PhoeniX’s blog

One of the greatest problems with Indo-European, is that the common reconstruction of the language's  phonology is typologically unlikely to impossible. Lately I've been focussing on the vocalic system.

The general idea is that there were two or four vowels depends on how you treat *i and *u; For the sake of this article it will be easier to view it as four vowels. The four vowels are *e, *o, *i, *u. This system is unlikely; if anything we'd at least expect the vowel *a. There is also some reason to believe that there might be the vowel *a; but the actual phonetic distribution of this vowel is so incredibly small, that the system is still extremely unlikely.

I'd rather not deny this system never existed; But I'd like to find an older, more logical system behind all this. My 'gut' tells me that *o was *a at some point, especially considering Hittite having /a/ for *o. A system like *a, *e, *i, *u. Though a lot less unlikely still doesn't quite feel right. To account for seemingly random *e/o and *i/e alternations in some situation we might like to see a *ə. And I'd want to assume that then all later *e's are in fact secondary developments from *a or *ə.

So that's a lot of assumptions; now let us take a look at some of the things that might agree with me. First know that, as Hittite seems to indicate, Perfect and Present used to be two completely unrelated categories of verbs, rather than forms of one verb system. Therefore a Perfect and Present can both be in the present tense and past tense; as odd as that may sound.

Now let's look at the reduplicated forms of both a present and a perfect (I believe pre-Hittite-Indo-European did have reduplication). I only gave first, second and third singular, and third plural respectively; With the 1st and 2nd plural I'm not very confident on how archaic those forms are; They don't quite function like the rest.
 
Present                 Perfect        
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-m+i        *de-dóh₃-h₂e
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-s+i         *de-dóh₃-th₂e
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-t+i          *de-dóh₃-e
*dʰi-dʰh₁-ént+i         *de-dh₃-ér     

There's several remarkable things about these two paradigms. First the Present
 has e-grade in the root, while the perfect has o-grade. But not only that, the present has a reduplication with *i, while the perfect has a reduplication with *e. Last but not least, the perfect has three endings ending in *e; while according to the rules of syncope, we wouldn't like to see final *e's or *o's at all. And in general we do not wish to see the vowels *e and *o outside of the accent at all. Nevertheless they're there, it'd be crazy to deny that.

Now let's look at both version of these forms as I would reconstruct them in their Pre-Syncope-Indo-European.
Present                  Perfect       
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-me+i        *de-dóh₃-h₂e
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-sa+i         *de-dóh₃-th₂e
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-to+i          *de-dóh₃-e
*dʰi-dʰeh₁-énta+i        *de-doh₃-éra 

Somehow though the *e's I reconstruct for the perfect did not syncopate like the one in say *-me did. This brought me to think that these vowels might be of a fundamental different nature than the normal *e. Let's assume that this vowel is *ə

For the sake of unification we'd like the reduplication vowels to originally be from the same source as well. And dare I say it, I'd personally feel for unifying the root vowels as well, into an *a from the *i,*u,*a,*ə-stage of Pre-Indo-European. One again quite a lot of assumptions but let's look at the paradigm first before I continue.

Present                   Perfect        
*dʰə-dʰáh₁-me+i        *də-dáh₃-h₂ə
*dʰə-dʰáh₁-sV+i         *də-dáh₃-th₂ə
*dʰə-dʰáh₁-to+i          *də-dáh₃-ə
*dʰə-dʰah₁-éntV+i      *də-dah₃-érV 

Note how I'm now using *V for unknown vowel because the previously used placeholder vowel <a> is now being used for an actual *a. Also note how in endings -me, -to and -érV I'm still writing the previous' stage's vowels. I do not pretend to know what these forms would be in this stage of Indo-European, but writing them all down as V would be silly, as we have significantly more data what they become in a later then the vowels I've denoted as V. And since *e nor *o overlap with the proposed system, they're not in the way.

Right so now onto the forms; what can we say? You'd almost like to assume that the *+i caused i-umlaut on all vowels; but this is sadly impossible for the secondary endings (without *i) also display e-grade, and it would be too far a stretch to assume that this was analogy. The other difference is that the all Present endings only have non-ə vowels for endings. Somehow this seems to have heightened the *ə and *a to *i and *e respectively.

Now sharp readers might want to point out the -érV is also a non-ə ending. They would be right, but realise that the vocalisme of the root becomes Ø in modern Indo-European, so there is a chance that the pre-syncope vowel there was actually *e and not *o, as we would expect from the present.

This heightening of the vowel because of non-high-vowels is very difficult to support phonetically though. I have tried to fit in some syncopated *i somewhere to account for the vowel-heightening, but this would be too far fetched. It almost looks like a sort of anti-vowel-harmony, where the vowels preceding the suffix disharmonise with the suffix vowel. I'm curious if anyone knows such a language, please tell me if you do.

