One might not realise it, but typologically the Indo-European verb is actually incredibly strange. Depending on your reconstruction the Aspect is marked in two or three ways, while actually marking it once would be enough and is enough in the majority of languages.
To illustrate this let me give you some examples.
*h₁és-mi 'I am' a athematic present 1.sg
*wóid-h₂e 'I know' a perfect 1.sg
Not only does the vocalism *é/ó mark whether the verb is a present or a perfect, also the ending *-mi and *-h₂e mark that the verb is a present or a perfect. This double marking is superfluous, and most languages try to get rid of such features, or don't develop it at all.
It get's even more extreme when we look at reduplicated presents and perfects. These verbs mark their aspect three times. For example:
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-mi 'I place'
*de-dórḱ-h₂e 'I saw'
Typo of reduplication, type of grade in the root and the ending mark the aspect of the verb! This is overkill to say the least. The overkill is so bad, that it makes these forms highly suspicious.
I'm not one to quickly suggest a completely different reconstruction for actual indo-european. I'd sooner accept that the currently reconstructed form were in fact 'true' at some point in time, but their unlikelihood is a strong indication to a likelier system in a not too distant past.
For example I am quite confident that the stop series T/D/Dʰ is correctly reconstructed, at least for the more eastern dialects. But this doesn't take away the fact that this system is so unlikely that it must have been something else first (for example Glen Gordon's Voiceless/Creaky voiced/Fully voiced system is quite nice).
Well the same goes for this double/triple marking of the verbal aspect. I have no doubt that this was once true, it's way to widely attested to argue the existence; nevertheless this can't have been the original situation, it's just too unlikely.
So this begs the question, how did it work? Several options come to mind. First the, in my opinion, most blatantly obvious one is that the *e vocalism in the verb is actually a form of i-umlaut. the *i of reduplication would then actually be an umlauted *ə, while the *e we find in the verb root iself is actually an *ä (i-umlated *a, phonetically probably [æ] before merging with *e). Now the question is how did this umlaut occur.
The first origin of this proposed 'i' to cause the i-umlaut that comes to mind is the *-i we find in the present endings. There's a problem with this though, we do not find this *-i ending in past tense of the present (that sounds odd, remember the 'present' is an aspect not a tense in Indo-European, it's a horrible misnomer actually). For example
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-mi in the past tense would become *(h₁e-)dʰi-dʰéh₁-m.
Nevertheless we still find this 'i-umlaut' even though there's an absense of the *i. This is still possible, one could propose that the i-umlaut was reanalysed as a marker of the present aspect. And then this i-umlaut was spread through the paradigm, even in places where techinically it wouldn't even exist.
Whether one finds this convincing, is another story. I can definitely see it as a possibility, but would not dare to call it proven, until we'd compare Pre-Proto-Indo-European with another proto-language and can confidently say that those two are related. Right now it's only a 'tendency' that can be noted. I like the elegance of the explanation though.
There's still problems with this though, as we'd also want to see a very consequent i-umlaut in the instrumental singular. But would such a thing be preserved if only one case would affect it?. There's several other cases where such an environment would occur that would cause an i-umlaut. But none of them would be as commonly occuring as in the present aspect. So therefore it's imaginable that it would only survive in the present aspect. But because of this, it makes it really hard to find undisputable proof for the idea.
Then again, if the *-i was the particle that brought about the i-umlaut, we would have to see this as quite a recent development, as this present marker is probably a later addition to mark the present. We can deduce this from the form we find in the aorist, which takes the endings without *-i (so called secondary endings), while the Aorist probably wasn't a past tense (although it is in Greek and Classical Sanskrit), but rather a perfective or 'focus' aspect, which is by no means a past tense.
Another explanation that Glen Gordon proposed in his lovely PDF of Pre-Indo-European changes is that due to Altaic influence Indo-European went through a short period where it had Vowel Harmony. The sheer coolness of this theory makes it incredibly appealing. Often though, 'cool' ideas are incredibly exotic, and thefore highly unlikely. I know of know language that 'gained' vowel harmony through intensive contact with a Vowel Harmonic language.
Maybe we could point out Old Norse as having done that. Due to exsessive i and u umlauts, words have ended up having either only back vowels, or front vowels rather often. In some way we could definitely consider this vowel harmony Except that it's regressive (The vowels of the suffix influence the whole word, while usually vowel harmonic languages have the word that influences the vowels of the suffix). Maybe we could see this appearance of Regressive vowel harmony as having been influenced by the Finno-Ugric languages with Progressive vowel harmony that were spoken in this region.
Back to Glen's Vowel Harmony. He describes this occurence like this Proto-Indo-Aegean development like this:
A brief period of Vowel Harmony, an isogloss shared with Pre-Proto-Altaic to the southeast,
may be warranted to explain the source of qualitative ablaut of *ə and *a between active and
stative conjugations. Presumably, the active conjugation which used personal endings
exclusively with *ə-vocalism (i.e. 1ps *-əm, 2ps *-əs and 3ps *-ə) and the stative
conjugation which used personal endings exclusively with *a-vocalism (i.e. 1ps *-ax, 2ps *-
at, 3ps *-a) acquired their distinctive vocalisms in the stem by way of regressive vowel
harmony emanating from their contrastive personal endings.
