directly from the independent oblique plural pronouns of the time: *mes and *te. MIE enclitic *mas regularly becomes *n̥s via Syncope, and was then later extended analogically as *nos by the time of PIE proper. MIE 2pp oblique *te however (*tei in the nominative case) was replaced in the meantime by an inanimate noun *yáuas “(the) group”^[1] (> early Late IE *yaus), thereby obscuring the ultimate source of later 2pp ending *-té.

If this is all correct, it's then probable to me that these alternative endings were first coined as early as the late Mid IE period and that dialectal replacement of *-méni and *-téni by *i-less, pronoun-derived alternatives *-més and *-té began to spread during the Late IE period.

Thus I think we now have a sensible solution to the reconstruction of the Old IE objective endings preceding the agglutination of “indicative” postclitic demonstrative *əi (> PIE *-i):

	singular	plural
1st person	*-əm	*-mənə
2nd person	*-əs	*-tənə
3rd person	*-ə	*-ənə

Furthermore, we may possibly reconstruct both the singular and plural independent pronoun forms for the first and second persons with greater depth:

	singular	plural
1st person	*məi (nom.)	*wəi (nom.)
	*mə (enc.)	*məs (enc./obl.)
	*mə́nə (obl.)
2nd person	*tau (nom.)	*təi (nom.)
	*tʷə (enc.)	*tə (enc./obl.)
	*tə́nə (obl.)

And now everything in the 3000 years prior to PIE is explained...

... Or is it?! Alas, my work is never done. Happy Halloween, everyone!


NOTES
^[1] The basic root *yeu- "to bind, join together" is acknowledged in Mallory/Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006), p.522 (see link). It is also deemed the underlying root of extended *yeu-g- with identical meaning which is the source of inanimate thematic *yugóm "a yoke" as expounded upon by Szemerényi, Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics (1999), p.272, fn.10 (see link).

The trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings (2)

(Continued from The trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings.)

My goal in this latest blog rant is to find a pleasing reconstruction of the Old IE (OIE) objective conjugation, that is, the antecedent of Proto-Indo-European's (PIE) *mi-conjugation. I'll be referring back to Pre-IE sound changes as I've defined them in my online pdf in order to find my solution. Before we can arrive at a solution, however, we must piece together what happened with the first and second persons plural endings. I guess to keep this topic together, we first might peck off a few options of possible ancient protoforms. Here we go.

The first, most obvious post-IE innovation is *-mosi/*-mos/*-mo as might be based on Latin -mus or OIr. -m, for example. This must be a new phenomenon that, at the very least, postdates Schwa Diffusion since in order for *o to have developed in an unstressed syllable, *s would have to be voiced at the time. Yet, this is not possible because we know that the plural had unvoiced *s throughout the Late IE period, that it was unaccented and that its preceding vocalism was *e as a result. Likewise, just in case some may think that *-mes was instead the product of 1ps *-m and 2ps *-s “you” (i.e. “I and you” → “we (inclusive plural)”), the same problem arises and *e is yet again the expected vocalism since it is afterall what is found in the 2ps thematic presentive ending, *-e-si (never **-o-si). So no matter how you slice and dice the 1pp ending, forms like *-mo[s(i)] must be patterned on something else, something later. Indeed, it is no doubt affected by the independent pronoun *nos “we” (in turn a late derivative of unaccented PIE *n̥s < MIE *mas). Surely this is a post-IE form and has no bearing on PIE, let alone Pre-IE. So let's toss these endings in the trashcan straight away!

