15 posts tagged “greek”

To get a better image of the model of pre-indo-european that I'm currently trying to reconstruct, I've been attempting to compile a PDF with a bunch of reconstructions and explanations in them. Of course, this brought me to some lovely problems that I hadn't foreseen before I started working on the PDF. One of these, and one of the major ones at that, is the prehistory of the *s-stems; But I now believe that I have quite a nice explanation.

First let me bring up a nice and proper word from Latin, which I hate bringing up because I know very little about it. But, I'll quickly switch to Sanskrit after that.

opus 'work', genetive operis, it has all the traits of a *s-stem, which it also is.
In Sanskrit we have this word as well ápas- अप॑स्. 'work'. It's easy to see that this word goes back to PIE *h₃épos. What is important to know though, is that Sanskrit besides the noun, also has an adjective that in Classical Sanskrit has become homophonous with the noun, but in Vedic Sanskrit was still distinct: apás अ॒पस् 'active'. Only the accent is different, but this is essential. It is also a feature which is definitely indo-european as it is also found in Greek. For example γένος 'one's descent', besides εὐγενής 'of good descent'. Most Greek examples are less ideal, since it doesn't have tonal minimal pairs such as Sanskrit, it usually has a prefix like εὐ- or δυσ-.

Continuing with the word *h₃épos, let's look at a bit of both the adjectival and nominal inflections:

Nominal:
Nom. *h₃ép-os
Gen. *h₃ep-es-ós

Adjectival:
Masculine-Feminine flection:
Nom. *h₃ep-ḗs
Gen. *h₃ep-es-ós

Neuter flection:
Nom. *h₃ep-és
Gen. *h₃ep-es-ós

Why the *e in the root doesn't disappear when unaccented is a bit of a mystery to me. Especially in the adjectival form. But of course playing around with analogy will yield us this *e eventually anyway.

So, I think that possibly, the Adjectival form isn't a derrivation of the Nominal forms, but the other way around. Why? Well if we go back into pre-indo-european, the Adjectival forms actually look more correct.

Let's have a look:

Nom. M/F *h₃əp-ə́sə=sə
Nom. N. *h₃əp-ə́sə
Gen. *h₃əp-əsá-sə

I have some doubts whether the sequence *-ésə=sə would yield *ḗs As per Szémerenyi's law, but it would easily be explained by other similar forms which do have a long accented *e, like the *r-stems.

In the next stage Syncope took place, but not yet schwa differentiation in unaccented position (those that were left anyway).

Nom. M/F *h₃(ə)p-ə́s-z
Nom. N. *h₃(ə)p-ə́z
Gen. *h₃(ə)p-əsá-z

(For the *z, which will surely look weird I refer you to Glen Gordon's blog Here and Here)

This is the stage where the accent was retracted to the previous syllable to create a noun of the same stem. There was no longer a rule for the accent to be on the penultimate syllable, and was happily jumping around in quite a few forms.

Much like how the noun *uĺkʷos may have been formed from adjective *ulkʷós around that time, the same happened with the *s-stems. Thus creating forms like the following (Note how the possible syncopated *ə definitely returns here, because there's nothing else to give the accent):

Nom. N. *h₃ə́p-əz
Gen. *h₃əp-ə́sə-z

This late innovation might even explain why we find the heterodynamic genitive *-os, on a proterodynamic word.

This is all still pretty rudimentary but I think it works pretty well. But I've probably overlooked something, and everything that I built up here might subsequently be horribly slaughtered. But hey that's what I blog for, so I don't end up as Edo Nyland reconstructing all languages back to conlangs constructed from Basque.

For some time now, I've been converting a Nostratic etymological dictionary to be put on-line on www.ieed.nl, it's the Nostratic dictionary written by Allan R. Bomhard, and while I'm extremely sceptical towards the Nostratic hypothesis even I must now admit that there is definitely 'something' going on at least in some of the branches. I personally though see no problem in saying that this is due to loans, or just common onomatopoetic words, or words using other types of soundsymbolism.

A problem that I see in his dictionary is that he keeps on making diconsonantal roots for a proto-language whose descendants tend to have triconsonantal roots (or even more). It's great that you can match up the first two consonants of words with vaguely similar meaning in both Semitic and Indo-European, but this begs the question, why does every single Nostratic language use a different suffix? Why is an apparent schwebeablaut perfectly okay? Vowels? Who needs vowels!

Simply put, there's absolutely some really interesting stuff, but I'd say at least 700 of the 900 something entries are a very big stretch.