I do not pretend to know how this will solve itself; nor am I sure if I'm thinking in the right direction, I'm going to need more proof (maybe in the nominals?) and more plausible soundshifts to be able to support this theory fully myself. But I just decided to put down my thoughts here, so that people can think along. So please any thoughts or questions are welcome.

For my job I have to work through an enormous amount of Journals, collecting every single article I can find that may be relevant to the Etymological dictionary of Greek. After collecting them I put them into a database and pass them on to R.S.P. Beekes. Needless to say, I see a lot of articles, not always directly related to Greek. But every now and then there's one that stands out a lot.

A couple of weeks ago I found one of those; It was an article proposing Prenasalised stops within Indo-European or some earlier stage of Indo-European. This obviously drew my attention, because it sounded absolutely ridiculous. Nevertheless, the idea's that were proposed were actually quite convincing. The only reason why I'm hesitant to reconstruct prenasalised stops now, is simply because it would double the consonant inventory, which is rather big already for a natural language; especially one which apparently only has two vowels.

The article I'm talking I found in BSL 86 [1991] p361-365 By André Martinet called "Finales nasales mobiles et prénasalisées indo-européennes". As you may deduce from the name of the article, it also discusses a n-mobile. The proof for this I did not find particularly convincing, and I will not discuss it here, if you want to know more, go read the article!

The first pre-nasalised stop Martinet proposes is the *ⁿt which would be the source for the r/n-heteroclitics.

Normally the paradigm would look something like this:

Nom-Acc sg. *uód-r 'water'
Gen sg. *ud-n-ós

This r/n alternation is obviously strange, But if we assume that this changing letter was actually the reflex of *ⁿt in two different positions you'd get a paradigm like

Nom-Acc sg. *uód-ⁿt
Gen sg.  *ud-ⁿt-ós

It's more likely for a stop like *ⁿt to be come an /r/ word finally than a nasal. Another interesting thing about this theory is that it would explain away the rather odd paradigm found in Greek of this word:

Nom-Acc sg. ὕδωρ
Gen sg. ὕδατος

The Genitive is generally explained as ground for *udn- with added *t as found in the n-stems (σῶμα, σῶματος 'body' from PGr.*sōmn, *sōmntos); This would be perfectly acceptable if there was any reason for the *t to be there in the n-stems; which it isn't.

But assuming that a  *ⁿt was actually retained into Proto-Greek as *nt ὕδατος would be instantly explained as *udntos. It works incredibly well.

Later then the t was actually carried over from the r/n-stems to the n-stems (Not particularly convincing either, but lack of better explanation makes it necessary).

Having just indications for the *ⁿt wouldn't really be enough though. Therefore Martinet also proposes another prenasalised stop namely *ᵐbʰ And this one would then be used to account for the odd *mus versus *bʰus distribution for the dative plural ending. One language would have the *ᵐbʰ with *m and the other with *bʰ. This is also very plausible.

An enormous problem is though; it's impossible to think that these would be the only two prenasalised stops, it would leave a massive asymmetry in the phonemic system. Besides that of course, any proof for prenasalised stops is inexistant except in the r/n-stems and the said dative plural ending. This might be an indication that it was a dinstinction already very early on in Indo-European and that these are archaic remains. It's still difficult to prove.

Nevertheless the possibility that Indo-European may have had prenasalised stops at some point should be taken into account when going about pre-Indo-European buisiness.

[EDIT]
In Retrospect, I think this theory is too far out there to be in any way plausible. I wanted to write about this article way sooner than I did. But maybe it's good that I gave it some thought. Although it's a very nice attempt at solving some of the issues in Indo-European; There's simply not enough proof to actually make this believable.

Nevertheless I'll keep it on here, maybe other people will find a way to make the theory more plausible, or even less plausible.

What I've always found fascinating about Indo-European is that there seems to be many isoglosses that alternate certain vowels. *e/o alternations in, for example the genitive *-es/-os. Then there's the *i/e alternation in reduplications. Where we find i in Present/Aorist reduplications, and e in perfect reduplication (although we find many variants of the reduplication where the root vowel seems to influence the reduplicated vowel). And last but not least there's the *i/u alternation, which is what I'll talk about today.

I have no idea what may be the solution to this odd alternation, but I thought I'd bring it up to our collective awareness.

Sanskrit has the locative plural -su सु/षु. This is  apparently related to the Greek dative plural ending -σι(ν). As you can see u/i seem to alternate. But this doesn't always happen between Sanskrit and Greek. For example the prefix *dus- seen in both Greek and Sanskrit both display proof for an original *u. Sanskrit has the prefix dus- दुस्- And Greek has δυσ-. For example in Sanskrit you have the word durjanaḥ दुर्जनः 'a bad man' which is quite similar to the greek word: δυσγένεια 'low of birth'.

But then if we look at the Latin equivalent of this prefix we find dis-! It's the dis- we find in dislocation for example. So somehow the *u/i alternation does not seem to be a steady, or split by isoglosses that can be strictly defined in the modern day languages.

I applaud anyone willing to come up with an explanation to this bizarre alternation. I for one, do not have a clue where it came from.