Next up are the 1pp variants *-més/*-mé and 2pp *-té. In this grouping, we observe an accent that should not be there since etymologically speaking, the 1pp ending is surely nothing more than *-me- [first person pronominal stem] and *-(e)s [plural]. Judging by QAR, the plural marker was unaccented because it contained no word-final vowel in the stages preceding Syncope . In other words, even before Syncope, *-as was the MIE plural ending, not **-ésa. Further, this word-final *s is testimony to a most ancient event which I call Indo-Aegean Sibilantization. Ultimately this plural is related to Uralic plural *-t. The sibilantization of early Indo-Aegean *t would not have happened unless *t was word-final at the time (n.b. Sibilantization also explains the origin of *s/*t-heteroclitic stems in PIE like participles in *-wos). Subsequently as a result of a lack of word-final vowel in the Mid IE (MIE) plural, the plural could never have been voiced to **-ez in the Late IE period. Yet... we find accented athematic presentive 1pp and 2pp endings nonetheless. Why??? How??? And if the primary form were *-mési and secondary were *-més, then despite unexpected accent, the source of the pattern might be a little more transparent. However, the primary form was apparently *-més without *-i and the secondary was *-mé. The absence of *-i in the primary marker adds to the strangeness but it might suggest an archaicism. The loss of *-s in the secondary is no doubt by analogy with other late innovations such as the secondary middle endings with its similar loss of *-r ultimately inspired by the inherited loss of final *-i in secondary active forms from pre-IE times. At first glance, it's impossible to tell what exactly was going on with this particular group of endings because of a few things obscuring the problem, so let's move on and come back to this group of endings later on.

Next up: the *-mén(i)/*-tén(i) group. More later.

(Continue reading The trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings (3).)

The trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings

I'm still thinking about a problem that I've never completely solved to full satisfaction yet so it's a good topic to amble through right now. It seems to me that the singular personal endings are easy enough to work backwards into Pre-IE. In the most ancient stages of Pre-IE, there must have surely been two completely different sets of endings, one used for objective/active (i.e. the *mi-set) and the other for subjective/stative (i.e. the *h₂e-set). It's safe to say that the *-t- of the 3ps and 3pp active is merely an eroded form of deictic stem *to- which was attached before the Syncope rule. This ending must have then been fully entrenched in the language by late Mid IE. So far then, this leaves me in Old IE with objective singular *-em, *-es and *-e and subjective singular *-xa, *-ta and *-a. There may also have been a special stative set: *-x, *-t and *-0. The later so-called indicative *-i (or should it be renamed declarative?) must have been agglutinated to the existing objective endings in Mid IE at the time of QAR (Quasi-penultimate Accent Rule).

So what's so problematic? Well, look at how the 1pp and 2pp active endings are reconstructed for later Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The 1pp primary ending is apparently a slight embarrassment of numerous parentheses: *-mé[s/n](i). That is to say, it could be *-mé, *-més, *-mési, *-méni or all of the above for all we know. The secondary ending is supposed to be *-mé, or possibly *-mén, or maybe even *-més. Egad! The 2pp is also idiosyncratic because for some IE dialects, specifically the "internal IE" dialects, *-té must be prescribed for both the primary and secondary conjugation in the parent language (as well as for the 2pp imperative) while in other branches such as Anatolian, primary *-téni and secondary *-tén seem more in order. Despite the madness, we can thank our lucky stars that the athematic primary and secondary 1ps, 2ps, 3ps and 3pp endings are securely reconstructed as *-m(i), *-s(i), *-t(i) and *-ént(i) respectively, but the 1pp and 2pp endings are our bratty problem children.

Now, with that intellectual teaser, perhaps we should start trying to figure out what is going on with these two persons. Which variants of these endings are more archaic? Or are they all the same age? What should we reconstruct for the Old IE stage? What is the significance and origin of this *-n- plural marker in some dialects that replaces the far more productive plural ending *-(e)s? Why isn't the deictic *-i attached to the 1pp and 2pp primary endings in some dialects? And why isn't the plural marker *-(e)s attached to the 2pp as it is in the 1pp?

So many questions, so few answers. But don't worry. Glenny's been thinking very long and hard in the past week about this. I believe I have some solutions that I will share in subsequent blog entries because this is a large topic with lots of grammatical details to juggle. Stay tuned.

(Continue reading The trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings (2).)

Updates on Semitic loans in Mid IE

Here it is. A new version of my original pdf listing possible Proto-Semitic loans in an early stage of Proto-Indo-European. Hopefully, many of the errors in the first draft have been ironed out to everyone's satisfaction.

SemiticPreIEloan_20080820.pdf

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As always, नमस्ते.

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.

Oops, I forgot about Thematicization

I've just updated my Diachrony of Pre-IE document. Click away on the link just below, my friends, click away:

DiachronyOfPreIE_2008Oct13.pdf

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It seems that, in all the immense details that I've deduced over the years on Pre-IE, I forgot about Thematicization which is what I call the point at which productive animate suffixes were derived from their inanimate counterparts by infixing a vowel schwa during the middle of the Late IE Period. I presume that the reason for this infixing is not because the schwa was an actual animatizing morpheme but rather by analogy with the fact that most animate stems happened to be thematic (i.e. stems ending in a schwa) while inanimate stems tended to be athematic (i.e. stems ending in a consonant).

