5 posts tagged “english”

Hey guys! Long time no see. My Bachelor thesis was eating a lot of time, combined with work on the Greek Etymological Dictionary and me just simply enjoying my holiday. But I'm back, with this word that has been bothering me for some time now.

The word Skt. sthā- 'to stand', is besides its double representation of the Laryngeal quite straightforward. Now if we look at its causative though, something really funny happens. Usually a causative is formed by giving the root lengthened grade (from PIE *o in open syllables) and adding the suffix -aya-. Words ending in vowels though would get the situation where we'd have **sthā-aya-. which is a rather unfortunate cluster of vowels. To remedy this, Sanskrit puts a -p- between the root and the suffix resulting in sthāpaya- 'to cause to stand; to stop'.

Why a p? This is not at all a natural transitional consonant you'd put there. A y would be a lot more likely (and quite common practice in Sanskrit). Since it can not be readily understood by phonetic reasons, there's two more examples. The Vedic people were feeling funny, and thought it'd be nice to come up with a completely nonsensical transition sound, or it is archaic.

As a historical linguist, I feel compelled to further research the archaic option. Indo-European has certain elements behind certain stems called 'stem-extension'. These are always simple consonants like *k, *p or *u. The function of these stem-extensions have always been a bit mysterious. A nice example is the root *(s)ker- ''to cut' as found in Dutch scheren 'to shave' beside *(s)ker-p- which we find in Old English sceorfan 'to bite'.

I believe that this p that shows up in Sanskrit might give us an indication of the original function of the *p-stem-extension. Maybe originally this was a way to form causatives from verbal stems, which was later replaced by the common textbook causative formation. A nice note to put with this is, that Anatolian indeed is unfamiliar with the textbook causative formation, so there's some indication that it's recent.

While most p-causatives in Vedic Sanskrit occur after Laryngeal final roots, there are a few verbs that show this p even without them ending in a vowel/laryngeal. These are r̥- 'to go'; ar-p-áya- 'cause to go' and kṣi- 'to dwell' kṣe-p-áya- 'cause to dwell'.

All in old, Sanskrit seems to give a strong indication that the *p-stem extension is an old causative formation. Now we must look to see if there's any other words out there in other languages that seem to support this idea. Germanic *(s)ker- 'to shave/cut'' ~ *(s)ker-p- 'to bite' might be seen as a reflex of this, though the difference is rather more intensive than causative.

There is lots more to say about these stem extensions, and I'm nowhere near done figuring them out. There's some really odd stuff going on with the voice of these extensions for example. They seem to become pre-glottalised sometimes for no apparent reason.

As a final little side-note sthāpaya- looks suprisingly much like the Dutch verb stoppen 'to stop'. I don't buy the commonly cited Latin etymology stupere (it wouldn't explain with Dutch and Enlish both have the vowel o rather than u, or English with u and Dutch with o), it can hardly be cognate either, since the vowels would be wrong, and Dutch p points to PIE *b, which is very odd to have in the first place. So until I make any significant breakthrough on this bizarre word (which even if it is from Latin has a difficult reconstruction), I'll consider it completely unrelated.

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 was under the impression that I had a fair share of knowledge of the Germanic languages that are and were spoken throughout history, and then this early split of of the English language pops up which I had never heard of, Yola.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yola_language

It's great to look at it, and how it continued until mid-19th century. It still as ich for 'I', thou for 'you', no great vowel shift, loss of word final dentals, and voicing of word initial fricatives. It actually looks a bit as if Middle-English was influenced by southern Dutch.

And then there's some lovely Irish influences too like here:

loyale dwellerès na Baronie Forthe

Loyal Dwellers OF THE Barony of Forthe.

na is the Irish genitive of the definite article feminine.

So now I do wonder, who did know about this one?

This blog entry I'd like to dedicate to a rather controversial theory of mine. Namely, the cause for sporadic sound changes.

Sporadic sound changes have always been something, we historical linguists would rather ignore, because it doesn't fit in well with our theories that sound changes occur through perfectly regular set rules.

Some people are convinced that these sporadic changes aren't so much sporadic, but rather we haven't found the system behind it yet. I personally think this theory is too positive, I sincerely doubt some of your sporadic changes are actually non-sporadic.

What are sporadic changes you say? Let me give you an example.

The word for "Horse" in English and Dutch give a nice example of a sporadic change.
English has: 'Horse'
Dutch has:   'Ros'
'Ros' comes from an earlier 'hros'.
I'm not completely sure which of the two words was first, but if we can believe etymonline.com it's the 'horse' form. As you can see Dutch has then just switched around the r and the o. This does not happen in other words, and is truely a sporadic change.

A similar switch we can see in the word 'wolf' in Proto-Germanic; *wulfaz. The PIE word for this is *ulkʷos or *lukʷos.
Compare: Sanskrit vrkas, Latin Lupus, Greek λυκος.

As you can see, for some unexplained reason the root for wolf seems to alternate between 'lwof' and 'wolf' in the different Indo-European languages.

This reminded me of a rather modern form of slang from France called Verlan'.

Verlan is an inversion of the syllables in the word word 'l'envers'.

In Verlan, the point is that you change around the order of either the syllables or letters itself. Another example of verlan is the rather politically loaded 'Racaille' which president Sarkozy so 'tactfully' used to describe the people of the Parisian banlieues. The Verlan version of this word is 'Kaillera'.

