I've been ranting too much about European linguistics. I've been shamelessly unfair to the other continents who have patiently been reading my rants and feeling unrepresented. This is a big world so let's get cracking on... [Glen swiftly spins a globe and then stops it suddenly with his finger]... ah, yes, Sino-Tibetan.
Don't know what Sino-Tibetan is? Then check out this explanation from Berkeley University in California. Learn it because this is where the most popular language in the world comes from. No, no, not English, silly. Mandarin!
When I was a wee lad, there was this nagging question in the back of my quirky mind: Why does Chinese have tones? No matter how educated one happens to be, most people honestly haven't the foggiest clue about how to answer that question. Afterall they don't teach language origins in high school for some crazy reason. I guess if they started that programme, people would feel more united and have one less reason to start wars with other countries. Surely global comradery would cause a collapse of civilization. (Okay, that was a terribly bitter thing to say, but I just finished watching George Orwell's 1984 on YouTube and it just makes ya think, y'know?)
Anyways, it was only in my twenties when I finally discovered the juicy answer. The keyword here is called tonogenesis. Tonogenesis is the development of tonal contrasts in a language that previously didn't have any. Apparently, this happens all the time. It probably happened in languages before the Ice Age. It's certainly happened into the modern day, and if we live long enough and haven't evolved into waddling fish-people, there will be new languages with tones, perhaps derived from English, in the future.
Asian languages aren't the only tongues with tones. Did you know that Swedish has two tones? See The Tone-bearing Unit in Swedish and Norwegian [pdf]. And have you ever heard of a Nilo-Saharan language called Nobiin? Where have you been? Read this article entitled A sketch of Nobiin tone [pdf] from the University of Leiden. And we can't forget our Native American brothers and sisters, some of whom speak Navajo.
Tonogenesis in Sino-Tibetan is pretty interesting. Surprisingly linguists have reconstructed Proto-Sino-Tibetan with tongue-twisting consonant clusters and no tones. Frankly, it sounds more like Russian than anything we'd recognize in China today. All the tonal contrasts that Chinese languages now use (four tones in Mandarin; six or more in Cantonese) came after Proto-Sino-Tibetan. I have to chuckle every time I think about that crazy thought. It's a mind-bender. The word "eight", for example, is pronounced ba with high tone in Mandarin and as baat in Cantonese with middle tone. The two words, including their tone are related, of course. Sometimes you can even guess what the tone will be in Cantonese if you know the Mandarin word but, trust me, be careful with that because I personally have miscalculated a few times and had egg on my face. Both Mandarin ba and Cantonese baat go back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan *bʀyat but this word is without any reconstructable tone. Yep, just like Russian. So where did these tones come from then? Thin air? How does that work?
It turns out that voiceless and voiced sounds that we make unconsciously when we speak a language have an inherent acoustic frequency or "tone". In the word *bʀyat the initial consonant cluster is voiced and therefore gives off a low frequency but the letter at the end, *t, is voiceless and has high frequency. In other words, the surrounding sounds of the vowel were the seeds for later tone and they eventually determined the tonal shape of the word, whether the tone was low or high, whether it rose to a high pitch or fell sharply, etc. I suppose we could say that the vowel assimilated the unconscious frequencies of consonants and this evolved into more conscious tones, now intrinsic to the meaning of that word. Different Chinese languages have different kinds and numbers of "tonemes", just as all spoken languages have different kinds and numbers of phonemes.
Similar tonogenesis happened in Navajo, a language which derives from Proto-Athabaskan. Proto-Athabaskan also doesn't appear to have had tonal contrasts. This article Vietnamese and Tonogenesis: revising the model is also interesting for those who want to really get their hands dirty.
8 Apr 2007
7 Apr 2007
The origin of Indo-European ego
(The following uses a special font to render linguistic symbols. Please download and install the Code2000 font [zip] if you're having difficulties with the display. A single asterisk (*) represents reconstructed forms; double asterisks (**) mark implausible forms.)
This blog entry is not about a psycho-linguistic exploration of our collective ego, nor even my own deranged ego. I'm talking about the word 'ego' and its unsaid curiosities, how it relates to Indo-European languages, why Nostraticists are wrong, and where it really comes from. Depending on your personality, my explanation will either prove to be terribly more boring or wonderfully more exciting than you've probably read elsewhere. Bon apétit, mes amis.
