A matter of the Egyptian heart

The Egyptians placed a lot of importance on the heart and it was believed to be the seat of the mind and the soul. In the English-speaking world, we usually treat "heart" as a symbolism of the feelings but for ancient peoples around the Mediterranean, it was instead the seat of reason and essence. They didn't realize yet the significance of the brain in that regard and of the bodily organs that Egyptian mummifiers traditionally preserved in their sacred rites, the brain wasn't one of them.

Considering how central the heart was to the ancient Egyptian perception of the soul, one would think we'd know how to pronounce the word by now. In hieroglyphs, it's represented only in consonants and we write this in standard orthography as ỉb. This unfortunately gives the false impression that we should just assume a pronunciation of /ib/. Indeed, Antonio Loprieno does reconstruct */jib/ and compares it directly with Semitic *libb- assuming in turn an Afro-Asiatic reconstruction of *lib (see Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic reconstruction [1995], page 31). So isn't that our answer?

I'm beginning to think it isn't. For one thing, this reconstruction could only work for the earliest stage of Egyptian before all instances of word-initial *y- were nullified in the language. Since the reed leaf symbol came to represent a glottal stop as a result, by the time of Middle Egyptian, we could only have had *ib at best. So isn't this our answer then?

To be honest something still seems off. The related Cushitic branch seems to instead point to *lub- with a rounded back vowel. If we derived an expectation of the Egyptian form from that piece of external data, we'd arrive at *ub, not *ib! Adding to the difficulty is that Coptic has replaced the word for "heart" with a completely different word, hēt (from ḥȝty). No clues there.

So what can we rely on to decide the matter? I finally came across the Hebraicized name Ḥophraˁ, the name of a pharaoh of the sixth century BCE. The original Egyptian form is represented in hieroglyphic writing as wȝḥ-ỉb-rˁ. It suggests that ỉb was at that point pronounced like the -oph- in Ḥophraˁ, causing me to want to side with the Cushitic reconstruction. Therefore *ub seems far more sensible than Loprieno's *(y)ib.

I'm curious about this word lately and want to get it right because of the parallel Proto-Berber form reconstructed as *ulβ. I wonder then if this might suggest that Proto-Berber had coloured the prothetic vowel with the original quality of the root vowel now lost between the two surviving consonants. If so, I have no clue how to account for the *i in Semitic *libb- however. The Semitic vocalism of the root now becomes the outlier.

The reconstruction of the Pre-Egyptian case system

Antonio Loprieno states something confusing to me on page 55 of Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction (1995):

"Also, the ending *-u is still preserved, although functionally reinterpreted, in the forms of some singular patterns as well: when the original stem ended in a vowel, for example *u in *ḥāruw '(the god) Horus,' *-a in *ḫupraw 'form,' or *-i in *masḏiw 'enemy,' the ending was maintained as a glide, often written in good orthography as <-w> in the case of *-aw as opposed to <-ø> in the case of *-iw or *-uw: <ḫprw> =: *ḫupraw 'form,' <ḥfȝw> =: *ḥaf3aw 'snake.'"

Stated more directly, he's claiming that the *w in *ḫupraw was written by scribes according to "good orthography" while strangely ignored in *masḏiw and *ḥāruw despite being present in all these words. It's hard to understand why that would be so. It's rather as if we have *ḫupraw with *w but *masḏi and *ḥāru without. But then this would be inconsistent with what he's stated on the development of the case system from Pre-Egyptian into Old Egyptian.

So it seems that either I'm missing something here or his theory needs a few tweaks. If I ventured an attempt at revisal, perhaps we could try Pre-Egyptian nominatives *ḫaprúwu, *másḏiyu and *ḥārawu. After reduction of unstressed vowels, this becomes *ḫaprūwa /xəpʰˈɾəwə/, *masḏi /'masɟi/ and *ḥāru /'ħaːɾu/ before the case ending was omitted altogether: *ḫaprū, *masḏi and *ḥāru. I contend that only the first word ever motivated writing w. I question its existence altogether in the pronunciation of the second. In the third, 'hawk', I suspect the word was built on the notion of 'that which is above', consisting of *ḥar 'above, upon' and an ancient masculine suffix *-aw, becoming therefore *-u. As such, it couldn't have consonantal w during literate times either since we have only a short vowel. This then explains Loprieno's "good orthography" which now reflects a transparent, underlying reality. No more arcane scribal rules on whether or not to write the trailing semivowel. No more wildcard symbols either, as I've shook my fist at beforehand.

Hattic grammar and Proto-Aegean

I'm currently data-mining an excellent article about a very obscure subject, that of Hattic grammar. The article is written by Petra Goedegebuure who gave it a rather verbose title: Central Anatolian languages and language communities in the colony period: A Luwian-Hattian symbiosis and the independent Hittites (2008). It's refreshing that the author has a mature grasp of the subtleties regarding cultural identity and language. Sometimes language shifts while the culture stays largely the same; sometimes culture may alter radically with no large changes to language. A question she explores is: Can certain peculiarities of the Hattic language hint at the specifics of complex, unrecorded shifts in language and culture/cultural identity between the Hattians and the Indo-European speaking population in early Anatolia?

