The Indo-European (IE) revivalists are up to some crazy plans to get the European Union to adopt "Modern Indo-European" (MIE) as the new European lingua franca. One look at the grammar that they propose and you'll see why their efforts are more doomed than Esperanto[1]:
http://dnghu.org/Indo-European/
They seem to have some interesting re-interpretations of history and IE roots in their pdf too, so I would suggest that after reading it, consult another source of information or hug your local librarian. Remember, question everything.
One of the things that I noticed was the claim that *ec- means 'fast'. First off, the standard spelling you see in any textbook on IE is palatal *ḱ. More importantly however, the root isn't directly based on the attested words which show Greek ōkus, Latin accipiter 'hawk' < *h₁oḱu-petro- and Sanskrit āṣu-. The word is normally shown as *h₁ōḱú- but the initial *h₁ is often omitted for simplicity's sake (read here).
These revivalists also linger on theories that place the earliest Indo-European far more to the east, near the Ural mountains! I personally have some major issues with that considering that if this were true, there would be an abundance of Uralic loans in Indo-European, however nothing conclusive has ever been shown earlier than 2500 BCE when the Indo-Iranian branch of IE was in positive contact with the Finno-Ugric branch of Uralic that had only done so, so it appears, because it had journeyed further south near the Caspian Sea from its original forested areas to the north. The few links that have been identified between the earlier protolanguages IE and Uralic themselves, such as IE *wódr̥ 'water' / Ur *weti 'water', could equally have been inherited in both protolanguages from a common parent language in the remote recesses of prehistory. Plus, the age old dilemma of Indo-European *septm̥ "seven" as a transparent borrowing from Proto-Semitic *sabʕ-at-um 'seven' (masc. form) (basic root *sabʕ-) is something that can't be ignored. So logically, the easterly location just isn't plausible. (On the other hand, I'm not a fan of those who place Indo-European in Turkey either. Eastern Europe suffices if we take into full account the implications of Neolithic sea trade in the Mediterranean to which archaeology attests.)
The original grammar of Indo-European is explained in great detail by Piotr Gasiorowski for those traditionalists out there like myself who don't like to mix protolanguages with protopolitics.
UPDATES
(2009 Nov 2) Added footnote #1. Also see dnghu and dogmatic relativism for an update on Carlos Quiles' "organization".
NOTES
[1] I should have qualified this statement a long while ago to avoid confusion. What I mean here is "doomed" in the sense of expecting that Esperanto or any other similar language attain the same popularity as other natural languages. Afterall popularity is the name of the game here, isn't it? There's no point marketing an unpopularizable language obviously. Of course, "never say never" and all that, but for everyone's information, Mandarin is estimated to have a little more than a billion speakers in all. I have respect for Esperanto as a fun conlang only and nonetheless appreciate the positive message of global unity that comes with it, but popularizing an artificial language for anything more than entertainment or for an apolitical, humanist message of peace is unconstructive.
21 Apr 2007
17 Apr 2007
How to pronounce Proto-Indo-European stops
Particularly for English-speakers unaccustomed to such phonetic novelties, there's a common question one asks when one first encounters the un-English phonology reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European: How on earth can anyone distinguish phonemes like *t, *d and *dh from each other? The first is called a voiceless stop, the second a voiced stop but the third a voiced aspirate stop. The last one trips a lot of people out.
However, no need to fear. Treat your tongue as a science lab. Find a quiet place away from prying ears who may think you've gone mad. Just have fun playing with voicing and aspiration as you pronounce a "d" over and over a little differently each time. After repeated practice, you should get a feel for it. Of course, it often helps if you can hear what the difference is. Take a look at this wonderful page on Hindi phonetics that gives visitors an audio recording of similar differences in that language:
http://phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter6/hindi/hindi.html
This site also has some other exotic phonemes that even more advanced linguistics students may find instructive. Personally, I just get a kick out the phonetic jumbalaya!
I'm probably lucky in that I grew up speaking English and French from childhood, so this whole conundrum wasn't so difficult for me. English and French are the two official languages here in Canada, of course, and my parents tried to make me a good Canadian. Alas, they tried. As I mastered both languages through gradeschool, I began to notice the subtle differences between an English "d" and a French "d" while my peers were more busy outside, discovering the joys of cigarette smoking behind the garbage bin.
