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Not sure if any of you ever saw this, but there's a band called The Magnetic Fields who did a song on Ferdinand de Saussure, which is cool enough for me to justify posting it here.

She-Wolves and Godesses in Sanskrit are and odd bunch. You have two types of ī-stems in Sanskrit (and also in Indo-european) the hysterodynamic and proterodynamic ones.

vṛkī- 'she-wolf' is one of the Hysterodynamic ones (which is quite rare).

nom. vṛkīs  ( < *-iH-s)
acc. vṛkyam ( < *-iH-ém)
gen. vṛkyas ( < *iH-ós )

devī- 'godess' is Proterodynamic

nom. devī (< *-iH)
gen. devī-m (< *-iH-m)
acc. devyās (< *-iéH-s)

The most striking of this is, that 2 perfectly feminine words, perfectly animate and all, have two different flections and on top of that, one takes the nominative marker *-s while the other doesn't.

I'm imagining that at some earlier indo-european stage some cluster *Hs must have assimilated or something along those lines. But I have not quite figured out how these paradigms would work pre-syncope. And rather than leaving you all in the dark, I thought I'd post this up, and see if any readers have bright ideas where the nom. *-sg comes from, or why it is absent.

Beekes doesn't reconstruct it for PIE as far as I can tell. But then we would have to assyume quite a bizarre analogy. But any thoughts are welcome!

One of the great annoyances about the Dutch language, is that the definition of the 'correct' standard languages is rather different from what we actually speak. This has to do with the standardisation of the Dutch language when the first bible translation was introduced. Dutch was morphed into some sort of mixture between Latin and Dutch, giving rise to new case forms and constructions previously unheard of in Dutch.

By now making a distinction between masculine and feminine is finally on its way out; and writing cases has been abolished for some time too. Nevertheless some things persist. Some people insist on making a difference between a dative and accusative third person pronoun hun and hen (I'm not even sure which of the two is which), which were originally just two dialectal variants of the same word. But were taken to be used as two different cases to facilitate a more accurate representation of the Greek language.

Another truly, and even, far more common 'correction' that is made to people's speech is the comparative.

In English we would write the following sentence:
He doesn't have more children than me.

'than me'; perfectly normal to use 'me' here, which is what all other germanic language do, except for 'correct' Dutch. We're supposed to say:

Hij heeft niet meer kinderen dan ik.

IK, nominative! Why? Because apparently you're supposed to fill in the rest of the sentence as follows:

Hij heeft niet meer kinderen dan ik heb.
or in English: He doesn't have more children than I have.

But English has no problem changing pronominal case here, why should we? And then when we look at actual spoken dutch we indeed find:

Hij heeft niet meer kinderen dan mij. As we would expect it. I had a previous suspicion that this must have been a early-modern dutch prescriptivist innovation, and as it turns out, I'm right. In Middle Dutch texts we find this sentence written in 1200 AD:

Hine hadde niet meer kinder dan mi
He-NEG had NEG more children than me.

So, the 'dan ik' construction is historically wrong. This never seems to convince prescriptivists though. Even if the construction wasn't historically wrong though. Why would anyone say that something that 90% of the population says is 'incorrect'. By which standard are you measuring language? Isn't language defined by the people who speak it? If it isn't, then what does tell us what language is? Because clearly language itself can't be used since it has no authority over what language is according to these prescriptivists. Do they really think grammar books come falling from the sky through some divine intervention?

There's an enormous contradiction here. I believe language should be spoken the way it is spoken, not the way some 17th century theologist would like to see us speak some pseudo-latin-dutch hybrid monster.

*k^(w)ert- is glossed in LIV as 'binden'. It is only found in Ved. cṛtáti 'he binds'.

*gʰerdʰ- is glossed 'umschließen, umgürten'. It is found in ON as gyrða 'to gird'. Also often found denominaly like in Dutch gordel 'girdle' from *gʰrdʰ-lo-. Also related is Skt. gṛha- 'house' and OCS gradъ 'city, garden'.