She gives a wealth of thorough examples showing Hattic grammar in action and my eyes have been opened. More frivolously, I believe I can now partially conjugate a Hattic verb with a modest degree of confidence: fa-nifas 'I sit', u-nifas 'you sit', an-nifas 'he/she sits', ai-nifas 'we sit' and nifas '(they) sit'. There are a camp of linguists who believe that Hattic belongs with the Abkhaz-Adyghe languages^[1] that are currently restricted to the northern regions of the Caucasus mountains and I think this most likely.


A Proto-Cyprian connection?

While a few kooks carry on dreaming that Etruscan is actually related to Hattic^[2], the two languages couldn't be any more alien to each other. Hattic is a prefixing language and exhibits an underlying VSO morphology (ie. verb-subject-object, as in Semitic and Egyptian languages) while Etruscan strictly uses suffixes. If there were any prefixes in Etruscan, we can expect them to be very rare, as is in fact typical of any SOV language (compare with other SOV languages like Inuktitut, Japanese and Turkish, for example). We can be certain then that the Cyprian languages, like Etruscan and Eteo-Cypriot, represented an entirely separate language group to Hattic.

Yet, there's still the potential that some traces of Hattian influence lurk in Etruscan through lexical and structural borrowings. Comparing the locations of Hattic (central Anatolia) and of Proto-Cyprian (western Anatolia & Cyprus) alone warrant the thought. And if not with Proto-Cyprian, could there have been an interaction with the older Proto-Aegean stage in the 3rd millennium BCE from which Minoan too would derive? This is why I've been feverishly recording Hattic vocabulary into my computer. Cross-correlation is delicious.

Let us try to be on our guard against all that sort of thing

Duane at Abnormal Interests lately quoted an English translation of Plato's Politikós 263d:

"But indeed, my most courageous young friend, perhaps, if there is any other animal capable of thought, such as the crane appears to be, or any other like creature, and it perchance gives names, just as you do, it might in its pride of self oppose cranes to all other animals, and group the rest, men included, under one head, calling them by one name, which might very well be that of beasts. Now let us try to be on our guard against all that sort of thing."

It's an interesting quote when placed alongside modern quests to understand language origins in proto-humans. Do some of us likewise group modern humans separately from all other antecedents of our species and assume in shame that they must surely have been lacking in the ability to communicate in complex ways? And do we assume that oral speech, using a developed modern larynx, is the only way to convey rich ideas?

In the dumbed-down hype over the discovered FOXP2 gene a few years back, I could only be irritated by a persistent media bias towards spoken communication when discussing it, in blanket ignorance of the possible role gestural communication (including ancient-but-now-dead sign languages) might have played in our development towards what we now label "language" but which we improperly imply to mean only "vocal language" or "speech". If this gene were honestly at the very root of our capacity to understand grammar, it would also affect an ability to express in sign language or learn writing while having no effect on our other abilities somehow. Then again, isn't every form of thought, even outside of language proper, formed from some kind of set of "grammatical rules"? Circuits are structured by the grammar of logic (a combination of fundamental AND, OR and NOT gates), for example. Is one grammar truly different from another? If so, how? How can we then separate a capacity to decipher communicated ideas via consistent rules from a capacity to reason itself? If we admit what's suggested here, we admit that language is in effect universal to all living things in a plethora of forms and complexities. Language, when defined less biasedly as mere information exchange, turns out to be surprisingly commonplace.

Thankfully Geoffrey Pullum debunked much of this brown sugar drivel six years ago on Language Log. FOXP2's not a grammar gene afterall. It's terribly unlikely in fact that DNA codes for something as abstract as "language" or "grammar" by way of a single gene. For that matter, it's unrealistic to expect that the double helix codes such an abstract thing even explicitly at all. Check out new theories on how "emergence" plays a role in everything from gene function and computer programming to human language and grammatical rules.

So let's be on guard against unscientific human chauvinism; that somehow we modern humans gained the corner on language. Plato's pagan writings of long ago are correct. We're not that different from all the talking beasts around us. Science is merely reminding us of what was already gestured before we were born.

Different kinds of triads

A variety of triads in Etruscan and Roman mythology are available to the imagination of the mythologist. Among Romanists, one speaks of a Capitoline triad (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva), an Archaic Triad (Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus) and an Avertine Triad (Ceres, Liber and Libera). Even the festival of Suovetaurilia is split in three - a sacrifice is made of a pig, a ram and a bull to Mars in order to sanctify the land. Amongst Etruscans, we can identify the Trinity of Tinia (Tinia Cilensal, Tinia Thufal, Tinia Thneth), the Trinity of Maris (Maris Husiurnana, Maris Halna, Maris Isminthians) and the Chimeric Triad (snake, lion, goat). The list seems to go on indefinitely. Our modern understanding is no doubt blurred by the mists of time and hampered by organizational laziness. There must have been a greater structure and meaning in all of this. Something clearer, more verstaile and not so complex. But what?

