2 Aug 2009

The PIE and Pre-PIE pronominal system from the perspective of a wave model

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was never a single language. Let's all repeat that over and over again to ourselves. Depending on one's level of knowledge of linguistics, one might either be shocked by this newsflash or one might be annoyed with being retold what you think you know about PIE. Yet, as I talk with others online, I'm reminded that many, even when seemingly well read up on linguistics in other respects, often still have failed to understand the fullest implications of the Wave Model of language change which informs us, among other things, that languages don't evolve in a simple, straight line.

If "language" is nothing more than a "package of linguistic features" and if each of these individual features can spread in their own ways across a geographical area and amongst a community of speakers over time, then not only, despite the usefulness of comparative linguistics and reconstruction, can there never have been a single Proto-Indo-European language in the strictest sense but that these Proto-Indo-European features we reconstruct have inevitably emerged from many divergent locales and times within the obscure protoplasm of a more distant *Pre*-PIE dialectology. The insight of languages being nothing more than packages of innovation waves is as vital to modern linguistics as wave-particle duality is to modern physics.

Clear as mud? Let's carry on and maybe what I'm getting at will eventually make more sense for everyone. We could use Middle English as an example of how the reconstruction of a language isn't as simple as tree diagrams make it out to be.

If someone asks, What is the 3rd person feminine pronoun in Middle English?, one may respond with all of sche, scho and heo[1]. However, even if one only responded with one of these answers, one would still be correct even if still failing to be comprehensive. A single answer here would be most correct for a single region of Middle English such that sche is a northern variant, scho is from east midlands speech, and heo is from southernmost regions. Looking through time from the Middle Ages to Modern English, we sit like oracles in front of our computer screens with the foreknowledge that eventually she will have displaced or at least marginalized all other variants of this pronoun that were existent in the previous stage of Middle English regardless of their intriguing, respective origins.

What have we learned from this? Again, that language doesn't move in a straight line, of course. So why do we keep thinking that PIE or other theorized protolanguages must?

So back to PIE, I've shared openly before in Paleoglot: The trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings (3) my detailed reasons for why I think that the development of 1pp and 2pp suffixes *-mén(i) & *-tén(i) (as suggested by Anatolian and Greek dialects) must precede the development of *-més and *-té (as found in other PIE dialects). However, in none of this have I intended to impose a single set of plural pronominal suffixes on PIE itself. I urge those interested in theories on Pre-IE made by me, or for that matter by any others, to understand them in the context of an eternal dialectal pluralism. Imagining evolving dialect maps across eons in your head, even the surface notion of it, may be exceedingly more complex a thought than one is used to, but it also gives us a more realistic picture of how languages and protolanguages have evolved. That way, when we ask, What were the 1pp & 2pp active primary pronominal endings in Proto-IE?, we may learn to say, in fashion parallel to the Middle English example above, all of *-méni & *-téni (Anatolian); *-mén & *-tén (dialectal Hellenic); and *-més & *-té. We will also learn to look past the mere illusion of self-contradiction in this multivalued response supplied.


NOTES
[1] Hogg/Blake, The Cambridge History of the English Language: 1066-1476 (1992), p.119.

7 comments:

  1. "Imagining evolving dialect maps across eons in your head, even the surface notion of it, may be exceedingly more complex a thought than one is used to, but it also gives us a more realistic picture of how languages and protolanguages have evolved."

    I decided to tackle that problem in my cartography class and came up with this.

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  2. Wow, that's great stuff! Neat. I would say though that the isoglosses boundaries could be clearer in it but it's an interesting graphic and exactly what I'm thinking of for (Pre-)Proto-Indo-European. Thanks.

    Another thing that I notice about the wave model is that one could also think of a "shifting epicenter" throughout time and throughout the area. This constantly moving epicenter would represent the most direct ancestor of a language at any given time. That might be interesting to track as well but it probably is best in a moving video or interactive adobe flash interface.

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  3. Thanks. The isogloss boundaries are much clearer in the full sized version (Picasa automatically shrank it).

    As for your idea about the "shifting epicenter", I did come across a phenomenon that may be a bit similar to what you're talking about. However, since it's currently midnight where I am, and this is a sort of complicated topic, I think it would probably be best to wait until morning before I tackle it. I would ask though what you mean by "most direct ancestor of a language", and in particular what you mean by "language". Are you talking about standard languages? Because if you're not, I don't see how the word has any meaning in this context, since we're talking about a dialect continuum.

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  4. All right, the phenomenon I noticed was a shifting center of change, specifically with regards to Franconian. The Franks originally lived on the east shore of the Rhine, then expanded west into the Roman Empire during the fourth century. As they expanded, they began, for inscrutable Frankish reasons, to devoice word-final obstruents (this is the blue isogloss), thereby establishing Frankish as its own distinct, highly conservative dialect. The Franks on the western side of the Rhine continued to speak their language with very little change for several centuries. The Franks on the eastern side, at least in the south, switched over to Old High German when the first stage of the High German consonant shift reached them.

    Now, the question is, did they continue to devoice word-final obstruents? That is not something I was able to figure out, but if they did, then it means that the situation was not as simple as them switching to OHG. What it instead indicates is that there were three "nodes", three centers of change, three wave sources, in the West Germanic dialect continuum: Ingvaeonic, Franconian, and German. The evolution of the continuum begins with all three "firing", resulting in three dialect areas. One of them, though, fires with more "force" (bear with me here, this is strictly conceptual), and its dialect region overlaps with the other two; the overlapping regions being what are now Low German and the Rhenish Fan. The two weaker nodes shut off, and the stronger one continues to fire.