But now I came to an entry which absolutely baffled me. Namely:
"346. Proto-Nostratic *kʰa- 1st person pronoun stem (stative):"

First he brings up Afro-Asiatic, Arabic anaħnu, where /ħ/ is a reflex of *kʰ, and Coptic anok where the /k/ is a reflex of the *kʰ (Where did the *a run of to?). Well sure these words are incredibly similar, I'm not gonna argue with this.

But then he brings up Indo-European, and actually tries to argue that the κ in Greek perfects is a reflex of the Indo-European 'suffixed first person pronoun *kʰa-'. Are you guys still with me?

Greek has a unique formation, the so-called “first perfect”, which would be better named the “κ-perfect”. As noted by Sihler (1995:576): “Its inception must belong to prehistoric G[reek], for it is already established, within limits, in Hom[er] and in the earliest records of other dialects.” Moreover, Sihler notes (1995:576): “In Hom[er] the formation is found in some 20 roots, all ending in long vowel (from the G[reek] standpoint), and in all of them the κ-stem is virtually limited to the SINGULAR stems which actually contain a long vowel… Later the formation, by now more accurately a κα-perfect, spreads to other stems ending in a long vowel, then to stems ending in any vowel (including denominatives), and finally to stems ending in consonants, and to all persons and numbers.”
[...] The -k- forms are also found in Tocharian, as in 1st singular preterit active tākā ‘I was’, and, as in Greek and Latin, the -kis found in all persons and has given rise to secondary formations. [...]

And by this he concludes that the *-k- must be from Ind-European. Sihler points out that it's typical for Greek, and must be a prehistoric Greek development. Why then Bomhard felt the need to somehow claim that it's a Nostratic development is absolutely beyond me. The example that he brings up for Tocharian is absolutely ridiculous.

First tākā doesn't mean 'I was', but takāwa means 'I was', at least in Tocharian B. tāka is 'He was'. Why Bomhard isn't distinhuishing between Tocharian A and B is beyond me, it could be that he's referring to Tocharian A (of which I don't know much); What I do know though is that the stem tak- is a suppletive preterite to the present stem nes-. It seems like a stretch to say that there's a *k suffix put behind a stem **ta- to give it a preteritive meaning in the first person singular if that stem **ta- is completely unattested! And I don't know which language is able to have an intial mutation from **ne > **ta by replacing suffix **-s with suffix **-k, but Tocharian definitely is not one of them.

All together this etymology makes no sense whatsoever, we solely have a -κ suffix in Greek, and where Greek got that one from is indeed quite mysterious, but it's without doubt not a feature of Tocharian, or Indo-European for that matter.

Wow I hope that made any sense at all, but debunking a theory that makes so little sense is actually quite difficult, since it's not proving anything at all.

[edit]
Just because it's nice to give references, it seems to me, though the page numbering seems different, that this is the Etymological dictionary I'm talking about:
The Nostratic Macrofamily

Maybe I'm working with a newer version, I'm not sure, never got the title page with it.

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.

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.

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.

I promised a while ago that I'd be writing down the phonology of Hittite on this blog. I am still at it, it's turning out to be enormous. But please be patient, while you wait I'll have some musings on the origin of the Indo-European wolf.

Wolf is a very odd word, because finding the 'right' root is actually far more difficult than you'd think. Traditionally we reconstruct *ul̥kʷos (*l is vocalised, your fonts may not place the vocalisation circle correctly.)

But normally we'd expect the reflex of *kʷ in Proto-Germanic to be *ƕ [ʍ] or the Verner variant *gʷ, not *f as seen in English, German and Dutch Wolf. *f can only come from PIE *p. To explain this odd switch between *kʷ and *p some people have proposed a sound law like the following:

*kʷ  > *p /R̥_ Or: *kʷ becomes *p after a vocalised resonant. Other such ad hoc explanations could be found, to explain the shift, simply because the environment is quite rare. I for one, would not know any other root with the same environment. Since there's no real way to disprove or approve such a law, we should be careful with accepting it.

But we haven't run out of odd Germanic cognates yet. We also have the word whelp. Arguably this word could be completely unrelated, but the build up is rather similar. Cognates to this word are O.S. hwelp, O.N. hvelpr, Du. welp, Ger. hwelf

A proto-Germanic form of this word would be expected to be *ƕelpaz. The most natural reconstruction of this word in PIE would then be *kʷélbos. Bizarre, I know but the similarity in root is striking. But the Indo-European word has a *b, which immediately makes it suspect. It looks like whelp actually developed in Proto-Germanic rather than Indo-European.