In my search, I find it handy to reclassify these triads into flexible categories, recognizing that these religions were so prone to creative symbolism and lateral-thinking analogy. So I'd like to suggest some helpful groupings as follows:

Solar triad:
The sun is divided into three parts: three seasons (winter, spring-summer, autumn) and three daytime periods (morning, noon, evening). Think "Father Time". This stems from the heliocentricity of Etruscan religion.

Etruscan: Tinia Cilensal, Tinia Thufal, Tinia Thneth (Trinity of Tinia); Snake, lion, goat (Chimeric Triad).

Roman: Jupiter Summanus, Jupiter Fidius, Jupiter Tonans.

Seasonal triad:
The year is divided into three seasons (winter, spring-summer, autumn) with focus on agriculture and cyclical climate changes. Think "Mother Nature".

Etruscan: Maris Husiurnana, Maris Halna, Maris Isminthians (Trinity of Maris).

Roman: Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus (Archaic Triad); Ceres, Liber and Libera (Avertine Triad).

Astral triad:
The three brightest bodies in the sky happen to be the sun, moon and Venus (in that order). Thus: Tinia the sun, Menarva the moon and Uni the planet Venus. This is a twist on the pre-existing Babylonian triad.

Etruscan: Tinia, Uni, and Menarva (Capitoline Triad).

Roman: Jupiter, Juno and Minerva (Capitoline Triad).

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).

To conceal a dead tongue

As already suggested in the works of those like Larissa & Giuliano Bonfante, the meaning of celu or cel as 'earth, ground' is well-founded. In more detail, we find calu in Old Etruscan and due to the regular raising of low a to mid e before resonants, the root eventually evolved to Late Etruscan cel(u)- which is why Liber Linteus shows locative forms like cel-i 'upon earth' (< *calv-i) and cel-θi 'in earth' (< *calv-i=θi). This word is usually however confused with the gloss Celius which was claimed centuries ago as a month in the Etruscan calendar.

Simultaneously, Indo-Europeanists have reconstructed a root *ḱel-/*kel- meaning 'to conceal, to hide' and since Indo-Europeanists seldom if ever dabble in the Etruscan language, as I hope to explain, there is a subtle logic conflict here. Ultimately I believe that this IE root may be yet another misidentification of a non-IE verb.

It's striking that Etruscan calu can so readily mean '(that which is) covered' by supposing an Etruscan verb root *cal- 'to cover' plus the transitive participle ending -u. This idle assumption isn't substantial in itself, of course, but it is when all direct evidence of the competing Indo-European root just so happens to be restricted to Europe.

The comparanda for PIE *ḱel-/*kel- has been from Germanic (*haljō- 'underworld' and *haljanan 'to hide') and Latin (cēlāre 'to conceal, hide, cover'). Some scholars will add Greek καλύπτω 'to cover, to hide' yet as Robert Beekes notes, the word is unanalysable in IE terms and shows a non-IE suffix *-u[p/b]- (cf. καλύβη 'hut, cabin'). It should also be asked why the Greek term should contain *a in its root. Some push a little too far, implicating "Indian šaras- 'skin over milk'"^[1] (which I'm having trouble verifying) in an apparent try to capitalize at once on r/l-alternation, satemization and shifting semantics to build an even flimsier house of cards. This strategy is far too easy and unconvincing. Adams and Mallory simply label it "WC" (West Central)^[2] which is a quiet way of admitting that the evidence is restricted to Europe and that they can't validate it as a genuine Indo-European root. All in all, while the root has become part of accepted Indo-European vocabulary, it nonetheless appears to be weakly justified.

This is where it may be wiser to look to Proto-Aegean to explain why the root is restricted to the west and why Etruscan looks in all appearance to be built on the so-called "Indo-European" root even though Etruscan isn't an Indo-European language. If we propose Proto-Aegean *kal- 'to cover over', then Greek καλύπτω and καλύβη is sourceable to a derivative *kalúpa. It's certainly better already compared to racking our brains wondering why the odd a-vocalism and suffix conflicts with IE grammar and with other identified cognate forms to the west. Likewise, the resultant Etrusco-Rhaetic transitive verb *kal can then explain the source of the Etruscan 'earth' word (perhaps also reflected in Rhaetic as χelθi 'in the earth'(?) in Schum SZ 12) while supplying a source for both Latin cēlāre and a Pre-Proto-Germanic *kal- whose initial plosive shifted to *h by Grimm's Law sometime after 1000 BCE. As with so many of these other curious Etrusco-Germanic correspondences, a language intermediary (Venetic *kal- ?) is plausible.


NOTES
^[1] Szemerényi, Scripta minora: Selected essays in Indo-European, Greek, and Latin, vol 63, part 4 (1991), p.2042 (see link).
^[2] Mallory and Adams, The Oxford introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European world (2006), p.492 (see link).

Indo-Aegean kinship terms

Coincidental to the previously mentioned *pR-reduction in Etruscan, I've long noticed that if the Etruscan word for 'brother' which is generally accepted to be ruva (nb. inscription TLE 232) were instead *pruva, it could relate nicely to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) equivalent *bʰráh₂ter-. Of course it's ample speculation but I'd like to explore a possible set of Indo-Aegean kinship terms because, for anyone really knows, there may be some gold in that river of speculation.

