New thought: A 2D matrix of eventive/non-eventive and subjective/objective

I've been remodeling the PIE verb system for my own personal kicks to try and unite a number of various ideas (ie. Jasanoff's theories, the durative-aorist-perfect model, active-stative, and subjective-objective) into a single coherent model that explains everything much clearer than what I'm finding in journals and books. Forgive me if I'm reinventing the wheel but as far as I know this wheel hasn't been invented yet.

My cursed snag to my subjective-objective theory remains that subjectives are expected to yield atelic verbs (ie. verbs without completed goal) or imperfectives (ie. continuous actions or states)^[1]. Even though the middle clearly should be placed under a subjective category in my hypothetical remodeling, and even though the subjective on which the middle is built acts in many respects like a former subjective (for example, its curious habit of accomodating verbs of state), subjective can't turn into a perfective in any direct way according to known structural linguistics! We oddly expect the total reverse: subjectives yielding imperfectives and objectives yielding perfectives. This is why I had a migraine a couple of days ago, frenetically diagramming to make this irritating paradox finally unfold into clarity. I think I've come to an interesting idea that takes a page from the Ancient Egyptian verbal system: eventive versus non-eventive.

An eventive verb, as the name implies, refers to a specific event in time while the non-eventive by contrast focuses more on the action or state in a more generalized context. It's the difference between "I ate the baby (last night)" (eventive) and "I eat babies (in general)" (non-eventive). By drawing a two-dimensional grid between eventive & non-eventive on the one hand and subjective & objective on the other, we end up with four main categories in which to place the earliest verbs of Common Proto-IE. This is perhaps not a good synchonic model for PIE but it seems to be explanatory as a seed for its eventual evolution in many of the Core IE dialects. Observe:

Objective non-eventive	*h₁és-m̥ 'I am' *déh₃-m̥ 'I share'[2] *bʰḗr-m̥ 'I carry (often)'
Objective eventive	*bʰḗr-mi 'I am carrying' *bʰḗr-s-m̥ 'I have carried (once)'
Subjective non-eventive	*wóid-h₂e 'I know' *ḱónk-e 'it is hung' *stestóh₂-e 'it is stood' *gʰónh₁-h₂e 'I am born'
Subjective eventive	*h₁és-h₂or 'I sit' *gʰu-h₂ór 'I spill'

Objective non-eventive

This category is the origin of root aorists and imperfective past in Core IE while becoming the mi-class preterite in Anatolian. This is because the pan-PIE choice to make the continuous aspect a present tense marker made non-continuous verbs automatically a past by contrast. This change also hints at why past tense came to be less marked than the present, curiously opposing normal language tendencies (ie. the shift occurred rapidly as PIE broke up). Telic verbs (ie. Narten presents with *ē-vocalism) were free to be marked in the continuous, suggesting an impending goal, or to remain unmarked to convey realized ones. The former leads to a durative-turned-present and the latter leads to a momentaneous-turned-past.

Objective eventive

This category was largely characterized by telic verbs marked in the continuous aspect (later Narten presents). However, the antecedent of sigmatic aorists (ie. those verbs marked in *-s- with lengthened root vowel) which originally expressed a past experience were by definition eventive as well. An experiential form, parallel to Mandarin guo (过), can easily yield explicit past tense "sigmatic aorists" in Core IE dialects, while forming special 3ps sigmatic past forms for an originally tenseless hi-class as evidenced by Anatolian and Tocharian.

Subjective non-eventive

This category denoted states where the subject was affected (passives), but also often verbs of emotion and of thought which are clearly subjective, as well as what would later be termed reduplicated perfects. The development of reduplicated perfects with built in punctual meaning directly out of a "stative" requires the brunt of explanation. My hunch here is that reduplication was restricted to verbs like 'stand' signifying states resulting from prior action. An expression like 'it is stood' qualifies as such while 'I have gone' is less focussed on state than on the completed action itself. This latter comparison explains how forms specialized in suggesting resultant states from actions (PIE *stestóh₂e 'it is stood up' → 'it has come to be stood up') can gradually expand to take on resultant actions as well (post-IE *bʰebʰórh₂e 'I have come to be carrying' → 'I have carried') and thus become a "perfect" with punctual aspect now emphasizing active result over mere resulted state. The connection then between subjective and perfect is indirect and subtle.