Proto-Germanic form of wolf is *wulfaz. *ƕelpaz looks as if the *w devoiced, and the  *f hardened. Besides that  the root has e-grade instead of Ø-grade. There really is no proper way to explain such changes, and maybe I'm completely wrong in assuming a relation between the two. But it's worth mentioning in this blog entry about the word wolf. Some propose the word to be onomatopoeic, but the same could be said for the Indo-European word for wolf.

There's one more very odd word ON. Vargr 'Outlaw, Wolf', but ModIc Vargur means 'fox', the Old English word is Warg, and referred to a particularly evil kind of wolf.

This word, if related to the above cited root for wolf, has also gone through some very odd sound changes. The hypothatical proto-Germanic form would be **wargʷaz
First of all, it seems to have a a-grade in the root. Then there's the *g which is a Verner variant of *ƕ. This would then mean at some point the accent would have been on the last syllable at some point. In PIE we'd expect *uolkʷós. Another odd thing is of course the *r rather than the *l. But this shouldn't surprise us too much, r/l switching is a 'common' sporadic shift.

I suggest we now leave the confusing  bunch of words that we know as the Germanic wolf-words and focus on some other languages.

First Greek. In Greek we find the word λὐκος. I can see you guys frowning! That's right, the *l and *u switched places, besides that this word reconstucts perfectly fine: PIE *lukʷos. This is not a normal process, not in Greek not in any language. Greek is known for its funky metathesis though (compare γυμνος to 'naked'), but even for Metathesis-happy Greek this metathesis is very funky.

There is a possibility that the word λὐκος comes straight from *ul̥kʷos though. One could assume a Proto-Greek form *ϝλάϙος /wlákʷos/ after which the labial element influenced the ά to colour to ὐ. Not something intirely dissimilar happens to κὐκλος <*kʷékʷlos where the é is influenced by the labial element. We have no indication though, that this happens to *a as well, and even less evidence that this labial-colouring occurred after the appearance of a through the vocalisation of the *l and in fact that seems fairly unlikely to me.

Let's take another word! Latin this time, lupus. Again a *lu- variant rather than *ul-. Interesting back in the days that people suggested that Latin and Greek may have been closely linked, but by now we know this isn't at all the case, which makes it all the more puzzling. I don't know much of Latin but lupus seems to only be able to go back to *lupos. Both the *p variant and the *lu variant in one word! Can it get any crazier? No it can't, and that's why we're now going to discuss Sanskrit!

Sanskrit has वृकः vṛkaḥ. Wow that one goes right back to *ulkʷos! Coincidence? I think not. This is yet another example of the shameless Sanskrit-centricity in almost anything we reconstruct in Indo-European. Something we should discourage. How is it that of the Major branches only this branch truly displays *ulkʷos and therefore, for some reason gets a more important status than the rest? Just because Sanskrit has a lot of archaisms, we can not just assume every word that's different from the rest is an archaism.  But okay enough venting of frustrations on Sanskrit-centricity (Hah! how's that for a neologism!).

So, now having discussed several appearances of the word 'wolf' what kind of conclusions are we going to draw from this? In fact I could still continue for example, telling about the seemingly similar root for 'fox' and also 'lynx' which looks like an n-infixed form of lycos. But that would make this entry even bigger than it already is, so I might discuss that some other time.

There's quite a few things we could come up with, and none of them are absolutely convincing. But let me mention just a few ideas worth mentioning

I'm not a great fan of Pokorny, and in my humble opinion, no one should be one. But he does have quite a nice explanation for this word. He proposes that the root *uelkʷ- is somehow related to the verbal root *uelp- 'to yelp', howl etc. This is in fact quite interesting, it would explain the seemingly random *kʷ/p alternations. I don't know of any other roots, but I do know it's not uncommon that *kʷ alternates with *p. Why this is, is absolutely beyond me. But it does give some nice options. Though it leaves the *lu~ul  metathesis unexplained.

Other explanations would say that the 'fear' for such wild animals as wolves would give birth to Taboo words, explaining the odd root formations. I find this absolutely implausible. Simply because such metatheses as *lu~ul are much to 'subtile'. When we see words being inverted, as for example in verlan, we see that this is not done per phoneme but often per syllable. It's not very likely that this is truly a taboo formation.