Remember that I reason that the Indo-European language family is quite distinct from the Aegean language family but that nonetheless an ultimate pre-Neolithic relationship exists between them. I estimate that these two families would have diverged at most 9000 years ago. To reconstruct Proto-Indo-Aegean accurately, we need to first to reconstruct pre-stages of both Indo-European and Aegean first. This is an unending series of refinements, to be sure.


Reconstructing Pre-Indo-European kinship terms

Internal reconstruction shows that PIE's kinship terms are mostly unanalysable save for their oft-employed kinship suffix *-h₂ter-. I sense that these kinship terms are largely preserved from prehistoric times but that their shared characteristic suffix has been added quite recently in PIE's development by false segmentation and subsequent analogy from the only truly analyzable term in this set, *ph₂tér- 'father; provider' (< *peh₂- 'to feed, provide' plus actor suffix *-tér-). If *ph₂tér- were a like replacement for a reduplicated nursery term, *pápa-, pre-existing in the language then *máh₂ter- could easily have been coined by analogy to replace earlier *máma-. In turn, our analysis of PIE *bʰráh₂ter- and *dʰugh₂ter- suggest that the inherited stems from the earliest recoverable period are *bʰrah₂- and *dʰug-. We should consider that they once existed in isolation without the suffix.

Thus, I choose to reconstruct earlier Mid Indo-European nominative case forms *baráhʷa-sa and *déug̰a-sa since Syncope operates in the earliest part of the Late IE period, resulting in *brāu-z and *deug̰-z . Note that at this stage, the feminine is indistinguishable from the masculine since both are just subsets of a common animate gender. Then we can see how original *brau- plus kinship suffix *-xter- could be mashed together as *brá-xter-, shaped in both vocalism and accent position by analogy with 'mother', while *deug̰- adopts the zerograde and accent placement seen in 'father' to result in *dug̰-xtér- (and then due to regressive spread of uvularity from *x: *duɢ-xtér-).

Brother to mother as daughter to father. They say blood is thicker than water afterall, so why not also their associated labels?


Reconstructing Aegean kinship terms

On to the Aegean family, Etruscan ruva 'brother' and seχ 'daughter' might temptingly be derived from Proto-Cyprian *pruwa and *sikʰ with little hyperbole, in turn from Aegean *parówa 'brother' and *síka 'daughter'. The aforementioned Etrusco-Rhaetic *pR-reduction would take care of the missing *p in the first term and Cyprian Syncope follows my currently prescribed rules. The avoidance of word-final vowel loss in *parówa is understandable when compared with the expected Cyprian result, **pruw, which proves to be an awkward shape even by the phonotactic rules of later Etruscan (ie. word-final *-uv is entirely unevidenced in Etruscan as far as I know). I have yet to confirm these two kinship terms in Minoan but I would expect they'd be identical to these Aegean protowords unless I've erred in my extrapolation.

The Proto-Aegean words for 'father' and 'mother' are based on stronger evidence. Minoan a-ta-i is attested consistently on multiple libation tables and I do believe it's referring to their great Mother Goddess. The father term, *ápa, was likely in Minoan vocabulary as well, at least if we are to analyse Hittite god Appaliunas in Aegean terms: *ápa 'father' (Etruscan apa) and *launa 'leonine; of lion(s)' (Etruscan lev 'lion, lioness'). So I feel pretty secure in suggesting Aegean *ápa 'father' and *átai 'mother'. This results in Proto-Cyprian *apa 'father' (resisting syncope as a nursery term) and *ati which spawns identical Etruscan terms.


Are there Indo-Aegean kinship terms here? What can we conclude?

If we indulge further and compare our internally reconstructed terms in both language groups, the Mid IE kinship package (*pápa- 'father', *baráhʷa- 'brother' and *déug̰a- 'daughter') start to bear strong similarities to the Aegean set (*ápa 'father', *parówa 'brother' and *síka 'daughter'). We might assume that 'mother' has been replaced in Aegean and that Pre-Aegean *d, having first become *t by systematic devoicing of all inherited stops, lenites to *s before a front vowel.

For now, there's little to conclude with certainty other than that a relationship between Indo-European and Aegean kinship terms is within a realm of plausibility. However, this mental exercise opens our minds to new possibilities to investigate. Can we find other examples of Aegean palatalization in other shared words? Why would the word for 'mother' be replaced in Aegean and where does *atai come from? If correct, are there social or cultural implications to this kinship replacement? Or is there a simpler explanation for these similarities?

As always, more information is needed and these further questions will help confirm or reject what are for now admittedly shallow hunches. Open brainstorming like this however is still a constructive process, even when all we have is hunches... especially when all we have is hunches.