For some time I've been wondering about the Indo-European genitive forms; Which anyone who reads my blog with any regularity has surely noticed.

As some of you may know, Indo-European has a different genitive form the nominal inflection than for the pronominal inflection. Later on the o-stems have taken up a lot of features of the pronominal inflection, as well as the pronominal genitive, but Hittite has convincing proof that this was not always the case; there Nominative and Genitive of a-stems (< PIE o-stems) are identical, ending in -aš.

The Indo-European pronominal ending is *-eso or *-oso; while the nominal ending is *-os or *-es. I believe I have found a way to unify these two forms as an originally identical ending.

To explain this I'll first have to bring in some theories which Glen Gordon has been working on considering a Pre-Indo-European syncope. Let me just stress that everything I present here are my theories, I'm not doing this to get respect and honour, but just so people won't think badly of Glen Gordon's awesome work if I make some terrible mistake in my reasoning.

Now for some spelling conventions. I am fairly traditional in displaying *e as *e and *o as *o, while it is quite likely that in fact the *o was an *a at some earlier stage. For an unknown vowel in my reconstructed pre-Indo-European forms I will use *a. Well, on to the actual theory now then!

For a word like 'father' we find the following paradigm
Nom. *ph₂tḗr
Gen. *ph₂trós

Now considering the 'Quasi-Penultimate Accent Rule' (QAR) and the syncope of almost all, if not all vowels outside of the accent we'd expect a Pre-Indo-European paradigm like this:

Nom. *p(a)h₂téro=so With pseudo-suffix *so-/to- 'this'
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-sa With a true suffix and thus agreeing to the QAR.

The *so suffix later gave rise to a *rs cluster which lost the *s with compensatory lengthening, hence *ḗ. A similar process is later seen in classical Greek.

The syncopated final letter *o which appears in the genitive could also be the vowel *e, which gives a very nice explanation why most languages have generalised the *-ós suffix, while some (like Latin) show an *-és suffix.

Having shown this, let's now get to the really interesting part, the pronouns.

The previously mentioned stem *so-/to- 'this'(with it's curious alternation of stem *so- in the nominative *to- in the oblique) is great to show as an example.

Nom. *so(s)
Gen. *toso

The *-s ending in the nominative is obviously highly curious if it is indeed from the stem *so-/to- because you'd be saying *so=so 'this-this' in  Pre-Indo-European. Luckily there's some proof that this is not the original form. Greek has the form ὁ which goes back to *so, and definitely not to *sos. Also there's the Sanskrit form of this word सः saḥ which has a variant 'Sandhi' form स sa. Although this variant isn't usable in all contexts, the form is not a regular sandhi variant, which makes it likely that this is in fact the older form.

I think with that I have sufficient proof to not reconstruct this nominative *-s for pre-Indo-European

Now onto the pre-Indo-European forms

Nom. *so
Gen. *to-so

What can be said about these forms?
First, the nominative taking the penultimate accentuation into account, should be accented before itself, which is not even unthinkable (accentless words in Greek can do this). How come it didn't syncopate then? Well, that can have several reasons. Either the form *so was in fact *só dealing with the impossible accentuation by simply placing the accent on the only possible position. We do not have much proof for this though. It is in fact likelier that this particle was just 'unaccented'. How come it didn't undergo syncope? Well the fact that the word would've then be **s might be an indication. Another reason is that really short particle-like words like *so-/to- tend to be very resistant to such syncopations which normal words regularly take part in.

Although the Genitive could in fact have been accentuated as **tóso giving a later form like **tós it clearly didn't. An explanation for this might be that the stem *so-/to- wasn't accentuated in the nominative and was thus felt as an 'unaccentable word'. Besides that this is of course still one of these particle-like words, even though it's in the genitive. Therefore not taking an accent but still being strangely resistant to syncopation.

Now, if we put next to each other the reconstructed genitive of father, and that of this we see the following:
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-sa
Gen. *to-so

Where in the first form the suffix' vowel was still a mystery vowel, from the pronominal form it is quite clear that this should be *-o thus giving:
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-so

With this the two forms of the genitive have finally been unified into a single suffix *-so. So obvious that I'm astounded it hadn't occurred to me sooner. Besides that it's also so obvious I'm sure it has occurred to other people too. nevertheless I'm here to inform both myself and my readers, so even if I'm the last one to discover this, it's still useful for me.

It's been quite fashionable to equate language change and evolution lately. In many ways language can be described as a living 'being', depending on your definition of life of course.

Personally though; I feel that this idea is fundamentally flawed. Sure up to some extent language change is very similar to evolution but not in all ways.

What is similar, is that both languages and organisms constantly change; and make offspring (for languages that is new people learning the language, whether a newborn, or a grown person).