I want to talk more on this because it relates to the eventual development of feminine gender in Post-IE dialects. That is, out of the ancient inanimate collective *-h2 would be forged a new animate collective *-eh2 that would later be used as a feminine marker. This also relates to the origin of Indo-European s-stems that Phoenix has recently been pondering on (and which made me ponder on lately).


UPDATES
(14 Oct 2008) Whoops, a teensy typo to fix in the text above. The phrase "while inanimate stems tended to be inanimate (i.e. stems ending in a consonant)" should have read "while inanimate stems tended to be athematic (i.e. stems ending in a consonant)."

Phoenix discusses Nostratic

Today, it's a beautiful, sunny day in the Forks area in downtown Winnipeg where the local population tend to accumulate on a regular basis during the weekends year-round. The temperature is getting a little cooler and the geese are heading south again for the winter but a light jacket suffices for now. A pow-wow of Native dancers jingling to the sacred drum ensues in the central area under a large tarp. Cree and Ojibway peoples have a growing presence in this city. Meanwhile, here inside the Irish pub in an upstairs location nearby where I sit looking over the spectacle, 50s rock-and-roll plays from the speakers. I really must start making my articles in advance, I think to myself, because during the week I've been finding that I've had little mind-energy to spend writing down all my linguistic ponderings.

In the meanwhile as I get reorganized and finally take advantage of Blogger's capability to issue my blog rants at prearranged intervals, you can venture over to Phoenix's blog where he's noticed something askew about some details of Allan Bomhard's published views on Proto-Nostratic: Nostraticists and their crazy theories.

I remain a Nostratic sympathist myself, seeing the hope and positive probability of the language family, but I also recognize that even prominent Nostraticists continue to make serious errors based on their inaccurate understandings of the various language groups involved. At any rate, this is a topic worth discussing, sharing and growing from.

Here's what happened to me

In a nutshell: I've been painfully busy. I've had little time due to working, socializing (yes! a shocker, hehe!), and coming down with a nasal cold from hell (honestly I don't have the heart to blow into one more kleenex, bleh!!).

So the Etruscan database update has been unfulfilled for September 15 as I had originally planned. To be honest, I just haven't updated much to it so adding an updated draft seems pointless as yet. However, that doesn't mean my task is done. As usual, my data-mining is a neverending hobby for me that won't stop until the Good Goddess in the sky shuts me up for good and takes me away to the land beyond. For whatever reason, my mind has been stuck on Pre-IE, the Neolithic period and the phonetics of Semitic loanwords. I'll get back to Etruscan soon but my mind likes to wander from time to time.

Anyways, I'd also like to thank everyone so far for some great, tough questions. It's nice to see that you're all still interested in my blogrants, even those from a while back, and that it's getting people thinking and discussing.

For now, I need some Neo-Citran, a warm blanket, and a good night's sleep.

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.

What do I "know"?

Both Mehri wēda and Akkadian wadū (variant of idū) make it uncertain whether it's appropriate to reconstruct *w- or *y- as the first radical of the Proto-Semitic (PSem) triliteral meaning “to know”^[1].

Considering the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *weid-, it's just too tempting to wonder if there's a connection. If the original PSem root had *w-, then it would predictably become *y- in Western Semitic languages as is the case with other Iw-verbs like *wθb “to sit”.

The question is: What, if any, PSem form can plausibly account for the semantics and phonetics of the PIE root if this was indeed a Neolithic loanword? So I've been consulting a handy pdf called Semitic Binyanim for a hint at a sturdy answer. One form that may fit could be the active G-stem participle which is reconstructed to be of the vocalic structure of CāCiC-. So in theory, I'd then expect *wādiʕ- “knowing” and this would be one option to explain the PIE root, if correctly formed that is, since PSem *ā appears to correlate with PIE *ei also in the equation of PSem *θalāθi = PIE *treis “three”. I really need to find an in-depth book on Proto-Semitic grammar though...


NOTES
^[1] Bibliographic Bulletin (1982), University of Virginia, p.193 (see link).

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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