It should also be noted that only part of this single category yields perfects while the rest of the subjective umbrella is the mother of middles and inherently non-punctual states. So the subjective simply doesn't become perfective wholesale and there's no need for me to worry about the crosslinguistic tendency I mentioned above which refers more to developments as a whole, not in part. Phew!

Also, forms like *wóidh₂e 'I know' which never ever show reduplication in the later perfect hint at their original meaning and usage: 'I know' (stative) → 'I have come to know' (inchoative) → 'I have known/seen' (perfective past). Since 'to know' is not an action and since reduplication expresses a resultant state from an *action* as outlined above, naturally there can be no reduplicated forms possible for these stative verbs.

Subjective eventive

This category is composed of middles and are marked as such with special endings in *-r. They are actions accomplished through a medium ("mediopassive"), through one's own effort ("sitting"), or involuntarily like "spilling" or "sneezing". This category appears to be the least molested by change in the various branches, so I think I'll stop typing now.

There, now we'll see if this post stands the test of time...


NOTES
^[1] Gülzow, The Acquisition of Intensifiers Emphatic Reflexives in English and German Child Language (2006), Studies on language acquisition, v.22, p.45, table 6 (see link).
^[2] Perhaps this verb is better placed in the category of subjective non-eventive instead. Note Hewson/Bubeník, From Case to Adposition: The Development of Configurational Syntax in Indo-European Languages (2006), p.100 (see link): "In this context we should remind ourselves of the archaic transactional meaning of *dō- (< *deh₃-) as shown by Hittite dahhi 'I take' (< *deh₃-h₂e) vs. general IE 'I give'." Jasanoff shows a slightly different interpretation in The role of o-grade in Hittite and Tocharian verb inflection (1992), published in Reconstructing Languages and Cultures, p.140 (see link): "Hittite has a 3 sg. dāi, which can be referred to an underlying *doh₃-e and taken as the continuant of a pre-Proto-Indo-European 'middle' with the meaning 'gives/gave to oneself'."

UPDATES
(12 Sep 2009)

Just realized that a better translation of what must have been a bidirectional sense underlying *deh₃- is not 'to trade' but 'to share'. Thus, a semantic shift from 'to share (my own property)' → 'to give' (as in Core IE dialects) and 'to share (another's property)' → 'to take' is clearer. It also works well with what grammatically hints at a non-eventive and atelic verb, non-eventive because it avoids the continuous marker and atelic because it shows no Narten-grade which would explicitly mark it as telic.

Also corrected the forms *h₁ḗs-h₂or and *gʰeu-h₂ór to *h₁és-h₂or and *gʰu-h₂ór respectively, as per the middle forms suggested in Sihler, New comparative grammar of Greek and Latin (1995), p.133 (see link) and in Indo-European perspectives - Studies in honour of Anna Morpurgo (2004), p.506 (see link).

(05 Sep 2009)

Added footnote #2 concerning the changing semantics of *deh₃-.

(09 Sep 2009)

Added footnote #1 concerning theories on the typical evolution of transitive verbs.

Is an active-stative or subjective-objective system more appropriate for earliest Common Proto-IE

The neat thing about keeping a blog for any length of time is that one can see how old one's ideas are and how one can reuse past ideas to eventually crystallize a thought into something more detailed and polished. Almost two years ago, I had talked about stages of Pre-IE with subjective-objective contrast which was in turn inspired by Allan Bomhard's words on Pre-IE in his idea-packed book, Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996). While I will never be a fan of current Nostratic reconstruction for its lack of scholarly rigour and poor methodology, the idea of a subjective-objective contrast ultimately linking PIE to Uralic stuck in my mind for... well... more than two years!!!

It's sadly only now that I realize how much of an impact these ideas can have towards finally understanding PIE grammar completely. COMPLETELY! I'm going to now assert the following premise for the sake of discussion: PIE *itself* still retained a subjective-objective contrast and this is what lies behind the suppletive *mi- and *h₂e conjugations. To sum up, "objective" is a conjugational form that marks verbs as "object-focussed" while "subjective" implies "subject-focus", as in modern Uralic languages like Hungarian or Nenets. For example, any action effected through one's own body parts can be automatically considered "subjective" such as "to know" (via one's brain), "to see" (via one's eyes) or "to feel" (via one's physical skin or by one's internal emotions). Other subjective verbs might simply be subject-focussed arbitrarily such as "I hunt" (naturally implying that animals of an unspecified sort are being hunted, and hence that the action is unavoidably transitive despite a lack of expressed object).