UPDATES
(04 Nov 2010) I decided to add something to "[...] while *deug̰- adopts the zerograde and accent placement seen in 'father' to result in *dug̰-xtér-." In light of commenter input, I felt the need to elaborate that *dug̰-xtér- becomes *duɢ-xtér- by assimilation of the velar stop by uvular laryngeal *x. (See comments below.) In traditional notation, by this assimilation, an unevidenced palatal *ǵ is therefore avoided.

The time-limit meme

Memiyawanzi recently quotes Jerzy Kuryłowicz from page 58 of The inflectional categories of Indo-European (1964): "One cannot reconstruct ad infinitum". No further commentary was added and so this hanging quote lured me to comment. Perhaps I read more into this than most but I notice a universe of issues in this deceptively simple quote. I'm just itching to elaborate.


Putting the quote in context

This quote showcases a certain irrational belief that has developed in modern comparative linguistics. From this belief arose a hypocritical attitude by many IEists towards more long-range theorists like Nostraticists. The reconstructions of long-range theorists deserve close criticism but it must be for the right reasons, otherwise we should dismount from our high-horse failing good methodology.

To avoid misinterpretation, we have to first understand that Kuryłowicz's above quote is followed by "We must be satisfied with stages bordering historical reality."^[1] and we can see that he really is making a strong assertion about the existence of a definable time limit (ie. "historical reality") beyond which comparative reconstruction magically becomes useless. Neither the word "bordering" nor "historical reality" is of any informative value to the reader and nonetheless can't be rationally proven even if accurately defined. Heeding this advice, arbitrary limits would shift depending on the different possible meanings each individual might give to this vague notion.

Why this principle is irrational

Potential knowledge is infinite and it can be safely said that Kuryłowicz's mind, brilliant as it was, was not. So it should be clear here why it's invalid to make bold claims about what we may or may not know in the infinite span of future time. One might call it the Oracle Fallacy. We may say that living to 400 years old will always be impossible, for example, but such predictions are drawn out of thin air. Kuryłowicz's statement simply has no noteworthy informative value, no matter how we choose to interpret it.

If we can't interpret it in a logical way, it's doomed to be misinterpreted and this is precisely what has happened.


Everybody plays the meme game

Alexis Manaster Ramer sees past these fallacies in his article "Some uses and abuses of Mathematics in Linguistics" (1999) where he made a tragic list of otherwise educated linguists making arbitrary assertions about a temporal bound to valid reconstruction. Kleiner, Lewin and Nichols - all guilty of the same statements devoid of logical proof. He notes how Kleiner insists 10 000 years before present is the upper limit of valid reconstruction while Nichols waffles between 7000, 8000 and 10 000 BP. As we can see, not only are these empty opinions but they might even be said to stray from Kuryłowicz' "border of historical reality". Many would not agree that 10 000 BP is anywhere near the border of "historical reality" since the first attested writing goes back merely to approximately 3200 BCE (ie. circa 5200 BP).


The fear that holds us all back

A common fear seems to be that by dismissing this arbitrary time limit for comparative reconstruction, it now gives carte blanche to any loon with multiple pocket dictionaries and a dream to reconstruct what they like. However, Occam's Razor is already limiting such far-flung reconstructions, so this bogus time limit rule of Kuryłowicz is not just baseless but completely unnecessary.

A much-maligned theory like Proto-World fails not because it's a theory on an exceedingly old stage of human language well beyond "historical reality" (however that may be defined) but because the theory is a ridiculous lump of unverified and currently unverifiable assumptions that pales in comparison to less extravagant theories available. Occam's Razor alone beats the pulp out of these extravagant claims so such concerns are unwarranted.


The hypocrisy

I've read many a famed Indo-Europeanist talk a good game about methodology and will often attack more long-range theories like Proto-Nostratic because they are less secure in their argumentation. This is of course inevitably true because the further back in time one investigates, the more difficult it tends to be to verify etymological claims.

However, as my previous blog entries like Sowing wild oats and plowing the fields reveal, many dubious roots have been reconstructed in the name of Proto-Indo-European. So it's conversely not necessarily true that the validity of a reconstruction increases the closer it lies to the present. Adams and Mallory fill their books with a large amount of shaky roots based on unacceptably sparse or geographically biased cognate sets. If these authors need to especially label a root "Western IE" in distinction to PIE proper, one must wonder what methodological standards, if any, guide their decisions. How are these standards nobler than those of the more self-indulgent Nostraticists who have published?


A final plea to reason

The healthier way to reason is simply to evaluate each claim based directly on the application of Logic itself, not secondhand through unverified mantras. It takes more effort to painstakingly reason things through for oneself instead of somnulently following thoughtless bureaucratic policies set up by others.


NOTES
^[1] Schmalstieg, Indo-European linguistics: A new synthesis (1980), p.127 (see link).

Aegean phonotactics and more about Cyprian Syncope

After I posted Adapting the rule of Cyprian Syncope, Tropylium strove hard to paint it as linguistically unnatural or unoptimal while pushing some alternatives that I don't believe he researched. Being stubborn and fierce about my linguistics, I challenge his reasons for objection. Disbelief is no less in need of firm basis than belief. Let's quickly go over my theory some more to see why it's indeed natural, or at least more natural than anything I've seen anyone come up with.