Some languages seem to be 'fitter' than others, and therefore manage to spread further, and survive longer. But here there's already a very apparent difference between languages and organisms. Organisms are fitter because of their features, while the 'fitness' of languages is dependant on the fitness of the host, that is to say the speakers. Maybe of course the 'fitness' of a language is dependant on how easy it is to learn. But this doesn't seem to be right. By that reasoning we would all be Esperanto! Or any other 'easy' language. But the ease of a language is completely dependant one exposure, relatedness to the speaker's  first language. And for infants there's absolutely no distinction. Every child learns their native language with about the same speed.

But to me the most fundamental difference is, the way change takes place. Evolution in organisms is something fairly random. Mutation happen randomly, and the results of such a mutation can either be good, bad, or neither. Whether such a change is good or bad, is completely random, we have no influence on it whatsoever.

Now for language change. These changes aren't truly random, the thrive towards an easier pronunciation, less energy. There's not many languages that will change *dw > erk. Simply because the latter is a lot harder to pronounce than the first. There's then a certain 'non-randomness' to such language changes. We pronounce an intervocalic [t] d]. Or an intervocalic [d] as a [ð]. Why? Because it takes less energy.

Besides such lenitions, sometimes there's also fortitions, but they are rather rare. But we could say those are done to make things clearer.

What I'm trying to say is, the start of a certain shift, is unpredictable and random; but there's reason behind what kind of shifts happen when. Especially with complete phoneme shifts, like the Armenian Consonant shift, and the Germanic Consonant shift, there's a clear interrelation between the shifts, the apparently influenced each other. This would be impossible if shifts were truly random.

Also, if we'd assume the position that changes are completely random. From a theoretical point of view, a language could start changing further and further, so far until at some point it has become so incredibly complex, that even the native speakers will no longer understand each other; and by this such a language would die out.

There's many reasons why languages die out, but a scenario as above is absolutely unattested. Thus I think we can not think of language change as something completely evolutionary.

Another point which is apparently an evolutionary thing, is the phenomenon of 'sprachbunds'. A sprachbund is a geographical region where languages, even when historically completely unrelated start taking over each other's features. A typical European sprachbund feature are voiced fricatives; which are quite rare outside of Europe. Typical of the Indian sprachbund is the existence of retroflex stops, which are not native to a language like Sanskrit.

This is similar to how some organisms can start to look very similar due to the same kind of environment, while not directly related. Recent studies, for example, have shown that the Large Flying Fox (Pteropus Vampyrus) is genetically more similar to apes than it is to bats. We explain this then that they lived in similar environments which made similar changes just as profitable.

The difference here, is though, that Sprachbunds could be seen as 'similar environments', but this is because it is the same environment. Equating these things, would be the same as assuming that all animals in the region where Bats evolved eventually all started looking like Bats, regardless whether it's a bacteria, a reptile or a mammal. That does sound absurd doesn't it?

We could also turn it around, let's say that sprachbunds, because they are often associated with regions, are in fact influenced by  similar environments. By that reasoning we'd expect the High German sound shift to take place in similar mountainous regions too. Or even more extreme, that people's languages start sounding like High German in that region. That is of course equally ridiculous.

Therefore, I don't think there's enough of a base to assume that languages 'evolve', similar to how organisms evolve. Therefore thinking of language as a life form, symbiotic, or parasitic is very difficult to keep up.

I know that there's much space for discussion here, so please do.

A while ago I quite quickly accepted the possibility of a contraction of Homeric Greek genitive ending -οιο to -ου, as seen in the most dialects.

Now I'd like to argue this once again! First of all, this is not the commonly expected contraction of any dialect; And I'd rather avoid explaining strange forms by irregular sound contractions. In this post I opted that -οιο seems to reflect a form PIE *-osio where -ου reflects PIE *eso or *oso. The first one would correspond with Sanskrit -asya, while the second form agrees with forms like the one we find in Gothic -is.

Of course our high sense of lumping everything together as some kind of Proto-Greek would make us want to delete once of these forms. But I think we might have to consider that maybe Proto-Greek at its very earliest stage already had dialectal variations, which may have even been carried over from Indo-European.

It might be worth noting that -οιο is not only seen in Homeric Greek, but also in Mycenean. Bonfante went as far as suggesting that Homeric text was originally a Mycenaean text in his article "Homer Text is Mycenaean"[1]. I would not go this far, throughout Homer there's such an enormous amount of evidence that the main dialect was Ionic, that it seems absurd to claim that it's Mycenaean just because of a Mycenaean-like genitive and evidence of a once existent waw (which all dialects must have had at some point, not just Mycenaean).

I'd sooner think that -οιο was loaned from Mycenaean because it is metrically a lot more pleasant to work with, for a dactylic hexameter. But that idea is sort of denied due to the almost exclusive use of -οιο rather than a metrical whim deciding whether to use -οιο or -ου.

So when we indeed believe that -οιο and -ου are from different etymological sources, which is in my opinion more probable than a sporadic contraction, especially because we find both *-osio and *-eso reflexes in other languages, then we can conclude that there is some kind of switch between *-si- and *-s-, this would be a bizarre assumption if it was only found in the genitive, but lo and behold, such a switch is found in the formation of the future as well!