Both roots are mainly found in Ø-grade. But in gothic we find gairda 'girdle' which actually points to an *e-grade.

I've written about vocalised in Arabic and how this can almost impossible represent the stage of language as it is written. Especially the case endings seem to have not existed in Arabic when the orthography as we know it now was brought into use.

In fact, I believe that the noun cases and nunation are most likely a result of a highly ritualistic language a 'high' language so to speak that was much closer to proto-semitic than the actual Arabic language. I believe that at the time Hebrew and Arabic split, Arabic can't have had case forms in the way we see them today. That's quite a claim, but let me elaborate.

Arabic and Hebrew are close in some ways and very divergent in others. Arabic broken plurals have run rampant for example. Nevertheless the amount of similar shifts that they seem to have undergone after Arabic lost it's noun endings and nunation is so absurdly similar to Hebrew that it's almost as if history redid some shifts it had lying around for those funny Semitic languages anyway.

I don't believe that's the case, I believe endings and nunation must have disappeared and then Arabic and Hebrew (and probably aramaic and a bunch of other languages of which I have too little knowledge) underwent a bunch of common changes.

Let's give some examples. Hebrew masculine plural ending is  -īm Arabic masculine plural is nom. -ūna gen./acc. -īna. As we can see a shift of m to n occurred and word final -a was lost. in hebrew while it didn't in Arabic. This makes little sense to me. But now if we look at the 'pausal' and modern pronunciation of these two endings of Arabic we find it without an -a. -ūn/-īn The shift of word final m > n is much more natural than m > n between a long vowel and a.

This word final m > n shift is actually also found in the nunation, which in proto-semitic must have been mimation. I call ritualistic endings that were not part of the real language. But they must have been in use in some contexts. And if a language gets a constraint of final m turning to n it's quite likely that it will abide to this.

But that's just one of many more things I wanted to show. Another point is the loss of the final *t in feminines in both Arabic and Hebrew. These days Arabic has a etymological ة which is simply a h with the dots of a t over it. But dots are a more recent innovation thus only an h was used. The exact same spelling Hebrew uses to write feminines.

The situation is somewhat different though, hebrew always uses a he to write long final a's, while in arabic this orthography is quite restricted. Nevertheless it makes no sense for an Arab to writen a word with a final h if it was pronounced -atun or even -at. Why not write a t? I believe that Arabic and Hebrew both had final *-at that was then simplified to *-a which was later even lengthened in Hebrew to ā.

The accusative indefinite singular -an in Arabic can not be old, unless you feel like an alif is a perfectly logical letter to write -an instead of -ā you'll surely agree. This is not that controversial, it's generally accepted that in Old-Arabic the accusative indefinite singular was probably pronounced -ā and that the -an was reintroduced by analogy of the other cases. I've been told, and I hope someone will back this up, that in colloquial dialects -ā is still the normal pronunciation of the accusative. I personally am unsure whether for Proto-Semitic -an or -ā is reconstruced. But Akkadian has -am. So I guess the development of -ā is a later feature. A feature that Arabic shares with... You guess it, Hebrew!

Now I can hear you guys saying: aha! you made a mistake! And it's true there's no true accusative in Hebrew, but there are some petrified forms. For example BBLH or bāḇĕlā means  'towards Babylon'. Once again then a common feature of Hebrew and Arabic.

This leaves us with one major issue of course. HOW can Arabic have a ritualistic language so much more archaic than the spoken languages alive simultaneously. I'd suggest you go to Egypt, and watch al-jazira while listening to the people around you talking, and you'll find out that this is not all that bizarre as it sounds. It's essentially the same situation as all those years ago.

Luckily there's also some analogies to be made outside of Arabic. What to think of Vedic Sanskrit still existing as an oral tradition well after Classical Sanskrit died, and when the Prakrit languages were alive and kicking?

