6 posts tagged “consonant gradation”

That's right after 3 years and a bit, I am now officially a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. Yay me, and yay for shameless self-promotion!

So I finished my final Bachelor Thesis with a score of 9/10, that is to say, pretty damn good. And therefore I shall treat you guys on this goodness, my thesis on the Consonant Gradation in the Indo-European Verb.

I am sure that it will lead to loads of discussion, because there is a lot to discuss, and even more is uncertain. But I am willing to discuss it all, it's an exciting subject. So enjoy!

[EDIT] Due to issues with rapidshare, I now uploaded my thesis to Mediafire (Thanks Tropylium!), please let me know if anyone runs into issues.

The 19th of october, that will be the date that I will be defending my Bachelor thesis on Consonant Gradation in the Verbal System of Proto-Indo-European.

This defense is open to public, if any reader happens to be around and wants to come, he is invited to place a comment, then I'll provide more information.

After that I can officially call myself Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, which is kind of cool.

My subject has been OK'ed, and thus I will be writing about consonant gradation in Indo-European verbal roots. My work on these roots will be serialised into blog form the coming weeks. I'll discuss several roots, their attestations, meaning etc. the coming days.

This way you can have an idea of what I'm writing, and I'll have a sort of 'backup storage'.

I've finally inserted all verb roots mentioned in LIV and s the results are much better than expected! I found 19 very sound verbal root pairs that differ at least in lenition of consonant, and sometimes also in vowel position as if it the process of schwebeablaut. Then there's also still a whole bunch of pairs which are semantically a bit harder to link.

The result thus is that in all probability I will be writing about the consonant lenition in verbal roots in Proto-Indo-European and trying to give a Pre-Indo-European solution for it.

I hope to keep you guys updated on my findings. My findings so far though, seem to match perfectly with Kortlandt's theories of Indo-Uralic. This might sound like a good thing, but if Kortlandt's theory turns out to work, and I can find no solution the penultimate-stress syncope way, it will mean I'll have to discard that theory.

There's still plenty fo room to attack Kortlandt's theory as well though. There's some roots that should  be pairs but are impossible to link semantically. If Kortlandt is right and all voiced aspirates come from voiceless consonants this should be impossible.

Plenty of stuff to think about and I still have a lot to research, but that's good. Whatever the result it will surely be enough top get my Bachelor degree, and that feels good. :D

No, scirpture was not a typo, but a display of an odd sense of humor.

Anyway, I just thought I'd give a little update on a possible subject for my Bachelor Scripture. Ah while ago I already mentioned in passing the odd correspondence between the verbal roots *gʰrebʰ- 'to grab' and *kerp- 'to pick'. I think these two roots might be a result of lexicalisation of one root that split into two gradation groups. The fact that there also is a schwebeablaut (that is a full-grade vowel that is not always in the same position within the root) seems to indicate a certain correlation between consonant gradation and accent shifts.

Outside of the verbal system we find another word that curiously seems to display such a gradation and that is *ḱerd- 'heart', while in Sanskrit we find hṛd- and in Avestan we find zərəd- which both seem to go back to *ǵʰrd-, and then there's the Sanskrit śrad- (notice the schwebe ablaut!) which in combination with dhā- 'to give' give a lovely indo-european experession also found in Latin Credere 'to believe'. This form seems to go back to *ḱred-.

I'm not sure if I can collect enough material to make a sound point yet, but I'm currently surveying the verbal roots of the Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben with the computer, and if all goes well all roots that might be elligible should roll right out.

If this works though, Kortlandt will have a much stronger point with his vowel gradation. So far he seems to have only the correspondence between Accent and consonant grades, but no proof that there was actual paradigmatic shifting within one root.

Seems like a fun enough subject doesn't it?

I've been reading a lot of Kortlandt's articles lately, which are conveniently almost all available on the web. His idea's are interesting, his writing is tormenting. I spent hours trying to figure out his article Hittite hi-verbs and the Indo-European perfect which I think I understand now. To give the man some credit, he does write about really difficult subjects, which will never give birth to easy to understand articles, but a 57 word sentence should not be allowed, no matter how difficult the subject matter.

Anyway, I wasn't going to talk about that article, though it is an interesting read. I am going to talk about his article on Indo-Uralic Consonant Gradation. Why? Because it has a lot of interesting stuff, and also some stuff I have trouble accepting. But I believe he is on to something.

He first talks about the Proto-Uralic stress pattern, which accourding to him is:
(C)É(C)-CE(C)-CÈ(C)-CE(C)

Where acute stand for primary stress and grave for secondary stress. Any odd syllable is considered strong, while every even syllable is considered strong. A certain Proto-Uralic system of consonant strengthening and weakening has been found. Kortlandt, completely in style, gives absolutely no examples, so I'm left guessing here what it might have looked like.

Nevertheless he mentions two rules:
1. Consonants which follow the vowel of a weak syllable are weakened.
2. Consants which precede the vowel of a closed weak syllable are weakened.

Read the article for specifics.

Kortlandt aims to transpose such a weakening due to 'strong' and 'weak' syllable to Indo-European, his implication being, that if Indo-European has it, the process must be Proto-Indo-Uralic.

For this he choses to bring up The System of Nominal Accentuation in Sanskrit and Indo-European by my current Vedic Sanskrit teacher, Sasha Lubotsky.

Lubotsky takes a look at the barytona and oxytona in Sanskrit. Barytone is the accent on the penultimate syllable, oxytone is the accent on the ultimate syllable.

Looking at the data Lubotsky concludes that the oxytona almost exclusively have voiceless consonants as opposed to voiced aspirates, whily the barytona almost exclusively have the voiced aspirates and next to no voiceless consonants.

That's quite the discovery. The conclusion that the type of consonant is influenced by the type of accent is so blatantly obvious that I feel silly for mentioning it. I wasn't aware of this distribution.

Kortlandt tries to connect this weakening to the Uralic weakening. For this he needs a third rule.

This rule is the following: An open strong syllable becomes weak and loses its stress to the following syllable, which will become strong if it is closed.

And here the article loses much of its comprihensability. Partially because he starts *o juggling through analogies, while I tend to agree with Glen Gordon that it's more probable and thus more preferable that such *o's appeared through phonotactic developments (mostly).
 Also a lack of clear paradigms of his reconstructed proto-languages makes it hard to understand what is meant. This lack of giving examples is typical of Kortlandt's writing style, who will rather use a periphrastic explanation of what happens, rather than showing what happens. I guess I am more of a visual person than he is. Insights on the interpration of the rest of the article are appreciated.

I challenge anyone to figure out what is meant here.

Even if it somehow works out though, I think it's still more viable to with a penultimate stress based syncope, but one should keep in mind that a very early form of Indo-European must have had consonant gradation as a result of the position of the stress in combination with syllable shape. I need to overthink how this fits in with the penultimate stress syncope.

But before rethinking the model, I would like to understand what Kortlandt is trying to achieve, even though I might not agree. So any help is appreciated.

Sceptics to the consonant gradation due to stress, could maybe say the stress is dependant on the type of consonants, besides it being typologically unlikely this would actually make the series of stops difficult to explain, and it wouldn't have to find some really nice explanation for verbal pairs like *grebh- 'to grab' and *kerp- 'to pluck', which are a bit to similar for comfort in my opinion. And there's more pairs like it.

[Edit: I misread a bit of the article, I thought it said the third rule took place between the first and second, but it simply takes place after the two, I am still not getting the results I want though.]