In Greek, to create the future, you take the verbal root, and add a -s-e/o suffix to it. For example πίμπλημι 'to fill' is a reduplicated present of the stem πλη/πλα- Then the future is: πλήσω. The sigma, in some environments disappears, but this is a post-proto-greek development, and not very important for this discussion.

Now, let's have a look at the Sanskrit future! Sanskrit doesn't insert a -s-a- suffix, like you'd expect looking at the Greek form, but a -sy-a- suffix, and just like Greek it's added to the full grade of the verbal root. For example: tiṣṭhati तिष्ठति 'to stand' stem: sthā- स्था The future is sthāsyati स्थास्यति.

aha another s/si switch. What exactly does this mean? Why does it happen? Why does Greek have both a *s and *si variant for the genitive?

I think this is an indication that Greek and Indo-Iranian languages may have been a lot closer than we think. But why this *s *si alternation seems to be taking place is beyond me.

It might also be worth mentioning that Greek and Indo-Iranian are in fact the only two branches that have a future with *s. Most Indo-European languages don't have a future at all. Why do we reconstruct this future as something from PIE? Because one day someone came up with the arbitrary rule: If it's in a European PIE languages, and an Asian PIE language, than it must be PIE. This idea is nonsensical, it might be helpful to establish true PIE roots, but for grammatical information like this, such rules should not be applied.

Once again, I find it difficult to go as far as saying that Graeco-Iranian was once an actual separate branch, but there's so many unique features to this group of languages not found anywhere else that it's quite idiotic to take the rules found in these languages and propose them as Indo-European, rather than the Graeco-Iranian dialect. Proof of the things we find in Graeco-Iranian is technically absent in all the other languages. Just because both branches have been extremely conservative doesn't mean that non of their shared features are archaic, rather than shared innovations.

[1] Bonfante, Giuliano 'Homer Text is Mycenaean' JIES 1996

[EDIT] Thanks to Glen for pointing out my terrible misspelling of Giuliano's name. Hah. I should look up whether this article also has the typo, because I was fairly sure I directly copied it.

About a week ago, I was telling my mother about that mysterious word *ulkʷos and its odd reflexes in the Indo-European languages in general, and Germanic languages especially.

She kindly pointed out to me that there aren't that many words in Dutch that end in -olf. And in fact there aren't even many word that end in -lf either. I compiled a list, which I expect to be near-complete list of non-compounds nouns that end in -lf.

I also looked for some words that would maybe display an alternation between -lf and -lk, which wasn't quite as successful. But l'll post the results and the etymologies of these words.

• kolf 'backside of a rifle'
  
• golf 'wave'
  
• kalf 'calf' ??
  
• half 'half'
  
• zalf 'salve' ?
  
• zelf 'self'
  
• elf 'eleven' (and also twaalf 'twelve')
  
• delven 'to delve'
  
• welven 'to gulf'
  

I'll discuss these words individually

kolf
I'm not sure what the etymology of this word is. These days it's the backside of a rifle the Middle Dutch meaning was 'stick, club, bat'. etymonline suggests a root *kulþ-. But I'm not sure how to get the f  out of that word, Dutch tends to change f's to ch, but doesn't get f's from þ (see luft > lucht. graft > gracht kraft > kracht).

golf
golf < French golfe < Italian golfo < late Latin colpus <Greek κολπος
So not a Germanic origin.

kalf
kalf < PGm. *kalbaz
Gothic has kalbo which is a *eh2-feminine stem of a root *kalb- it also means 'female calf'.
It is sometimes connected with PIE *gelb(h)- from a root *gel- 'to swell' , the swelling of an animal womb. I don't find this explanation particularly compelling. either way it's not important for the comparison to 'wolf'.

half
half < PGm *halbaz
It's connected with the Indo-European root *(s)kel- 'to split'. Quite convincing, Also 'scalp' is related to this word (this time with the presence of the s-mobile).

It's interesting to see scalp have a *p-suffix and half have a *b-suffix. the actually reason for this is really difficult to trace though. We'd obviously like to connect the two, but there's no real reason fur us to do so except for 'they sound alike and related words use them'.

zalf
From a Indo-European root *selp- 'butter, fat'.

zelf
From proto-Germanic selbaz 'self' from Indo-European *sel-bho- from the base *s(w)e- "separate, apart" is wat www.etymonline.com says, makes you wonder what this -l root suffix is though. Or the bho part, I myself am not sure.

elf
From Proto-Germanic *ain-lif. litterarely one-leave. The leaving part from PGm. laibijan 'to cause to remain/to leave' from PIE root *leikʷ- There we have one! A *kʷ > *p /R_. Where R = i,l (and likely then also u,r).

delven
Apparently from an Indo-European root *dhelbh- 'to dig'.

welven
From PGm. *hwelban From Indo-European *kʷelp- To wich also Gk. κολπος is directly related.