Or the (somewhat controversial) idea of Runic inscriptions that often look almost proto-germanic while languages must have differentiated into the different germanic languages at the time we find those inscriptions? It's pretty odd that in Old-Norse region not much before the first latin-written attestation we still find runic inscriptions that write the nom. sg. as -az rather than -r.

So this is the point where I ask you: Am I crazy? Am I seeing things? Surely these similarities can't just be coincidence can they? I'm open to all words of praise, critique and whatever else, as long as it doesn't change into a ridiculous mudfight. I want to be proven wrong, or someone to kindly point out that this interpretation has been the status-quo for centuries and has somehow gone past me.

[EDIT]

I should probably add that there's no direct reason to assume that there was no nominative -u and genitive -i or definite accusative -a. Since we also have to account for final vowels in the verbal system to explain certain vocalisms in Hebrew, this must have existed at some point. They may have been lost individually, or around the time that the two groups were starting to move away from each other.

Not so much a very insightful post as a mere musing.

It has always puzzled me how one language can be so resilient to changing their phonologies when loaning words while others aren't.

There's languages that take on whole new phonemes purely from loaning from other languages. English Zoo has a word initial /z/ which in native words is illegal. Dutch goes even further, all instances of /s/ and /f/ are loan phonemes. It's highly dependent on the region in how much they merge with /z/ and /v/, but in my speech I have a clear distinction between fee 'fairy' and vee 'lifestock'. Other languages have taken on completely new illegal clusters in their language like āyiskrīm in Arabic with a CCC cluster. There's also some initial CR words though I can't think of them right now. Nevertheless Arabic always stayed quite resistant, often adapting loanwords to known consonant patterns.

bank 'bank' has a plural bunūk.

Other languages have gone even further completely taking over larger parts of illegal phonological traits. Swahili is probably a good example. stampu 'stamp' with a previously illegal st cluster at the beginning of a word.

It also amuses me that french has a word like scolaire after trying so hard to get rid of that cluster over the centuries creating école out of Latin schola.

And when you see languages this open to changes you wonder why Japanese after all this time and such an enormous influx of loanwords from english still refuses to pronounce love any different than /rabu/. Why, although often written as such, video is still pronounced /bideo/ and star trek is still /sutaatorekku/. Why is Japanese so resistant to changes in phonology and why aren't other languages?

The 'contact' or 'influence' argument gets you a long way, but doesn't fully cover the problems it brings. How can Latin be said to have such contact with French that it would influence their phonology, it's a dead language after all, that wasn't spoken widely either.

And maybe something could be said about English influence in Egyptian Arabic, but is such influence stronger than anglo-mania that currently spreads throughout Japanese? Not to mention the rather great, though not as great resilience to influence in Chinese loans as well. Sure it introduced some Cy clusters, but still Chinese loans sound, and never did, nothing like Chinese.

Maybe it has something to do with how limiting a phonology is? That would stand in the way why Swahili didn't follow Japanese's path. Maybe it is actually related to the orthography too?

Any musings are welcome.

I've been pondering about a problem for some time now. What is traditionally reconstructed as voiced aspirates, and is probably more accurately reconstructed as voiced stops in Indo-European at times seem to display voiced-fricative behavior rather than voiced or voiced aspirate.

Let me explain. The first thing that brought me on this thought is the odd reflex of *ǵʰ in both Sanskrit and Latin. They both reflect it as h. For example *ǵʰeiōm 'winter' is found as hiems 'winter' in Latin, and as hima- 'cold' (like in himalaya)in Sanskrit.

A *ǵʰ > h shift isn't that obvious. Taking it as a voiced stop it becomes slightly more probable, but still an intermediate stage must have been a voiced velar fricative [γ].

For Latin this is easy to understand the other voiced aspirates also become fricatives word initially (*dʰ > *ð > [*þ >] f, *bʰ > *v > f), but for Sanskrit this is a lot harder to imagine. Why would *ǵʰ become a fricative, while *dʰ and *bʰ become aspirates stops dh and bh respectively. It makes me feel that more is going on here.