Since stress accent must fall on one of the first two syllables in Aegean (and in later Minoan) we might say that accent placement is left-handed. By dividing the Aegean protoword into feet of two syllables consisting of trochees (or strong followed by weak syllables), then we see how Cyprian consistently erodes weak syllables towards the left and how this explains Etruscan's later shape. Let's simply make up some example forms to illustrate my theory at work, without being obstructed for now by the separate issue of the validity of any of my reconstructions:

Aegean		Cyprian
**áinatʰo [ˈai . na . ˌtʰo] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ )	→	**áinatʰu [ˈai. na . tʰu] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯)
**táḳalimi [ˈta . kˤa . ˌli . mi] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ ˘ )	→	**táklim [ˈtak . lim] ( ¯ ˘ )
**kápari [ˈka . pa . ˌri] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ )	→	**kápri [ˈkap . ri] ( ¯ ˘ )
**sarópa [sa . ˈro . pa] ( ˘ | ¯ ˘ )	→	**srupʰ [ˈsrupʰ] ( ¯ )

In the above examples, the weak syllables all nicely squish into a previous syllable except for the first example whose diphthong blocks syncope (as per my previous post on this). The next example shows why stress shift is not just a plausible phonotactic-correcting strategy, but possibly the most optimal one to avoid unacceptable onsets, given the specific qualities of this protolanguage.

**takíru [ta . 'ki . ru] ( ˘ | ¯ ˘ )

→

**tákru ['tak . ru] ( ¯ ˘ )

Without shift, **takíru becomes Cyprian **tkir yet this disobeys constraints on onset clusters and unacceptably overloads the inherited and highly strict rules of syllabic structure. Or succinctly: "(Too much) change is scary." Certainly it takes more than a few generations before a Japanese-like language turns into a Kartvelian-like one, そうですか?

Since stop+stop sequences are simply not found in Etruscan or related languages, some rule or rules must have repaired or avoided these logically inevitable conflicts. Simple onset deletion is a common cluster-fighting strategy in world languages and this would produce **kir, although this would also surely create a tsunami of homophones! (That is, we'd see that a long list of terms like **takíru, **kʰakíra, **pakíri, etc. had all merged to **kir. Surely not.) Seeing it from this angle, onset deletion doesn't pass muster.

Lenition of the offending onset is barely a better strategy to avoid conflict in this respect because similar issues resurface. While **takíru could always plausibly yield **skír if lenition were so, what about a word like **pakíri which couldn't possibly produce **fkír in Etruscan! We might appeal to a mixture of lenition and onset deletion, I suppose, but now we're already multiplying hypotheses and assuming much too much.

By contrast, accent shift is in this case far more natural than wholesale onset deletion or piecemeal lenition. It also offers some added benefits besides its simplicity, obviously one of them being avoidance of homophony if nothing else. Also since the stress was already largely on the first syllable, this leftward stress shift would only help to pin an occasionally wandering accent permanently onto the first syllable (as in Proto-Germanic).

So accent regularization, solving cluster conflicts, preserving inherited consonantism, and avoiding troublesome homophony are a lot of things this strategy of simple stress accent shift has to offer that make it a win-win over other ideas pushed by Tropylium in my commentbox. Thus **takíru becomes Cyprian **tákru (not **tkir, **kir, or **zkir).

The 'god' word in Europe

I'm mired in a giant can of worms here. After pondering deeply the past week on all the exact details of the origin of the Etruscan word ais 'deity', I find myself not only skeptical of the direction this word traveled but also even more intrigued now of how widespread a common set of mythic traditions are. Most authors seem to be writing that the word ais spread from Etruscan into the various Italic languages. Whereas another interesting possibility I'm exploring is that it went in the other direction, from some Italic language (probably Umbrian *aisos) into Etruscan before 700 BCE.

If the Italic form was *aissos (perhaps from *h₂éisdtos '', let's say), it's interesting that the Germanic form for 'god' is so similar, *ansuz. At first I was thinking that maybe the *-n- isn't really there, maybe an etymological fantasy. However the association between different variants of the same names in different Germanic languages (eg. Ásgeir vs. Ansgar, literally 'god-spear') would assure us that the *-n- was probably there. It would almost look like a borrowing if it weren't for that *-n- in place of *-i-. Then again, what if the Germanic word were a borrowing and were originally **aisuz. With later contamination with the similar word *ansaz 'beam' due to a cosmic analogy between the structure of their universe and the structure of a house (ie. the roof = sky, the beams = gods, the supports = dwarves, etc.), we have a motive for the odd theoretical change.^[1]

Curiously, we also have the Celtic god Esus which, after reading up on the basics of his myth, I'm convinced he's equivalent to one the aspects of the Etruscan solar trinity, Tinia Thufl 'Tinia of Oath'. I've spoken of this trinity before. Esus is also part of a Celtic triad involving Taranis and Teutates, which again can be matched perfectly with Etruscan Tinia Thneth 'Tinia of Thunder' and Tinia Cilensl 'Tinia of Darkness' respectively.