So now we have two words!  *leikʷ- and *ulkʷo- Which have a *kʷ > *p shift. Both in a similar environment.

We can hardly draw conclusions from this, but it was definitely worth checking out the -lf words, and seeing which words have a *kʷ > *p shift.

My next post, I'll work the other way around, and I'll look for roots that have *kʷ/*p switches.

I don't come in contact with Esperanto much. First time was several years ago when I was in China, when an old Chinese man did attempts to talk Esperanto with me so he could play International Chess (Esperanto-writ rules) with me.

Luckily my knowledge of Romance languages was good enough for me to understand this 'neutral' language. Nevertheless I lost miserably (I'm not a very decent chess player). But last Snowboard holiday I ran into it again, on probably the most unlikely place I've ever thought possible: A bag for Sanitary Pads. This is what it said:

Higiena saketo
por menstrusorbiloj.
Bonvolu ne meti ĝin en la pelvon,
sed en la tiucelan ujon.
La ĉâmbristino forigon ĝin.

Now I don't know much of Esperanto, but I recognise it when I see it. And it only leaves me to wonder "why?". What exactly possessed anyone to put Esperanto on a Bag for Sanitary pads?

The choice of languages on the bad itself was already a bit odd, right above Esperanto we find:

Lütfen Adet bezlerinizi WC
atamayiniz, bu torbaya koyup
çöp tenekesine atiniz.

Turkish. In Switzerland?

Let me just transcribe the other ones for your pleasure.

für
Damenbinden
Bitte nicht in' s WC, sondern in den Toiletten-Eimer werfen.

in' s instead of ins. Was this bag designed by one of the 200 to 2000 rumoured native speakers of Esperanto?

Bag for Sanitary Pads
Please do not throw in WC., but in the pail,
will be removed by chamber maid!

Sac pour Serviettes Hygiéniques
Prière de ne pas jeter dans les W.C.,
la femme de menage les enlevera!

Sachetto
igienico per fascie igieniche
Si prega de non gettarie nel gabinetto,
bensi di metterie nel cestino toilette.
Sarà allontanato dalla cameriera.

I thought some of you would find this amusing. I did.

Assuming that I'm identifying the last quoted language correctly as Italian, I wonder why there isn't any Rhaeto-Roman. The region where I was in Switzerland, Rhaeto-Roman is still the native tongue of everyone there, and classes are given in said language.  Surely it can't be the obscuritym, since they're including Esperanto.

Oh well. I'll see if I can make a picture of it.

I promised a while ago that I'd be writing down the phonology of Hittite on this blog. I am still at it, it's turning out to be enormous. But please be patient, while you wait I'll have some musings on the origin of the Indo-European wolf.

Wolf is a very odd word, because finding the 'right' root is actually far more difficult than you'd think. Traditionally we reconstruct *ul̥kʷos (*l is vocalised, your fonts may not place the vocalisation circle correctly.)

But normally we'd expect the reflex of *kʷ in Proto-Germanic to be *ƕ [ʍ] or the Verner variant *gʷ, not *f as seen in English, German and Dutch Wolf. *f can only come from PIE *p. To explain this odd switch between *kʷ and *p some people have proposed a sound law like the following:

*kʷ  > *p /R̥_ Or: *kʷ becomes *p after a vocalised resonant. Other such ad hoc explanations could be found, to explain the shift, simply because the environment is quite rare. I for one, would not know any other root with the same environment. Since there's no real way to disprove or approve such a law, we should be careful with accepting it.

But we haven't run out of odd Germanic cognates yet. We also have the word whelp. Arguably this word could be completely unrelated, but the build up is rather similar. Cognates to this word are O.S. hwelp, O.N. hvelpr, Du. welp, Ger. hwelf

A proto-Germanic form of this word would be expected to be *ƕelpaz. The most natural reconstruction of this word in PIE would then be *kʷélbos. Bizarre, I know but the similarity in root is striking. But the Indo-European word has a *b, which immediately makes it suspect. It looks like whelp actually developed in Proto-Germanic rather than Indo-European.

Proto-Germanic form of wolf is *wulfaz. *ƕelpaz looks as if the *w devoiced, and the  *f hardened. Besides that  the root has e-grade instead of Ø-grade. There really is no proper way to explain such changes, and maybe I'm completely wrong in assuming a relation between the two. But it's worth mentioning in this blog entry about the word wolf. Some propose the word to be onomatopoeic, but the same could be said for the Indo-European word for wolf.

There's one more very odd word ON. Vargr 'Outlaw, Wolf', but ModIc Vargur means 'fox', the Old English word is Warg, and referred to a particularly evil kind of wolf.

This word, if related to the above cited root for wolf, has also gone through some very odd sound changes. The hypothatical proto-Germanic form would be **wargʷaz
First of all, it seems to have a a-grade in the root. Then there's the *g which is a Verner variant of *ƕ. This would then mean at some point the accent would have been on the last syllable at some point. In PIE we'd expect *uolkʷós. Another odd thing is of course the *r rather than the *l. But this shouldn't surprise us too much, r/l switching is a 'common' sporadic shift.