Then there's the lovely Germanic languages.

Verner's law teaches us that the *f *þ *x *xʷ *s > *b *d *g *gʷ *z when directly followed by the Indo-European accent. This law can only be understood if *b *d *g *gʷ like *z were voiced fricatives rather than voiced stops. Which automatically implies that the reflexes of the Voiced Aspirates were in fact voiced fricatives.

Those are a whole bunch of voiced fricatives, or at least voiced stops that can't really decide on what they want to be. I'm currently thinking that the Voiced Aspirates were in fact voiced stops that alternated with voiced fricatives allophonically in some way. I'm just not completely sure in which way just yet.

Any thoughts?

I'm on an *n-stem high it seems today. Today in my Vedic Sanskrit class we ran into something very interesting, once proposed by Alan Nussbaum. I'm not entirely sure what to think of it yet, but I thought I'd throw it at you guys to see what you think.

the passage we were reading was RV x. 129, 1
नास॑दासी॒न्नो सदा॑सीत्त॒दानीं॒
नासी॒द्रजो॒ नो व्यो॑मा प॒रो यत्।
किमाव॑रीवः॒ कुह॒ कस्य शर्म॒न्न्
अम्भः॑ किमा॑सी॒द्गह॑नं गमी॒रम्॥

I'll spare you the transcription and translation, these things can easily be found online, what's interesting is the word शर्म॒न्न् śármann which without sandhi loses that double n: śárman 'protection' loc.sg.

That's right it's a locative singular. Where is the ending? There isn't one, several n-stems in vedic sanskrit show up with an endingless locative. This is weird, something we'd like to have explained. Alan Nussbaum proposed that the *n-stem formant itself was actually the locative case. Maybe based on *h₁en 'in' ?  Either way, there's certain words that are naturally more prone to be coupled with cases, animate things will sooner get a dative, while inanimates will sooner get a locative. Taking the *n-stems as an old locative perfectly explains why there's endingless locatives in Sanskrit, and there is some reason behind it too.

Nevertheless, can a whole flection truly spring forth from one case form? One that isn't found anywhere anymore except for Sanskrit (and no doubt Avestan, though I know next to nothing about Avestan). I'm not sure what to thing, but it is a pretty exciting idea.

A long long time ago, I wrote a little article on my suspicion that maybe Indo-European didn't have a word final *n in the nominative of n-stems, and that Greek had in fact innovated. I have more proof for this now!

Namely in Lithuanian. Lithuanian, being the wonderful archaic language it is, still fully preserves n-stems. And guess what! The nom-sg. seems to end in *ō. For example the word for water vanduõ.
Nom. vanduõ
Gen. vandeñs
Acc. vándenį

Isn't that nice? Yes, yes it is.

If I were to reconstruct Late Indo-european *n-stems I would no longer reconstruct a word final *n, and consider Greek's *n an innovation.

*skreit- is glossed as 'im Kreis gehen' (?) in LIV with the (?) marking the uncertainty of the meaning.

In OEn. We find scrīðan 'to walk, to step' which we still find in Dutch schrijden 'id.'. In Lith. we find skríečiu, skríesti 'to go in a circle', which is where the LIV meaning comes from. But if this root is to be connected with *gʰreidʰ- then the meaning of going in a cirkel rather than 'to walk' is probably secondary.

*gʰreidʰ- is glossed in LIV as 'schreiten'. It is attested in OIr. in:greinn, in:grennat 'to follow', OCS. grędǫ, gręsti 'to go, to come'. Which both point towards a nasal present *gʰri-né-dʰ-.

The root *skreit- is exclusively found in e-grade, o-grade and Ø-grade, since it's a strong verb in Germanic all three reflexes are automatically attested. Lithuanian only points to an e-grade.

The root *gʰreidʰ obviously only points to an n-infixed root.