So now I wonder if there's a chance that these forms spread from Italic to Celtic and onward to Germanic particularly between 500 and 200 BCE. I'll have to think through this some more. There's still so much to read. Will I live long enough to know everything? ;o)


NOTES
^[1] Bandle/Elmevik/Widmark. The Nordic languages: An international handbook of the history of the Germanic languages (2002), p.400 (see link); Liberman, An analytic dictionary of English etymology: an introduction (2008), p.49 (see link).

Against the *dkmtóm camp

Some Indoeuropeanists reconstruct *-dḱomt- '-ty' and *dḱm̥tóm '100' instead of simply *-ḱomt- and *ḱm̥tóm by analogy with *déḱm̥ '10'. While superficially seductive, there are some good reasons against this.


No evidence for **d in *ḱomt-/*ḱm̥t- whatsoever

This elusive **d has never been directly attested in any Indo-European (IE) cognate of the higher decads, despite there being a plethora of languages to choose from. A lack of proof is enough to dismiss claims by simple Occam's Razor and burden of proof. Yet some scholars persist putting **d- in *-ḱomt- and *ḱm̥tóm, with or without parentheses, before bearing evidence that directly demonstrates this phoneme in these stems, showing that there continues to be a widespread disregard for linguistic methodology and due process in PIE studies.


Laryngeal switcheroo

Since this **d fails inspection, some resort to an alternative *h₁ to account for lengthening in Greek and Latin decadic compounds. Frederik Kortlandt goes so far as to assume that *h₁ (as /ʔ/) comes from earlier **ˀd which he describes as both "preglottalic" and "implosive" interchangeably without anything but circumstantial evidence. He imposes this same change in word-initial position and traces them to original ejectives as per Glottalic Theory^[1] (ie. *tʼḱm̥tóm > *ˀdḱm̥tóm > *(ʔ)ḱm̥tóm). I find this implausible and unnecessary^[2] and I have already settled on laryngealization (ie. creaky phonation), with derivative word-internal pre-laryngealization, as a superior alternative to wholesale preglottalization in all environments. Both the change of word-initial ejective to preglottalized voiced stop and the ad hoc reduction of *ˀd to *ʔ here, further compounded by his claim that this laryngeal then explains -e- in Greek hekaton '100'^[3], are a series of exotic and contrived fabrications.

Yet even if one wishes to defend **d in a Pre-IE reconstruction, it nonetheless has no business being in a valid root of Indo-European proper. Pushing it to Pre-IE, however, doesn't let the theorist off the hook either. Justification must still be demanded.


Must the vanishing *d be a phonetic phenomenon?

Before any of these considerations, it's presumptious to immediately think that *déḱm̥ and *ḱomt-/*ḱm̥t- must be built on exactly the same stem. A poignant example is Proto-Austronesian (PAN) *sa-puluq 'ten' or literally 'one-ten', built on *esa 'one' and *-puluq 'ten; -ty'. In higher decads, *sa- is naturally replaced by other numbers (cf. *duSa-puluq '20; two tens'). Oddly, this reflects best the actual PIE pattern observed in higher decads where *d- seems to be likewise omitted. Must the disappearance be phonetic instead of morphological? There's no evidence thus far published to support that assumption - the proposed phonetic changes fail miserably and further we have parallel PAN evidence to support a morphological cause.


A solution

Rather than indulging in unnecessary assumptions, let's take the unexpected lack of *d in higher PIE decads as a done deal. Let's also reject simplistic solutions involving a ubiquitous deus ex machina like *h₁. Let's instead acknowledge the obvious that number systems are unlikely to evade analogical levelling over the course of millennia. Instead of taking the lengthening in 30 to 90 at face value as a Proto-Indo-European feature, we accept that the overall PIE data is ambiguous to lengthening and that there are later changes at work.

To go with this topic, I've created my own pdf and placed the link on my Lingua Files page showing how I personally would reconstruct the Indo-European number system. As you can see, my view looks a lot like had been originally reconstructed before idle speculation got the better of IEists by the latter half of the 20th century.

We may blame the lengthening in the Greek and Latin decads on analogy between '30'/'40' and the rest of the decads that originally could not have produced such lengthening. The ultimate source of lengthening? Concatenated neuter forms of '3' and '4' marked with the collective marker, *-h₂, that originally quantified a neuter stem *ḱómt-. Note that the numbers 5 to 9 were unmarked for case and therefore are bare. Once fossilized in '30' and '40' and once laryngeals gave way to compensatory lengthening, the decads from 50 to 90 were prone to analogical lengthening. Latin shows intervening -ā- (eg. quīnqu-ā-gintā) in these stems while Greek shows -ē- (eg. πεντ-ή-κοντα), clearly showing different post-IE strategies employed to normalize obscured decadic terms.