The English word 'ego' comes directly from Latin egō 'I, myself', an ancient word used to convey the first person singular throughout the Indo-European family of languages (Old English ic, German ich, Greek égō, Sanskrit áham, Hittite uk, etc.), the common origin being Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵoh₂ or *h₁éǵom. (Often, simply the common pronominal stem *h₁eǵ- is cited.) Unlike the second person where we see a nominative form *tu, enclitic *twe and plural verb ending *-te-, we see a curious break in the pattern with first person nominative *h₁eǵ-, enclitic *me and 1pp *-me-. Many would expect something like **mu in the nominative instead. However we have to look outside of PIE altogether, in language groups suspected to be remotely related to it (Proto-Uralic *minä and Etruscan mi), before we see any evidence for this earlier pronoun in the nominative case.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was spoken around 4000 BCE until the people who spoke it significantly spread out in different directions. Various new languages sprang forth from it, now spoken throughout Europe and India six thousand years later. So we can conclude logically that *h₁eǵ- was first used in Indo-European sometime even before that date.
However, beyond this, intelligent discussion dies. Little of substance is mentioned in books or shared in online forums. Few competent people delve seriously into prehistoric linguistics. Few ask important questions like "Where did that word come form?" or "When exactly was that pronoun first used?" Few too resist idle fantasy when seeking answers to these important questions but we need to solve these questions scientifically, based firmly on facts and logic, not by lazy whim.
Many Nostraticists wrongly connect it to a seemingly identical first person pronoun ɣem in a Siberian language called Chukchi (eg. Joseph Greenberg). This is rejected by mainstream linguists because it relies on idle eyeballing of look-alikes and exposes a lack of knowledge in the languages in question. Most Nostraticists fail to get intimate with the protolanguages on which they write and they suffer much-deserved scorn by academics as a result. However, the same academics who reject this solution offer no real solutions of their own, shirking their duty as scholars to be inquisitive. Sufficed to say, there is a more logical solution already available that shows that this pronoun is a much later invention and unique to PIE.
PIE *h₁éǵ- always seems to have ended, regardless of dialect, in a first person singular suffix intended exclusively for verbs. The ending -oh₂ is specifically used for the indicative mood of so-called thematic verbs (ie. stems ending in *-e-) . So, PIE *bher-e- 'carry' was conjugated in the first person as *bhéroh₂. The ending *-om is likewise a first person ending, used in the thematic subjunctive to convey a hypothetical situation. Either way, this pronoun undeniably behaves as though it were a verb, not a pronoun. Yet, how can a verb be a pronoun?
Easily, actually. It turns out that *h₁éǵoh₂ or *h₁éǵom can be understood to have originally meant 'I (am) here', formed from the attested adverb *h₁e-ǵe "here". This pronoun was initially only necessary when introducing oneself as a new topic, as emphasis, since the verb of a sentence itself was always conjugated distinctly for each person. Numerous languages show similarly formed pronouns made like verbs. Look at Inuit (uvaŋa 'I' from uva- 'here' and -ŋa 'I'; ivvit 'you' with -it 'you'), Aleut (tiŋ 'I' from ti- 'here' and -ŋ 'I'), Coptic (ntok 'you', ntof 'he', ntos 'she' with pronominal endings -k, -f and -s respectively), and even Chukchi (ɣem 'I', ɣet 'you' from a demonstrative stem ɣe- and endings -m 'I' and -t 'you'). Chukchi pronouns may not be related to PIE ones but they do show an independent, parallel development that's still useful here.
The only objection left to analysing the PIE first person pronoun as a verb derived from an adverb is the belief that adverbs aren't normally made into verbs like this in PIE. I encountered that objection once when discussing it online and I didn't know what to say about that until I encountered this informative article entitled Hittite hi-verbs from adverbs that eliminates that argument.
The article explains that a number of Hittite verbs conjugated with its first-person ending -hi are derived directly from adverbs such as āppai 'to be finished' (PIE *h₁ópi 'afterward'), parā- 'to come forth' (PIE *pro 'ahead'), šanna- 'to conceal' (PIE *sn̥h₁- 'without'). That Hittite first person ending, by the way, has already been related by PIE experts to the thematic ending, precisely the one we see in this first person singular pronoun! (See Piotr Gasiorowski's Homepage on IE grammar.)
So my job is done. The mystery of 'ego' is thoroughly solved. Yes, break out the champagne. The mystery is solved. The next mystery now is what the original Pre-IE pronoun that *h₁egoh₂ had replaced looked like...
This blog entry is not about a psycho-linguistic exploration of our collective ego, nor even my own deranged ego. I'm talking about the word 'ego' and its unsaid curiosities, how it relates to Indo-European languages, why Nostraticists are wrong, and where it really comes from. Depending on your personality, my explanation will either prove to be terribly more boring or wonderfully more exciting than you've probably read elsewhere. Bon apétit, mes amis.