It looks to me that what I've previously mused about the origin of the 1ps pronoun is yet one example of evidence in favour of a subjective-objective contrast in PIE itself. If *h₁ég-o-h₂ (or perhaps more accurately *h₁ég-o-h₂e) is originally a subjunctive verb form meaning "(as for) my being here" and if Jay Jasanoff is correct in deriving all thematic verbs from the subjunctive, then the unique subjunctive 1ps ending *-o-h₂e, which later becomes the "thematic 1ps" familiar to avid Hellenists and Indo-Iranianists and which so self-evidently borrows at some point from the *h₂e-conjugation (but curiously only in this 1ps), is indeed a relic of this subjective-objective contrast. Afterall, one's thoughts (and one's potential expressed so specifically by the 1ps subjunctive, eg. "I would go/I will go") simply imply subjectivity, making the replacement of an earlier Pre-IE 1ps subjunctive *-o-mi, the otherwise expected form, with this new subjective ending all the more natural.

Again too, the use of the specific *h₂e-conjugation as a basis for the middle endings (*-h₂ór < MIE *-xá-ra, *-t(h₂)ór < *-tá-ra, *-ór < *-á-ra, etc.) is simultaneously also explained best through this paradigm being used to express the subjective rather than stative or perfective. The result of the action isn't important, neither is any implied state, whether arrived at by an action or not. What's rather most important to the *h₂e-conjugation is that the action and/or subject is the true focus and not the object which remains comparatively less defined or even entirely undefined (ie. less important to topicality). Considering that the intransitive verb, and the subjective forms that may spring from it, can in turn develop into an aspectual perfective (aka punctive, punctual) is a delicious bonus too since it now helps to link this hypothetical "Indo-Anatolian" system with the later system of durative-aorist-perfective in the later "Core PIE" from which non-Anatolian and non-Tocharian dialects sprang such as Indo-Iranian and Hellenic (Greek).

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)

The active-stative mess

In Indo-European studies, there's always talk of active-stative languages, as an attempt to unite the Anatolian mi-class/hi-class dichotomy with the trifurcated present-aorist-perfective system preserved in non-Anatolian dialects. Somehow this hasn't completely sat well with me and I'm starting to understand why that is. For instance, concerning the absence of a verb 'to have' in Indo-European, Brigitte Bauer in Archaic Syntax in Indo-European first goes on to explain: "Instead, [Proto-IE] had constructions of the type mihi est, which includes a stative verb 'be' [...]"^[1] Notice that she rightly identifies 'to be' as a stative verb here. Yet before listing off some examples of active-stative verb pairs, she shares in the same paragraph: "In addition, Indo-European languages display residues of a lexical distinction between active and stative verbs. There is a group of verbs, moreover, that have two lexical roots, both referring to the same verbal concept, yet one representing its active aspect, and one representing its stative aspect."

So what's the problem? The problem is that the first pair she lists is *h₁es- 'to be' & *bʰeuh₂- 'to become' and if it's true that one is "active" and one is "stative" in a system where the active verbs are supposed to be marked by the *mi-set of pronominal endings and the stative verbs are marked by the *h₂e-set, then she and other Indoeuropeanists appear to have contradicted themselves^[2]. Further, there's the whole matter of *-i supposedly marking the "present tense" that I think I'm going to take up issue with right now.

