2 posts tagged “graeco-iranian”

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.

Okay, Greek isn't really a satem language, but it is a good introduction to this post. First, let me point out that I have no idea whether people have researched the theory I'm about to propose before. I'm guessing that I'm in all likelihood not the first one to notice this.

Traditionally we like to split up Indo-European into two main dialectal groups. The Central and Peripheral group. The central group are the so called satem languages, due to the result of the velars in these language. The Peripheral group are the centum languages.

For more information on what actually distinguishes satem from centum read my older blog entry: One Hundred

Now then, let's get to the point. It is true that there is definitely a tendency of Centum languages to be more similar to each other, and similarly Satem languages to be more similar. Nevertheless, I don't believe that the Satem-Centum differentiation was a big enough shift to completely disconnect the two groups as two main dialects not able to influence each other any more.

I even believe that Greek, a Centum language, shares far more feature-isoglosses with the Indo-Iranian languages than it distinguishes itself from those. Therefore, I would like to propose a Graeco-Iranian dialect, rather than an unlikely incredibly similar development of Greek next to Sanskrit without any influence on each other.

Note, that I will not go as far as saying that these languages should be considered a 'branch' of the Indo-European language family. Family trees are starting to become painfully outdated, and are only an easy abstraction when talking about very general groups.

Let me explain why I believe there was a Graeco-Iranian (henceforth G-I) Indo-European dialect.

1. Productive reduplicated perfect

Traditional Indo-European linguistics tells us that the standard form of creating a perfect was reduplication of the first consonant and a o-grade in the root.

The perfect stem of *gen- 'to be born' thus be comes: *ge-gon-. This is terribly biassed towards Greek and Sanskrit (which is a very typical fault in traditional Indo-European reconstructions I must add). Greek and Sanskrit clearly show this system as being the productive one. The most well known perfect that doesn't have reduplication is *ueid- 'to see'
which in the perfect is *uoid- 'to know' (Compare Dutch 'weten', and Gothic 'waitan').

In itself it's very mysterious both Greek and Sanskrit share this as a non-reduplicated perfect, although there's next to no other verbs that do this.

So from a Sanskrit-Greek bias we conclude reduplicated perfect is the Proto-Indo-European form.

If we look at other languages though, we get a very different view of how the perfect is formed. First let's point out that Anatolian has no indication that there was reduplication at that point in Indo-European when the Anatolian languages split of. There clearly was a distribution of verbs with either e or o vocalism though. But this is of lesser importance, we can conclude that reduplication was a later development. Tocharian (one of the other early differentiating languages in Indo-European) there's already proof of reduplication, but solely in the Perfect Participle.

Now we get to Germanic, which will be one of the important branches that will support my theory of a close relation between Greek and Indo-Iranian, and the terrible bias towards those to languages in our reconstructions.

Germanic as we know it today has next to no proof of reduplication. Except for of course, the preterite of do: did <*deda. Old English apparently has some words which might be traced to reduplication, but it's hard to tell.

What Germanic does have though, is o-vocalism in the preterite stems of the strong verbs. almost strong verbs have o-vocalism except for the classes I'll get to later. Know that Indo-European *e often becomes Germanic i, and *o always becomes a.
Examples of o-vocalism in English:
give ~ gave
see ~saw
bear ~bore
lie ~ lay

Gothic though, as the only Germanic language retains a productive category of a reduplicating preterite.
For example
saian ~ saiso 'sow, sowed'
waian ~ waiwo 'blow, blew'
letan ~ lailot 'let, let'

Nevertheless, this is only one of the seven classes of preterites. But etymologically this can be brought back two two classes. Non-reduplicating perfects and reduplicating perfects. It's not unlikely for a language to get rid of its reduplication. But retaining two productive systems is highly unlikely. In Gothic the reduplicating class was a minority class, but definitely an existing one.

I therefore believe that Indo-European had two types of perfects reduplicating perfects, and non-reduplicating perfects. And I tend to believe that the non-reduplicating perfect was the normal variant, whereas Graeco-Iranian had made the reduplicating perfects the productive class.

2. Grassmann's law

Both Greek and Indo-Iranian languages undergo the so called, Grassmann's law. This law says that no two aspirated consonants can follow each other. The first consonant will lose its aspiration. These laws only take place after Greek devoices its aspirates. therfore we have trikhos from earlier thrikhos. And we have Sanskrit Bodhati from erlier bhodhati.

That this law took place, and spread itself over both the Indo-Iranian group and the Greek language is not unlikely. I do not think that the initial differentiation of Greek's aspirate devoicing is enough for the two very similar dialects to lose touch. I thus believe that Grassmann's law was not a law that developed in two different branches, but rather its 'wave' spread itself over both dialectal regions, simply having a different effect due to their initial differentiations.

For more information about this 'wave' theory of dialectology and linguistic differentiation I refer you to Language waves and the satem innovation in PIE.

This is it for now. I had a lot more in my head, and it has currently flow out of my head (remind me to make notes from now on!). There is some stuff on the pronominal system in Greek and Sanskrit that makes me go Hmmmmm, but it is difficult to prove. I also believe that maybe the 8-case system as seen in Sanskrit is a Graeco-Iranian innovation. Although Classical Greek only has 4 cases (and a vocative), there's clear indications of older cases. But these are all speculations. I will write more once I get to it. Personally though, I think the productivity of the reduplicating perfect is a very strong indication of a seemingly close relationship.