Note that, indeed, this is also Regressive Vowel Harmony, just like Old Norse, while Proto-Altaic has Progressive Vowel Harmony. I am not completely sure about the credibility of Glen's reconstructions, I have not yet ventured even further back than Pre-Indo-European. What I do wonder is where these proposed vowels that caused the Regressive Vowel Harmony went.
The Indo-European endings for the ə-vocalism are *m, *s, *t which go back to an earlier *mə, *sa, *ta. The last two might be innovations of Indo-European but the first person singular is *mə and not *əmə as this would ruin the Syncopation.
The same goes for the endings that caused the a-vocalism they are: *h₂e. *th₂e and *e. These go back to earlier h₂ə, *th₂ə and *ə. Only *ə goes back perfectly to an earlier *a. *ax would have an expected result *h₂. The second person singular ending is clearly built of the *t that Glen reconstructs + *h₂ from the first person singular ending. But from the forms *-ax and *-at I failt to see where those *a's went, and where those *ə's came from.
Hopefully, Glen will shed some light on this in the comments box, so keep your eyes peeled ;-).
Whether this Vowel Harmony truly developed is very dependant on how likely you think it is that Regressive Vowel Harmony arises by areal influence of Progressive Vowel Harmony*. Or even whether a language can 'gain' Vowel Harmony from areal influence at all.
After reading Glen's PDF, and his idea of Vowel Harmony, I came with an idea that originally motivated me to write this lengthy post.
In Proto-Indo-Aegean there used to be an *i and an *u which were lost due to vowel centralisation, Glen formulates it as follows in his PDF:
Due to influence of neighbouring Pre-Proto-Abkhaz-Adyghe to the east, the original 4-vowel
system of *a, *ə, *i and *u collapsed into a centralized system of only *a and *ə. In open
syllables *i and *u were diphthongized to *əi and *au respectively while in closed syllables,
they became *ə and *a respectively. Note that at this stage, while *i and *u may have
continued to exist on the phonetic level as allophones of diphthongs *əi and *au, they were
now only variants of *y and *w on the phonemic level.
From reading this was, if *ə can come from *i, then wouldn't it be possible that the i-umlaut took place much earlier than in Indo-European itself, namely in the Pre-Proto-Aegean stage. Glen indeed does reconstruct endings with *i in this period giving some credibility to this idea. On the same page as mentioned above he replies to this suggestion though. I see no reason why I'd reformulate it, while he explains it best, so I'll quote:
Yes. I presume you are pointing to a "pre-Indo-Aegean" stage then? I call that stage "Proto-Steppe", the ancestor of Indo-Aegean, Boreal (Uralic, EA, Chukchi-Kamchatkan) and Altaic. In the Proto-Steppe stage, I'd reconstruct transitive personal endings *-im (1ps), *-it (2ps) and *-i (3ps) plus intransitive endings *-uh (1ps), *-un (2ps) and an endingless 3ps. Since Steppe *u > IAeg *a and Steppe *i > IAeg *ə via Centralization, your i-umlaut idea almost works and was something that I initially thought of.
However, since Centralization and the concommitant transfer of labialization from the vowel to the neighbouring consonant is naturally heavily dependant on vocalism, I would have to oppose i-umlaut at the Proto-Steppe stage unless you can find a different formulation of Centralization that works to explain the rise of labialized consonants in PIE.
If this ablaut preceded Centralization, we would find verb stems alternating between labialized (eg. *kʷ) and non-labialized consonants (eg. *k). This is why I opt for vowel harmony *after* the dissolution of the Proto-Steppe speech area and after the Centralization rule had already taken place, circa 8500 BCE or so. This hypothesis is in alignment with Allan Bomhard's views in Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996).
So there you have it, a very lengthy, and an inconclusive survey of the theories that fly around in my head about explaining the odd occurence of the vocalism in the Indo-European verbal roots, and on top of that an explanation why it is so important to try and explain this odd occurence due to its highly unnatural superfluency to mark the Aspect.
*I just realised, that maybe I'm all wrong, and Pre-Proto-Altaic originally had Regressive Vowel Harmony. This would definitely surprise me, as the Altaic languages that I have a bit of knowledge of namely Turkish, but mainly Classical Mongolian, both have Progressive Vowel Harmony (I'm not a big proponent of adding Japanese to the Altaic family, and besides that, it has no obvious Vowel Harmony at all). If for some kind of bizarre twist of history Altaic shifted from Regressive Vowel Harmony to Progressive Vowel Harmony, I believe that this does add a bit more plausibility to the 'areal influence' theory.
A while ago I posited the idea that the paradigm for 'foot' in Indo-European might have a phonotactic schwa insertion. Glen Gordon spook out against this, saying it was paradigmatic levelling rather than a phonotactic constraint. I didn't want to believe him, simply because phonotactic constraits are so much nicer than paradigmatic levelling, but I found some examples which shows that he's probably right.