The English word 'ego' comes directly from Latin egō 'I, myself', an ancient word used to convey the first person singular throughout the Indo-European family of languages (Old English ic, German ich, Greek égō, Sanskrit áham, Hittite uk, etc.), the common origin being Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵoh₂ or *h₁éǵom. (Often, simply the common pronominal stem *h₁eǵ- is cited.) Unlike the second person where we see a nominative form *tu, enclitic *twe and plural verb ending *-te-, we see a curious break in the pattern with first person nominative *h₁eǵ-, enclitic *me and 1pp *-me-. Many would expect something like **mu in the nominative instead. However we have to look outside of PIE altogether, in language groups suspected to be remotely related to it (Proto-Uralic *minä and Etruscan mi), before we see any evidence for this earlier pronoun in the nominative case.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was spoken around 4000 BCE until the people who spoke it significantly spread out in different directions. Various new languages sprang forth from it, now spoken throughout Europe and India six thousand years later. So we can conclude logically that *h₁eǵ- was first used in Indo-European sometime even before that date.
However, beyond this, intelligent discussion dies. Little of substance is mentioned in books or shared in online forums. Few competent people delve seriously into prehistoric linguistics. Few ask important questions like "Where did that word come form?" or "When exactly was that pronoun first used?" Few too resist idle fantasy when seeking answers to these important questions but we need to solve these questions scientifically, based firmly on facts and logic, not by lazy whim.
Many Nostraticists wrongly connect it to a seemingly identical first person pronoun ɣem in a Siberian language called Chukchi (eg. Joseph Greenberg). This is rejected by mainstream linguists because it relies on idle eyeballing of look-alikes and exposes a lack of knowledge in the languages in question. Most Nostraticists fail to get intimate with the protolanguages on which they write and they suffer much-deserved scorn by academics as a result. However, the same academics who reject this solution offer no real solutions of their own, shirking their duty as scholars to be inquisitive. Sufficed to say, there is a more logical solution already available that shows that this pronoun is a much later invention and unique to PIE.
PIE *h₁éǵ- always seems to have ended, regardless of dialect, in a first person singular suffix intended exclusively for verbs. The ending -oh₂ is specifically used for the indicative mood of so-called thematic verbs (ie. stems ending in *-e-) . So, PIE *bher-e- 'carry' was conjugated in the first person as *bhéroh₂. The ending *-om is likewise a first person ending, used in the thematic subjunctive to convey a hypothetical situation. Either way, this pronoun undeniably behaves as though it were a verb, not a pronoun. Yet, how can a verb be a pronoun?
Easily, actually. It turns out that *h₁éǵoh₂ or *h₁éǵom can be understood to have originally meant 'I (am) here', formed from the attested adverb *h₁e-ǵe "here". This pronoun was initially only necessary when introducing oneself as a new topic, as emphasis, since the verb of a sentence itself was always conjugated distinctly for each person. Numerous languages show similarly formed pronouns made like verbs. Look at Inuit (uvaŋa 'I' from uva- 'here' and -ŋa 'I'; ivvit 'you' with -it 'you'), Aleut (tiŋ 'I' from ti- 'here' and -ŋ 'I'), Coptic (ntok 'you', ntof 'he', ntos 'she' with pronominal endings -k, -f and -s respectively), and even Chukchi (ɣem 'I', ɣet 'you' from a demonstrative stem ɣe- and endings -m 'I' and -t 'you'). Chukchi pronouns may not be related to PIE ones but they do show an independent, parallel development that's still useful here.
The only objection left to analysing the PIE first person pronoun as a verb derived from an adverb is the belief that adverbs aren't normally made into verbs like this in PIE. I encountered that objection once when discussing it online and I didn't know what to say about that until I encountered this informative article entitled Hittite hi-verbs from adverbs that eliminates that argument.
The article explains that a number of Hittite verbs conjugated with its first-person ending -hi are derived directly from adverbs such as āppai 'to be finished' (PIE *h₁ópi 'afterward'), parā- 'to come forth' (PIE *pro 'ahead'), šanna- 'to conceal' (PIE *sn̥h₁- 'without'). That Hittite first person ending, by the way, has already been related by PIE experts to the thematic ending, precisely the one we see in this first person singular pronoun! (See Piotr Gasiorowski's Homepage on IE grammar.)
So my job is done. The mystery of 'ego' is thoroughly solved. Yes, break out the champagne. The mystery is solved. The next mystery now is what the original Pre-IE pronoun that *h₁egoh₂ had replaced looked like...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)