    Around the nineth century, though, the tables turned as the Franks gained dominion over everyone else. This led to terminal obstruent devoicing spreading to the rest of the continuum, and I suspect that þ>d may also have originated with the Franconian node (though this is little more than speculation). This nodal system (if of course it existed) may have continued on through the Middle Germanic period; I don't know as it fell outside the purview of the project.

    It's possible that the Iranian dialect continuum might also be analyzable in this way, though as I haven't studied it it's hard to say.

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  5. I've never thought of what *three* of these epicenters of influence might look like but that's a powerful idea! I'm definitely not going to be sleeping tonight! Hahaha.

    Sergei Andropov: "I would ask though what you mean by 'most direct ancestor of a language', and in particular what you mean by 'language'. Are you talking about standard languages? Because if you're not, I don't see how the word has any meaning in this context, since we're talking about a dialect continuum."

    Okay, my words are probably being tangled in the complexity of my thoughts but I mean that, at least from the perspective of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, there is only one direct "timeline", if you will. I suppose the concept of parallel universes is apt here because I'm envisioning an ever-bubbling dialect area from which both Proto-IE proper as well as para-IE dialects (ie. almost-but-not-quite PIE) spring.

    So the "epicenter" in that case would represent a "direct ancestor" of PIE proper, in opposition to all the indirect ancestors that never survived into history.

    Try imagining a situation where a para-IE dialect *beside* Mid IE (the direct ancestor of PIE c.5500 BCE, let's say) diverges already before PIE proper develops and it has become influenced by northerly Proto-Uralic to form palatal affricates. Such a paradialect wouldn't survive since it would later be overwhelmed by the influence of PIE before the dawn of history, nor would such a dialect represent the true epicenter in development of PIE since it's not a "direct ancestor" nor does it contain a feature in it found later in Proto-IE. "Language" in this case means more the language area if anything, the area harbouring both PIE and para-IE dialects until "the end" when PIE completely takes over.

    However, I like your use of epicenters to sniff out three main points of political influence for two reasons: 1) the connections you make to local politics and society, and 2) because three epicenters makes for an even more thought-provoking idea.

    Indeed, if the epicenter of PIE had moved southward, spurring the development of Mid IE and Semitic loanwords before the epicenter moved back north, we might be tempted to likewise interpret this from a socioeconomic/political angle. It might reflect what is effectively the obvious, that the Neolithic was a boon particularly to coastline communities, including some Mid IE-speaking peoples nearer to the Bosporus. A boon for a while until the brunt of trading was pushed outward to the north towards 4000 BCE. Perhaps?

    I might even be tempted to overlay my swirling proto-dialect map with "archaeological epicenters" based on incoming cultures like LBK, Cucuteni, Sredny-Stog, etc. I'm certainly not a fan of simplistically assigning protolanguages to any single archaeological culture but by thinking of them as epicenters of influence instead, things might get interesting...

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  6. "I suppose the concept of parallel universes is apt here because I'm envisioning an ever-bubbling dialect area from which both Proto-IE proper as well as para-IE dialects (ie. almost-but-not-quite PIE) spring."

    But that brings us back to the tree model. As you said in the original post, there was no Standard PIE, and the various dialects do not necessarily ultimately converge on a single dialect — even if that is what the comparative method suggests. Considering the example of the Rhenish fan again, the dialects of that region are quite clearly German rather than Dutch, but are in fact descended from Old Franconian. If I'm correct about terminal obstruent devoicing continuing in the region, then they never did speak Old High German as we usually think of it (note that terminal obstruent devoicing is one of the criteria for distinguishing MHG from OHG).

    "So the 'epicenter' in that case would represent a "direct ancestor" of PIE proper, in opposition to all the indirect ancestors that never survived into history."

    Ah, a drogulus.

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  7. "But that brings us back to the tree model."

    Not in the slightest. Reconstruction necessarily starts with a singular model (nb. the KISS principle) since 19th-century IEists couldn't assume dialects of which they were as yet ignorant.

    Now today we have a singular PIE reconstruction and this is still a valid accomplishment. From a wave model perspective, Proto-IE is merely an "averaging out" of all existing PIE dialects from which modern languages spring and now the task is to understand how the PIE dialects of a "PIE dialect area" were formed. We now should be understanding the term "PIE" to be shorthand for "PIE dialect area".

    It's also pointless to eternally ponder on the vagueness of terms like "language" and "dialect" because in the end we're now refocusing our reconstruction efforts towards elucidating former feature boundaries (eg. the satem area). Since linguistic features are more concrete and easily definable than terms like "language" and "dialect", we can be more accurate and scientific in our descriptions and understanding of the linguistic reality of the past.

    "As you said in the original post, there was no Standard PIE,[...]"

    Exactly, and I'm still saying this without waver. No single PIE existed in prehistorical reality, but one has been reconstructed through theory. Theory will always be a poor approximation of reality but it's approximation is better than nothing. Unless we can invent a time machine, theory will have to do.

    "Ah, a drogulus."

    No, not really. None of us are logically justified in placing arbitrary limits on what we can or cannot know in the infinite span of the future. Paradialects may yet be reconstructable. This is no more than an elaborate jigsaw puzzle afterall.

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