Other examples are keufli for flics 'coppers' and ouam for moi 'me'. No lets hypothetically say that one of these words becomes so popular that we stop using the non-Verlan word, and if even later all accounts of Verlan were lost, you'd get the impression that without an apparent reason a word had just completely turned itself inside out.

And I think this is exactly what causes these bizarre sporadic changes, playfulness in language, like Verlan. Other people have already previously suggested such things. Like how 'wolf' can turn itself inside out, and how some languages have a -p- rather than a -kʷ-. This was apparently done because there was a taboo on the word 'wolf', maybe because the early Indo-Europeans found this creature so scary that it was considered bad luck to pronounce its name correctly.

Now we get to the more far out part of my theory, which you may readily disagree with, because I have no good way to prove it.

Me and a very good friend of mine, Leah, have in the past years created a sort of idiolect which combines Dutch and English with internet language and our own little changes. By now people have lost all track of our conversations, but we generally understand each other (onderstad00!).

Another feature of this little dialect of ours is that we randomly transpose letters. We pronounce words like 'wolf' for example as 'wlof'. Why the hell do we talk about wolves? Well it's a sort of religious object, the so called aardappelwolf or aardappelwlof, don't ask.

But all of a sudden when I started saying 'wlof' I realised that this disturbingly much like what happened to the Indo-European language. Now my theory is, that some cultures have a certain predisposition to certain sporadic changes. In Germanic languages you should never be surprised to see resonant-vowel inversions. In Romance languages you shouldn't be too surprised to see inexplicable vowel changes. So maybe, this is part of our cultural heritage, a sort of inherited language game, much like Verlan is passed on from person to person.

Who knows? It doesn't really help us predict sporadic changes, but understanding which 'sporadic change games' are more prone to happen in which language family will greatly help us with reconstruction of words that have undergone these changes.

Lately I've had some questions from several friends what the Centum & Satem split is about. Mostly because I have fairly controversial theories on this. So whenever I talk about Centum vs. Satem language split, and my theories about it, people generally end up asking me what Centum and Satem languages are exactly. Therefore I thought I'd write a definitive post to once and for all end these questions.
I also figured it would be nice to have some slightly easier entries on this blog about Proto Indo-European (PIE) as well. It's not unlikely that I'll write more non-Indo-Europeanist friendly entries in the future.

This blog entry will be about the sound shifts that take place in Proto Indo-European, and the languages that sprout from these. I will especially focus on the so called Centum & Satem split. Which has to do with the `velar series' in PIE. First I'll explain what these `velar series are', after that I'll explain the definition of the Centum & Satem split, and to conclude I'll give practical examples of words in Centum and Satem languages.

In PIE you have the so called `velar series'. Groups of three types of consonants with a velar articulation.
In a row they are the:

• Palato-Velars ḱ ǵ ǵʰ
• Plain Velars k g gʰ
• Labio-Velars kʷ gʷ gʷʰ

What's special about these Velar series, is that every Indo-European language only retains two of them. The so called Centum languages retain the Plain Velars and Labio-velars, and the Satem languages retain the Palato-Velars and the Plain velars.

So in Satem languages Plain Velars and Labio-Velars merge to k sounds, while Palato-Velars stay distinct. And in Centum language Plain Velars and Palato-Velars merge while Labio-Velars stay distinct.

Centum is the Latin word for `Hundred' and `Satem' the Avestan word for hundred. These words  come from the Indo-European word *ḱmtom `Hundred'. This is especially illustrative, because Latin has the "K" sound here (although these days we would pronounce it as s, originally it was K) while Avestan retains the palatal articulation, and actually exaggerates it so much it becomes an s (which is the general tendency of Satem languages).

This split in how these velars are treated are generally thought to be a big split in two dialects of PIE, and this would mean a Centum language and a Satem language would never be able to form a subgroup in the Indo-European family tree together.

In the next few paragraphs I'll illustrate the difference between Centum and Satem. I'll do this by taking three words, with the three different types of velars. Then I'll show how they are reflected in a Centum (English) language and a Satem (Sanskrit) language respectively.

The three words I'll compare are the words for 'Hundred', 'Light' and 'What'.

Centum languages:
English (a Centum language) has hundred where the h comes from palatovelar ḱ (root is also *ḱmtom).
The English word light  comes from the PIE root *leuk- with a plain velar which also becomes h (and later gh, but Old English spelling still has leoht.)

Thus the Palatovelar and and Plain velar have merged into h.

The English word what comes from the Indo-European word *kʷod `what'. Here you can see how  kʷ  (a Labio-velar) became wh and not h as with the plain velars and palatovelars.

So clearly Labio-velars are distinguished from the other velars.

Satem languages:
Sanskrit (a Satem language) has śatám for hundred also the root is *ḱmtom  so the ś comes from ḱ.

The Sanskrit word for light though is roka from the root *leuk-, here you can see the ḱ stays clearly distinct from the k. as k stays k while  ḱ becomes ś.

The Sanskrit word for `what' is kád which comes from the Indo-europed word *kʷod. As you can see here the labiovelar became k, and through that merged with the plain velar.

So to sum it up. English has h for Indo-European ḱ and k. And it as wh for Indo-European kʷ.

Sanskrit has ś for ḱ. And it has k for k and kʷ.

I hope this illustrates the concept Centum and Satem languages. And how the split works. Interestingly enough, a few Anatolian language (not Hittite though, that's a Centum language) retain the full three series, so they can't be defined as Centum or Satem.

As said before the general consensus is that Centum vs Satem split is something dialectal in Indo-European itself, I personally am not very convinced of this theory, which I'll try to explain in later updates.