NOTES
^[1] Kortlandt, Baltica & Balto-Slavica (2009), p.68 (see link): "In my view, the original PIE ejectives developed into implosives in all branches except Anatolian and Tocharian, and show traces of glottalization and/or partial merger with the laryngeals in Germanic, Italic, Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Balto-Slavic."; Evidence and counter-evidence: Essays in honour of Frederik Kortlandt (2008), p.417 (see link): "In a number of papers Kortlandt (1988a, b; 2000; 2003) has suggested that the ejectives that both he and I reconstruct for Proto-Indo-European changed into preglottalised stops in Proto-Germanic before they became plain voiceless stops in the individual daughter languages."
^[2] Fallon speaks against the proposed Germanic change in The synchronic and diachronic phonology of ejectives (2002), p.283 (see link); Doubts are also offered in The new sound of Indo-European: Essays in phonological reconstruction (1989), p.218 (see link).
^[3] Venneman, The new sound of Indo-European: Essays in phonological reconstruction (1989), p.28 (see link). Kortlandt's offer solves nothing since **h₁ḱm̥tóm alone can only supply Greek *ekatón (missing h-) while **sm̥-h₁ḱm̥tóm would produce even worse results: *smākatón!

New pdf on Indo-European verbs

I've put up a new pdf in my Lingua Files section on my views about Proto-Indo-European (PIE) verbal inflection. This pdf is a culmination of many of the posts I've already pushed out on this blog.

As a recap, I had come to a couple of major revelations on PIE that diverge from the "mainstream" but problematic view:

One: The unlikely phonological system can finally be rationalized by turning palatal stops to plain ones and plain stops to uvular ones while shifting phonation to a contrast between creaky and plain voice rather than plain versus breathy.

Two: The traditional "present-aorist-perfect" verb model (which is notorious for being an inadequate model representative only of a post-IE stage) can be reworked into an earlier two-dimensional system of subjective/objective versus progressive/non-progressive to now explain why Anatolian & Tocharian verbs behave so differently.

Now, I use the term progressive to specifically refer only to an affirmative, ongoing action in the realis mood while non-progressive covers everything else, including negative actions regardless of aspect or tense. I've modeled this system partly on what I know of the pecularities of the Mandarin verb which is also tenseless.

This makes for a very different PIE but these drastic changes are unavoidable if we are to solve some problems that have thus far gone unsolved. I've dared to theorize, if anything, for the sake of my own personal understanding and exploration, but hopefully my summary will also help anyone else interested to understand at a glance what I'm getting at and/or inspire others to blog their own insights and innovative solutions.

Manly goats

I don't mean to be lewd, although it's an irresistible temptation of sinful pleasure, but it was Mallory and Adams in Encyclopedia of Indo-European culture (1997) that wrote that *kápro- 'goat', from whence Latin caper, is built on the word for 'penis', *kápṛ.^[1] This is an old tired line mentioned too by Julius Pokorny. Seemingly the endowment of goats left quite a large impression on the ancient world. Or is it only a post-Freud obsession? Greek assigns a different quadriped to its allegedly related word κάπρος, 'wild boar'. The only perceivable similarities between a goat and a boar are their hooves and general mammalian air but several scholars want us to believe that the majormost commonality is their respective external organs. How might we touch upon this odd penchant to name animals based on reproductive parts of the body and how might we avoid possible blindness in doing so?

The Ancient Greeks were conscious of the enticing difference in meaning between their word and the similar one in Italy. Hesychius glossed the word κάπρα describing it as 'goat' and he assigned it to the "Tyrrhenian" language (ie. Etruscan). Surely he was alluding to Latin caper and made a mistake in judgement, perhaps based in turn on his own erroneous sources. Or was it really a mistake? Maybe we have it all wrong. Maybe this is another case of mistaken identity and Indo-European bias in the field of etymology. Maybe this is really an Etruscan word that was exported to surrounding IE languages of Western Europe and just maybe there is no such stem *kapro- or penis-based animal terms here at all.

As with so many other dubious roots slopped into Mallory & Adams' EIEC, this one begs to be investigated more closely. For starters, they find it difficult to explain the Celtic reflexes that curiously would point to an Indo-European *g- instead of *k- and in order to protect their reconstruction, they point to possible contamination with a similar PIE animal root. However, if we follow instead Hesychius' testimony, the irregular Celtic reflexes can be perfectly explained through borrowing from the implied Etruscan etymon *capra with its unaspirated [k-]. To the foreign Celtic ear, it could very well sound more like their [g-] than their [kʰ-] did since their plosive contrast was one primarily of voice, not of aspiration as among the Etruscans.

This would really make sense and go with Hesychius' testimony but for one thing, the inclusion of Iranian data like Modern Persian kahra- 'kid', Auramani kawrā 'sheep', Saka Khotanese kaura-, kám̥ra- 'sheep' which has been attributed to a Proto-Iranian reconstruction, *kafra-. Note a complete lack of Indic reflexes situated anywhere to the east. Does this Iranian evidence, much of which is obscure, honestly give us reason to reconstruct a PIE root? Has it been shown that these words are not just borrowings? I'll have to examine this more later and try to solve my own questions. This doesn't seem to be a simple affair.


NOTES
^[1] Mallory/Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European culture (1997), p.229: *kápros 'he-goat (male Capra hircus)' (see link).