I suggest we now leave the confusing  bunch of words that we know as the Germanic wolf-words and focus on some other languages.

First Greek. In Greek we find the word λὐκος. I can see you guys frowning! That's right, the *l and *u switched places, besides that this word reconstucts perfectly fine: PIE *lukʷos. This is not a normal process, not in Greek not in any language. Greek is known for its funky metathesis though (compare γυμνος to 'naked'), but even for Metathesis-happy Greek this metathesis is very funky.

There is a possibility that the word λὐκος comes straight from *ul̥kʷos though. One could assume a Proto-Greek form *ϝλάϙος /wlákʷos/ after which the labial element influenced the ά to colour to ὐ. Not something intirely dissimilar happens to κὐκλος <*kʷékʷlos where the é is influenced by the labial element. We have no indication though, that this happens to *a as well, and even less evidence that this labial-colouring occurred after the appearance of a through the vocalisation of the *l and in fact that seems fairly unlikely to me.

Let's take another word! Latin this time, lupus. Again a *lu- variant rather than *ul-. Interesting back in the days that people suggested that Latin and Greek may have been closely linked, but by now we know this isn't at all the case, which makes it all the more puzzling. I don't know much of Latin but lupus seems to only be able to go back to *lupos. Both the *p variant and the *lu variant in one word! Can it get any crazier? No it can't, and that's why we're now going to discuss Sanskrit!

Sanskrit has वृकः vṛkaḥ. Wow that one goes right back to *ulkʷos! Coincidence? I think not. This is yet another example of the shameless Sanskrit-centricity in almost anything we reconstruct in Indo-European. Something we should discourage. How is it that of the Major branches only this branch truly displays *ulkʷos and therefore, for some reason gets a more important status than the rest? Just because Sanskrit has a lot of archaisms, we can not just assume every word that's different from the rest is an archaism.  But okay enough venting of frustrations on Sanskrit-centricity (Hah! how's that for a neologism!).

So, now having discussed several appearances of the word 'wolf' what kind of conclusions are we going to draw from this? In fact I could still continue for example, telling about the seemingly similar root for 'fox' and also 'lynx' which looks like an n-infixed form of lycos. But that would make this entry even bigger than it already is, so I might discuss that some other time.

There's quite a few things we could come up with, and none of them are absolutely convincing. But let me mention just a few ideas worth mentioning

I'm not a great fan of Pokorny, and in my humble opinion, no one should be one. But he does have quite a nice explanation for this word. He proposes that the root *uelkʷ- is somehow related to the verbal root *uelp- 'to yelp', howl etc. This is in fact quite interesting, it would explain the seemingly random *kʷ/p alternations. I don't know of any other roots, but I do know it's not uncommon that *kʷ alternates with *p. Why this is, is absolutely beyond me. But it does give some nice options. Though it leaves the *lu~ul  metathesis unexplained.

Other explanations would say that the 'fear' for such wild animals as wolves would give birth to Taboo words, explaining the odd root formations. I find this absolutely implausible. Simply because such metatheses as *lu~ul are much to 'subtile'. When we see words being inverted, as for example in verlan, we see that this is not done per phoneme but often per syllable. It's not very likely that this is truly a taboo formation.

Another theory, which I've been theorising myself (although undoubtedly other people thought of it too) is the following.
Obviously what we know as Proto-Indo-European was not a sole linguistic entity in the area. It's likely there were other languages, and not just other language families, but sister languages of Indo-European itself too. Similar to how Dutch is a sister language to English. If countless languages develop from English and thus becomes the proto-language of a new family tree, while Dutch dies out, it doesn't mean Dutch never existed. Loan words from other such Indo-Europaic languages are not at all unlikely. Nor is it unlikely that such a sister language had a shift like **kʷ>**p. Did we loan the word for wolf from one of these sister languages? We can never be sure.

We could also explain the *lu- variants with this. In one of these sister languages, it's not at all unlikely that a vocalic *l  developed to *lu giving a **wlu-like cluster. I find it unlikely any language would retain a horrible cluster like **wl- which would lead to the disappearance of **w.

It is then absolutely possible to imagine sister languages with realistic sound shifts giving the results Indo-European has. But what would be the reason for taking over the word for wolf from these odd people? Why not keep our own?

Another idea might be that there was a substrate language, maybe even something Finno-Ugric, without the phoneme *kʷ, making it *p by sound substitution. Similarly a vocalic *l is easily pronounced *lu when said language has no such thing as vocalic consonants. But once again, why did a substrate language have such great influence on a word that doesn't have little importance within one's basic vocabulary of a prehistoric culture?

All very nice ideas very little conclusions. Feel free to add any idea's, no matter how crazy, I'm interested in what you think.