According to the standard view, heavily biased in favour of non-Anatolian PIE languages and an effectively post-PIE state of affairs, we have the following forms and their functions:

bʰér-e-ti '(S)he is carrying' (present)
bʰér-e-t '(S)he was carrying' (preterite)
bʰēr-s-t '(S)he carried' (aorist)
bʰé-bʰor-e '(S)he has carried' (perfect)

This is not acceptable as a genuine model for the Proto-Indo-European stage because it doesn't explain a lot of things about the oldest branch of them all, Anatolian, and its unique features like 1) its scarcity of thematic verbs in *-e-, and 2) its system of mi-class and hi-class conjugations that are kept separate. Also, if the above is correct, we have an ugly situation where the present appears to be marked with an extra ending *-i despite a strong tendency in languages for presentives to be less marked than their preterite counterparts. So let's remodel the above into a new, purely aspectual system which might better account for everything, including Anatolian this time:

bʰēr-t '(S)he carries/(S)he carried (habitually)' (non-continuous)
bʰḗr-ti '(S)he is carrying/(S)he was carrying' (continuous)
bʰēr-s-t '(S)he carried (once)' (experiential)
wóid-e '(S)he knows/(S)he knew' (punctive)

I've tossed out thematic verbs which have already been nicely explained away as derivatives of subjunctive forms. So *bʰer- 'to carry' is now recognized as a former Narten present. I've also made the so-called "preterite" the new default, specifying non-continuous (ie. completed) actions or states regardless of whether they were contextually meant to be past, present or future tense whereby the form may just as well have meant '(S)he carried' (past) as '(S)he will carry' (future). The so-called presentive is reinterpreted as a continuous action or state, again regardless of time reference. Finally the sigmatic aorist is no longer treated as a formalized conjugation distinct from the non-continuous. Rather, the marker *-s- specifies a specific event of an inherently dynamic verb (a perfective nuance) and this is why only some verbs were given a sigmatic aorist later on in non-Anatolian dialects.

My understanding of PIE grammar is being inspired by Mandarin Chinese where here too, tense is irrelevant. Both the non-continuous and punctive would be expressed in Mandarin with the perfective particle le (了) placed after the verb. Continuous is very similar to the preverbal progressive marker zài (在), except that the PIE marker also marked stative *h₁es- 'to be'^[3] while Mandarin shì (是) isn't marked this way. The experiential is reflected as the particle guo (过) and already, by speaking of an action experienced, is inherently preterite to begin with. More on the fascinating subject of Chinese aspects can be read here if one wants to explore the implications of a tenseless language further.

I notice that le is often mistaken by foreigners (like me) as a past tense marker, yet it's more accurately described as a marker of completion for both action and state, refered to as a perfective or completive. The fact that this marker is mistaken so often as a past tense marker by those more familiar with tensual languages however suggests a strong semantic connection between the two. The common "completive" nuance between the two concepts provides the conduit in Indo-European for the eventual restriction of non-continuous aspect to past tense (even in Anatolian) and the reinterpretation of the continuous in *-i as a present tense which spreads to the Anatolian hi-conjugation as such. All this being said, we then understand why the perfective action could not possibly have been originally marked by *-i (as proven by non-Anatolian dialects) if its function were originally to express this aspect, due to the obvious semantic contradictions that would ensue, and we also see why the sigmatic aorist couldn't have ever applied to all verbs, such as punctives, likewise to avoid simple contradiction.


NOTES
^[1] Bauer, Archaic syntax in Indo-European: The spread of transitivity in Latin and French (2000), in Trends in Linguistics 125, p.21 (see link).
^[2] Lehmann, Theoretical bases of Indo-European linguistics (1996), p.219 (see link).
^[3] Bybee/Pagliuca/Perkins, The evolution of grammar (1994), p.140 (see link): "For instance, progressives that definitely are not restricted to dynamic situations occur in Motu, where the form is derived directly from a demonstrative meaning 'here (or there) now', and in Chacobo with a progressive translated as 'now'."

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.

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" - *(s)kerp- vs. *gʰrebʰ-

Based on Phoenix's latest entry on pairs of suspiciously similar Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stems (see Phoenix's Blog: #6 *(s)kerp- ~ *gʰrebʰ-), I discovered what I admittedly expected to eventually uncover - that these pairs are in part the product of early Proto-Semitic (PSem) loans in the neolithic Mid IE period and in part the product of phonotactic constraints imposed on stems that irregularly lost their *s- in the Late IE period, perhaps due to PIE speakers losing track of the true etymological source of these stems in the course of time.