So let us look at the paradigm for 'foot'. We have the root *ped- With a paradigm like this:
Nom. *pṓd-s
Gen. *ped-ós
The ō in the nominative is due to mono-syllabicity of the word. The vocalism of this word is then perfectly acceptable.
The genitive though is slightly more problematic. From the idea of syncope, we'd rather see a word like **pd-ós, which we clearly don't. My idea was then that a *e was inserted (which was previously a schwa), due to phonotactic constraints, after all /pd/ is a rather difficult cluster to pronounce initially, even Greek, known for it's sometimes rather strange initial clusters doesn't allow such a cluster. Glen Gordon argued that this is not so much a phonotactic constraint, but rather the tendency of Indo-European to avoid asyllabic roots alternating with syllabic roots in one paradigm.
At first I did not see why one would assume this, and then I suddenly remembered the root *peth₁- 'to fly'. This root is well attested in many languages, including English (feather). But the Greek word πτερόν 'wing' is the one I'd like to talk about. As we can see, Greek has a perfect zero grade in the root for this word, a Indo-European reconstruction of this word would be:
*pth₁ró-m
By the phonotactic constraint I first proposed such a cluster would be forbidden. I would expect a form **peth₁ró-m, so I have to re-evaluate my theory. I'm not quite feeling into giving into Glen's theory yet, and would like to change my theory a bit;
When there's a initial cluster of two consonants of which one of the two elements is voiced, a schwa is insterted between the two.
I believe Greek agrees with me on this one, since there's no clusters like bd, gd, pd, bt etc. to be found in the Greek language initially. Nevertheless I'm going to have to search for words to disprove me again; If you're feeling in a particularly productive mood, I encourage my readers to do the work for me!
Just a little side not to finish this post of, it might be interesting to know that Sanskrit in fact does have the phonotactic constraint that I posited the first time, the word for 'wing' in Sanskrit is patram पत्रम्. Which is a problematic word as well since it brings up some of Sanskrit's sporadic laryngeal vocalisation, but we'll leave that for some other time.
Sanskrit does allow such clusters medially though. The third person plural perfect in Vedic Sanskrit of patati पतति 'to fall/fly' is paptuḥ पप्तुः While in Classical Sanskrit by a bizarre analogy from sad- 'to sit' it became petuḥ पेतुः. To sit in 3ppl perf. is seduḥ < *sazduḥ < *sasduḥ. This e-vocalism rather than a medial CC cluster was generalised to all reduplicating perfects that have identical initial reduplication (Labials, dentals and fricatives). Seems like Sanskrit wasn't particularly fond of the medial zero-grade roots after a while either.
Last post I started telling you about how the present seemed to be some kind of vowel heightening form the perfect; due to its type of suffixes. In retrospect I consider this to be very wrong. I sometimes have days I try to merge everything with everything; which turns out wrong.
I still think the reduplication was originally reduplicated with the same vowel. I just think that the *e found in the present stem somehow motivated this pretonic-epenthetic-like schwa to be heightened by this *e or maybe it's a form of dissimilation (continuing on the idea that the present *e was originally a schwa as well).
Then we have two types of verbal stems, those with *e as the root vowel and those with *o. I can't stop thinking about how this *i/*e alternation might somehow be the clue to proving Pre-Indo-European syncope. Because, despite it being fairly obvious to me, from a logical point of view it's very hard to prove that the Genitive of 'father' ph₂trós originally had an unaccented *ə in between the *t and the *r, quite simply because it's not there.
Now if indeed the reduplication reflex of *ə before another *ə was *i, and this can be proven; we have definite proof that a Ø-grade used to have a *ə there.
Let me explain:
the verb 'to give' *deh₃
In full grade, that is in the singular we find
*di-déh₃-mi
while in the plural we find
*di-dh₃-més
If the preceeding Pre-IE *ə (> PIE*e) does indeed influence the heightening of *ə to *i, then also in the plural the *ə must have been there to cause this heightening.
So my job right now is twofold: Either find convincing proof that this heightening is true by collecting a big collection of reduplicating verbs in Sanskrit/Greek and maybe Tocharian; Or proof that all pretonic *ə followed by a *ə are heightened to *i.
And this is what I've been doing lately, collecting examples to prove this; so far, not incredibly fruitful though.
On a completely different note:
Some sharp readers may notice my self-contradiction. I'm currently placing reduplication in a pre-Indo-European stage, while previously I held a big argumentation that reduplication was an exclusive feature of Greek/Indo-Aryan. You're absolutely right please forgive me. I'm currently only placing the reduplication in such an early stage because I think it might work; which would mean I'd have to review my previous theories.
I now believe that loss of reduplication is far easier than I considered it before though. We have to realise that due to Haplology ( Or Haplogy? ;-) ) things like reduplication have a tendency of disappearing. Even within Greek we find Haplology *αμφι-φωρα > αμφωρα 'amphora (litt. that which is carried on both sides)'.
Let's hope this isn't a dead end. Even if it is, it'll be interesting to research.
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.
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.
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