DISCLAIMER
I'd just like to thank Glen Gordon for making me realise that of course there must have been Indo-Europaic languages around Proto-Indo-European, and not just languages of other languages families. This possibility never occurred to me before, while it's actually so obvious.

So, I had my Hittite 2 test today. It included Hittite, Hieroglyphic Luwian and Lycian. It went fine, but as I was busy working with it, I stumbled upon the last question of the test which went as follows: What can you tell about the genitive in Anatolian languages?

The answer was easy enough, and I'll give it as an introduction that is to come.

Anatolian languages seem to have two separate ways of creating a genitive construction. One is by the typical genitive ending suffixed to the possesor. This is Proto-Anatolian *-as (Hitt. -aš, Luw. -as, Lyc. -eh). This just goes back to the typical Indo-European genitive suffix *-ós (although some might argue it's the other way around).

What is interesting about the *-ós suffix though, is that it is also seen in the Anatolian a-stems (PIE o-stems), while in the later PIE languages we tend to find the pronominal *-eso, or even a *-esio (and maybe *-eio).

The other way of creating a genitive construction is the -ssi- suffix (Luw. -esi, Lyc. -ehi), oddly enough this formation seems to be absent in Hittite, while it is dominant in Hieroglyphic Luwian and Lycian, and the only formation in Cuneiform Luwian. This formation is typically Anatolian and works quite different from what you're used to.

I'll give an example of both the traditional genitive construction, and the Anatolian genitive.

Both forms can be found in a Lycian trilingual on the founding of Xanthos (a Lycian city). The *-as genitive is used as a so called onomastic genitive (a genitive used for names), while the *-ssi- genitive is used for nouns.

ẽke Trm̃isñ χssaϑrapazate Pigesere Katamlah tideimi 
'When Pigesere son of Katamla became Xadrape of Lycia....'
The Genitive construction here is Katamlah tideimi. where -ah goes back to *-as (though we would expect **-eh, but there's still many things we don't fully understand about the *a>e shift in Lycian.)

se-t-ahñtãi χñtawatehi χbidẽñnehi sey-ArKKazumahi
'and to be of the king of Kaunos, and of Arkesima'
And there we have, not one, not two, but three -ssi-genitives!
χñtawatehi, χbidẽñnehi, ArKKazumahi. What's interesting (though not particularly visible in this example), about the -ssi- suffix, is that it makes it a new noun, which afterwards, just conjugates like any normal noun. So *-ssi-s is the Nominative, *-ssi-n is the accusative, etc.

So here is approximately where I ended my answer, and, my answer had less cool examples and diachronic notes, but you get the point.

So, now that we have an overview of Anatolian genitives. Let's look at some other Indo-European languages.
First Greek:
Standard for all consonant stems is the -ος genitive. For example:
πατηρ > πατρος
o-stems though, work differently. they end in -ου. For example:
ἱππος > ἱππου
This ending could come from a variety of sources.
Some idea's are: *eso, *eo, *ejo but definitely not *esio. The first *e could also be an *o, and technically the final *o could be an *e if the first letter is an *o. *eo is dismissable if we're to assume it's from an Indo-European origin.

*eso is the most likely, since this is what we see in the pronouns, which in most cases seem to work the same as the o-stems.

Gothic has -is, which should be safely derrived from *eso as well.

But then comes Sanskrit to screw it all up!
Taking the same examples (etymologically) as Greek:
pitā > pituḥ पिता > पितुः
This formation is rather weird, I believe it points to a *-r-s ending, and thus proterodynamic rather than hysterodynamic as seen in Greek. It's not that relevent though, the word for horse (an a-stem (PIE *o-stem)) shows a very odd genitive:

aśvaḥ > aśvasya  अश्वः > अश्वस्य

An -asya suffix. This could be from a variety of sources, the likeliest ones are *esio or *osio. It might just be me, but I think the -sy- part looks an awful lot like the Anatolian *-ssi- suffix e-si-o. An *e thematic vowel, *-si- suffix, and an *-o ending. What exactly this *o-ending would be is unclear. Maybe it's an *-e, and then it would be an old vocative suffix. Maybe it's based on the pronominal ending *-eso which might have sounded enough like *-esi to start influencing each other.

When I presented this idea to a fellow student of mine, he pointed out the rather odd dative plural of consonant stems in Greek, which is made with a -σι(ν) suffix as well!

It's hard to explain how a genitive *-si- ended up in a dative plural. But the current explanation isn't too satisfying either. People generally compare it with the Sanskrit locative suffix -su सु/षु. But an ablaut of i/u isn't what we like to see in Indo-European.

So to conclude. There's two types of genitive constructions in Anatolian languages. The true genitive *-as and the genitival stem extension *-ssi-. There are some indications, especially in Sanskrit, that this suffix may have already existed in Indo-European itself, but only ended up being productive as a separate category in the Anatolian languages.

I am quite sure there's other Indo-European languages that have evidence for a -si- genitive like Sanskrit does, maybe Slavic languages? I'm not sure, but if you know, please leave a message.