Prehistoric isoglosses in Proto-Steppe

As you can see, I've been pondering on Proto-Steppe today. Many people refer to this early hypothetical language set most sensibly around 9,000 BCE as Indo-Uralic and it's called this because it's the common ancestor of both Proto-Uralic (PU) and Proto-Indo-European (PIE) afterall. However I still prefer my own term Proto-Steppe a) because it's more descriptive of the likely region where it was spoken and b) because PIE and PU aren't the only language groups implicated in the grouping. I made this simple isogloss map to show at a glance how I would explain Proto-Steppe's development into the later proto-languages known and studied and it relates, as always, to the unpixelated view of the Wave Model of language change. Thus far, I've been satisfied with a 4-vowel system of *a, *i, *u and *ə, forming a pleasant V-shape when you graph it out on paper using the dimensions of height and backness. V-shaped vowel systems are quite common around the world as far as vowel systems go.

Now to explain the three isoglosses I have on display above. I've been getting the impression for a while that Indo-Aegean (IAeg) and Altaic-Gilyak (AG) must have remained particularly close after diffusion of the Proto-Steppe community because I can think of at least two sure features that they share with each other that couldn't have been inherited from the parent language. One is the wholesale softening of word-final *-t to *-s as seen in the changes on animate plural marker *-it (n.b. further erosion of word-final *-s causes in turn Proto-Altaic *-r₂) and the other is an occasional correspondence of *a in IAeg and AG with Boreal *u in certain key words. I attribute this curious development to an original mid-central schwa *ə which could sit equally in accented positions as well as unaccented ones.

Upon revisiting these ideas, I've just realized an interesting minimal triplet in Proto-Steppe that serves as a simple but effective argument to justify the necessity of at least four reconstructed vowels at this stage:

• *ta 'from'
• *tu 'you (sg.)'
• *tə 'that (near you)'

The first becomes the source of the Indo-European ablative *-ód and Uralic partitive *-ta. The PIE form originated by agglutinating the postposition to the nominal stem in IAeg (thus *-ata), followed by Penultimate Accent Shift in Old IE which took the fixed accent off the initial (*-áta), then Syncope (*-ád̰) and finally Vowel Shift, yielding PIE *-ód with regular rules. The second and last examples show a vital difference between them since *tu becomes *tʷa (> PIE *twe, n.b. vocalism secondarily affected by *me < Proto-Steppe *mi 'I') while *tə becomes IAeg *ta without labialization of the preceding stop (>PIE *to-). This is explained if there was an unrounded vowel distinct from both low central unrounded *a and high back rounded *u, namely the mid central unrounded schwa which fits so nicely into an otherwise common 3-vowel system. Forms that suggest to some long-range linguists the apparent existence of a proximal demonstrative **ti on the Proto-Steppe level^[1] are, I figure, caused by later analogical derivation out of inherited *tə since this proximal demonstrative is only evidenced in Boreal and AG while IAeg seems to preserve only *ta 'that' (> PIE *to- and Aegean *ta) with a distinct proximal counterpart *ka (> PIE *ḱo- and Aegean *ka). I take the IAeg evidence to show an original word *ka 'this' in Proto-Steppe since, if this is not so, the source of the IAeg form would remain much more obscure than that of Boreal and AG's *ti vis-a-vis the securely inherited deictic *tə. The Altaic forms with word-initial sibilant in place of expected *t- are surely caused by pre-Altaic palatalization before high front vowels as has also apparently occurred in its second person pronominal forms.

All these speculative ideas while interesting and worthy of discussion are however, of course, subject to some range of interpretation. Debate remains open.


NOTES
^[1] See, for example, page 2 of Frederik Kortlandt's article Indo-Uralic and Altaic [pdf].

Language waves and the satem innovation in PIE

I want to talk about the awesome, yet unappreciated, power of isogloss maps. I find that a lot of people in general misunderstand Proto-Indo-European (PIE) to have been a single, unified language when in fact this could never possibly have been the case. At any given time, PIE would have been an assemblage of dialects from start to finish. Of course, when I say that, I will probably be misunderstood to have meant that the reconstruction of Proto-IE is invalid or futile, which I stress is absolutely not my position at all.

Rather I think that by conceiving of language change in a better way, as I will explain below, we can gain a lot more insight into protolanguages than is currently the norm. To me, the confusion about language evolution stems from a popular, antiquated notion of language change as represented by the all-too-famous "family tree" diagrams. We can see the concept in this picture or in this one. As the diagram implies, language divides into various new languages as time goes on much like how a tree grows new branches as it ages. This is a horrible way to understand language change.

A better way is to recognize language, not as a single entity, but rather as a package of features (whether they be grammatical features or phonetic features) that coexist within said language. Furthermore, these features may spread like waves over a geographical area much like waves in an ocean and therefore spread into other neighbouring dialects or even completely different languages. When one language affects another, dialectologists call it areal influence.

So now, if we can truly understand that languages are nothing more than the mere intersection of spoken features within a specific geographical area and that each of these features may be represented as independently spreading waves, then we can now understand what I mean when I say that PIE was never a single language and had always been a sea of regional dialects.

Now that we have that clarified, I want to explore a crazy idea. It's untested but even if it's wrong, it should give you an example of an as-yet underappreciated process using isogloss mapping to tease out interesting details about a protolanguage's history that would otherwise go unpondered. I want to posit an idea that the satem innovation of PIE was in fact caused by areal influence from a "para-dialect", that is, a dialect lying just outside the boundaries of PIE itself. A dialect, in other words, that was almost-but-not-quite PIE. One that only shared some features with PIE because it had split away at an earlier date than Anatolian or Tocharian while innovating new features. The only way I can fully explain how this intriguing idea would work is to illustrate this in a video using my skills with Macromedia Flash.

In this rough sketch presented in my video below, the p-Satem (or para-Satem) dialect is a hypothetical paradialect that could have perhaps provoked the Satem innovation in PIE. I toy with this idea to illustrate for you how language waves and isogloss maps can help us explore new details about ancient languages.

(Hopefully this video will show up because I've never used Blogger's new video feature before. Knowing how most programmers code and being pessimistic, I'm thinking that I will encounter problems as I press "Publish Post". Let's all cross our fingers that my video will be visible.)

UPDATE
As I expected. Unskilled programmers botch up yet another "user-friendly" service. What an annoying hassle but I'm used to fixing other people's stupid programming. So I have uploaded my presentation to my eSnips account for downloading.



Sorry for the inconvenience but blame Blogger and don't forget to send them hate mail, hehe.