I remember seeing a stem similar to *gʰrebʰ- somewhere in Proto-Semitic. As I've explained to Phoenix, I treat Nostratic works such as the sources of Allan Bomhard and John Kerns as helpful leads to potential IE-Semitic contact. Bare with me, since while I'm a kind of sympathist to the theory of Nostratic, I hardly believe that Bomhard and Kerns are completely on the ball with it and there are many series which they consider cognate but which I think are more likely more recent loans, particularly so when they list a supposed cognate series with only PIE and Proto-Semitic data to substantiate their reconstructions. Very suspicious indeed.

So, it's not surprising that I managed to find a lead in one of Bomhard and Kern's books (see Bomhard/Kerns, The Nostratic Macrofamily (1994), p.386) which compares PIE *gʰrebʰ- "to scratch" with a list of Semitic data which suggest a triliteral skeleton *grb. It just so happens that precisely this skeleton is explicitly listed in Murtonen, Hebrew in Its West Semitic Setting (1989), p.140 with accompanying attested forms in various Semitic languages and with semantics revolving around "itching".

This then leads me to wonder if the following hypothesis has meat:

PSem *garābu "to scratch" ~ *šagāribu "made to scratch; itchy"
↓
MIE *ɢaréba- "to scratch (tr.)" ~ *saɢérba- "to scratch (intr.)"
> early Late IE *ɢreb- ~ *sqerb-
> PIE *gʰrebʰ- ~ *(s)kerp-

Theoretically, the stemfinal *bʰ would devoice to *p in original *skerbʰ- once speakers of Indo-European no longer were consciously aware of the historical connection with *gʰrebʰ-, and this would especially occur after *s- came to be irregularly omitted and phonotactic "stop voicing harmony" pressures took over. Once the sibilant disappeared, it would be all too easy for even a native speaker to get confused between a historical phonetic [k] (an allophone of voiced *gʰ following a sibilant) and the homophonous phoneme *k. The confusion would be made more likely if this "optional" s-mobile as a fossilized foreign morpheme, as I continue to maintain, had never ever become a productive phoneme in Pre-IE or PIE as some PIEists still believe.

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).

Back to business: emphatic particles and verbal extensions

Now, returning to the safer topic of comparative linguistics, I still am trying to account for how my new solution concerning the prehistoric genesis of Proto-Indo-European's uvular sounds helps (or maybe hinders?) my attempts at trying to figure out the origins of the emphatic particle *[ǵ/g](ʰ)[e/o] which is thus far so hideously reconstructed by current Indo-Europeanists.

However, if we take the velar contained in the nominative first person singular pronoun, which appears to contain the fossilized remnants of the earliest form of the emphatic particle when the pronoun was first coined in the Late Period (ie. *h₁eǵoh₂, literally "(as for) my being here" from *h₁e "here" + *ǵe [emphatic] + *-oh₂ [old 1ps subjunctive]; parallel in development to the 1ps pronouns of Inuktitut uva-ŋa, Aleut ti-ŋ, and Proto-Semitic *an-āku), we are pointed to *ǵe as the most appropriate reconstruction. Any other forms of this particle would then have developed later after presumably being influenced by or merging with other existing words or particles with similar phonetics and meaning. In the earlier Mid IE (MIE) stage, we could then posit an emphatic particle *g̰a derived from Indo-Aegean *k’ə. From there, if comparable to Uralic emphatic *-ka attached to some pronominal stems^[1], we might finally reconstruct a Proto-Steppe emphatic particle *k’ə to account for both the Indo-European and Uralic forms. Can you all swallow that? Granted, this all remains tentative for now, but it's worth a shot.

Considering the differing velar stop in the emphatic particle, the verbal extension with uvular stop, seen in PIE verbs like *yeu-g- "to join" whose *g-less counterpart has identical semantics, must not be related afterall as I had previously assumed. Instead I'd like to suggest that it derives from a Mid IE aspectual marker *-ɢ̰a-, which originally might have conveyed a perfective sense. This implies earlier Indo-Aegean *-k’a- (thus Etruscan -ac- [perfective] as in tur-ac-e "was given") and relatable then to the Uralic perfective in *-ka. In this case, a Proto-Steppe perfective suffix *-k’a would be in order to explain the later forms.

That so far is my solution concerning that. Let's see if this idea sticks.


NOTES
^[1] Fortescue, Language Relations Across Bering Strait (1998), p.113 (see link) confirms Uralic emphatic *-ka.

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).)