It turns out that the differences between stops in both languages have to do with "voicing onset". But I didn't need the technical term to know what I was hearing. What I instinctively began to sense was what I personally called a "light d" (in English) and a "heavy d" (in French). It turned out that my ears were on to something. I was hearing the subtle fact that French "d" is pronounced with a longer duration of voicing, something I perceived as a deeper, richer sound. My English d's certainly sounded weaker somehow because oftentimes they are only semi-voiced. As a child, you learn to mimick sounds very easily in your environment and only much later do you think about it all.
Some African languages push the voicing onset to the extreme, even beyond French, and create phonemes like nd and mb. One might say that the initial nasal sound is what naturally happens when voicing extends beyond just the 'd' itself. To the other extreme, some languages don't have any voicing at all but the stop may still sound like a 'd' to English-speakers if the stop happens to lack aspiration. For example, when a Mexican pronounces Spanish queso, it may sound like 'gay-so' to an Anglophone even though the sound is in fact an unaspirated, voiceless "k".
(If you're interested in the ugly technical details, you may find this article right up your alley. It's called Perception of VOT and First Formant Onset by Spanish and English Speakers [pdf] from the University of Michigan. It shows us how easily speakers of a new language can mispronounce and misinterpret sounds because of the influences of their native language's phonology.)
Now if you're lucky enough to speak English and another contrasting tongue with significant differences in voicing onset, then you can begin to understand how a single language like IE could have had a distinction between this "light d" and "heavy d". It's not the only one (cf. Hindi or Thai).
Hopefully this layman explanation will encourage a few more zany paleoglots out there to successfully revive a dead protolanguage for their own enjoyment.
However, no need to fear. Treat your tongue as a science lab. Find a quiet place away from prying ears who may think you've gone mad. Just have fun playing with voicing and aspiration as you pronounce a "d" over and over a little differently each time. After repeated practice, you should get a feel for it. Of course, it often helps if you can hear what the difference is. Take a look at this wonderful page on Hindi phonetics that gives visitors an audio recording of similar differences in that language:
http://phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter6/hindi/hindi.html
This site also has some other exotic phonemes that even more advanced linguistics students may find instructive. Personally, I just get a kick out the phonetic jumbalaya!
I'm probably lucky in that I grew up speaking English and French from childhood, so this whole conundrum wasn't so difficult for me. English and French are the two official languages here in Canada, of course, and my parents tried to make me a good Canadian. Alas, they tried. As I mastered both languages through gradeschool, I began to notice the subtle differences between an English "d" and a French "d" while my peers were more busy outside, discovering the joys of cigarette smoking behind the garbage bin.
It turns out that the differences between stops in both languages have to do with "voicing onset". But I didn't need the technical term to know what I was hearing. What I instinctively began to sense was what I personally called a "light d" (in English) and a "heavy d" (in French). It turned out that my ears were on to something. I was hearing the subtle fact that French "d" is pronounced with a longer duration of voicing, something I perceived as a deeper, richer sound. My English d's certainly sounded weaker somehow because oftentimes they are only semi-voiced. As a child, you learn to mimick sounds very easily in your environment and only much later do you think about it all.
Some African languages push the voicing onset to the extreme, even beyond French, and create phonemes like nd and mb. One might say that the initial nasal sound is what naturally happens when voicing extends beyond just the 'd' itself. To the other extreme, some languages don't have any voicing at all but the stop may still sound like a 'd' to English-speakers if the stop happens to lack aspiration. For example, when a Mexican pronounces Spanish queso, it may sound like 'gay-so' to an Anglophone even though the sound is in fact an unaspirated, voiceless "k".
(If you're interested in the ugly technical details, you may find this article right up your alley. It's called Perception of VOT and First Formant Onset by Spanish and English Speakers [pdf] from the University of Michigan. It shows us how easily speakers of a new language can mispronounce and misinterpret sounds because of the influences of their native language's phonology.)
Now if you're lucky enough to speak English and another contrasting tongue with significant differences in voicing onset, then you can begin to understand how a single language like IE could have had a distinction between this "light d" and "heavy d". It's not the only one (cf. Hindi or Thai).
Hopefully this layman explanation will encourage a few more zany paleoglots out there to successfully revive a dead protolanguage for their own enjoyment.
Labels:
indo-european,
language,
phonology,
prehistory
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)