Another theory, which I've been theorising myself (although undoubtedly other people thought of it too) is the following.
Obviously what we know as Proto-Indo-European was not a sole linguistic entity in the area. It's likely there were other languages, and not just other language families, but sister languages of Indo-European itself too. Similar to how Dutch is a sister language to English. If countless languages develop from English and thus becomes the proto-language of a new family tree, while Dutch dies out, it doesn't mean Dutch never existed. Loan words from other such Indo-Europaic languages are not at all unlikely. Nor is it unlikely that such a sister language had a shift like **kʷ>**p. Did we loan the word for wolf from one of these sister languages? We can never be sure.

We could also explain the *lu- variants with this. In one of these sister languages, it's not at all unlikely that a vocalic *l  developed to *lu giving a **wlu-like cluster. I find it unlikely any language would retain a horrible cluster like **wl- which would lead to the disappearance of **w.

It is then absolutely possible to imagine sister languages with realistic sound shifts giving the results Indo-European has. But what would be the reason for taking over the word for wolf from these odd people? Why not keep our own?

Another idea might be that there was a substrate language, maybe even something Finno-Ugric, without the phoneme *kʷ, making it *p by sound substitution. Similarly a vocalic *l is easily pronounced *lu when said language has no such thing as vocalic consonants. But once again, why did a substrate language have such great influence on a word that doesn't have little importance within one's basic vocabulary of a prehistoric culture?

All very nice ideas very little conclusions. Feel free to add any idea's, no matter how crazy, I'm interested in what you think.

DISCLAIMER
I'd just like to thank Glen Gordon for making me realise that of course there must have been Indo-Europaic languages around Proto-Indo-European, and not just languages of other languages families. This possibility never occurred to me before, while it's actually so obvious.

So, I had my Hittite 2 test today. It included Hittite, Hieroglyphic Luwian and Lycian. It went fine, but as I was busy working with it, I stumbled upon the last question of the test which went as follows: What can you tell about the genitive in Anatolian languages?

The answer was easy enough, and I'll give it as an introduction that is to come.

Anatolian languages seem to have two separate ways of creating a genitive construction. One is by the typical genitive ending suffixed to the possesor. This is Proto-Anatolian *-as (Hitt. -aš, Luw. -as, Lyc. -eh). This just goes back to the typical Indo-European genitive suffix *-ós (although some might argue it's the other way around).

What is interesting about the *-ós suffix though, is that it is also seen in the Anatolian a-stems (PIE o-stems), while in the later PIE languages we tend to find the pronominal *-eso, or even a *-esio (and maybe *-eio).

The other way of creating a genitive construction is the -ssi- suffix (Luw. -esi, Lyc. -ehi), oddly enough this formation seems to be absent in Hittite, while it is dominant in Hieroglyphic Luwian and Lycian, and the only formation in Cuneiform Luwian. This formation is typically Anatolian and works quite different from what you're used to.

I'll give an example of both the traditional genitive construction, and the Anatolian genitive.

Both forms can be found in a Lycian trilingual on the founding of Xanthos (a Lycian city). The *-as genitive is used as a so called onomastic genitive (a genitive used for names), while the *-ssi- genitive is used for nouns.

ẽke Trm̃isñ χssaϑrapazate Pigesere Katamlah tideimi 
'When Pigesere son of Katamla became Xadrape of Lycia....'
The Genitive construction here is Katamlah tideimi. where -ah goes back to *-as (though we would expect **-eh, but there's still many things we don't fully understand about the *a>e shift in Lycian.)

se-t-ahñtãi χñtawatehi χbidẽñnehi sey-ArKKazumahi
'and to be of the king of Kaunos, and of Arkesima'
And there we have, not one, not two, but three -ssi-genitives!
χñtawatehi, χbidẽñnehi, ArKKazumahi. What's interesting (though not particularly visible in this example), about the -ssi- suffix, is that it makes it a new noun, which afterwards, just conjugates like any normal noun. So *-ssi-s is the Nominative, *-ssi-n is the accusative, etc.

So here is approximately where I ended my answer, and, my answer had less cool examples and diachronic notes, but you get the point.

So, now that we have an overview of Anatolian genitives. Let's look at some other Indo-European languages.
First Greek:
Standard for all consonant stems is the -ος genitive. For example:
πατηρ > πατρος
o-stems though, work differently. they end in -ου. For example:
ἱππος > ἱππου
This ending could come from a variety of sources.
Some idea's are: *eso, *eo, *ejo but definitely not *esio. The first *e could also be an *o, and technically the final *o could be an *e if the first letter is an *o. *eo is dismissable if we're to assume it's from an Indo-European origin.

*eso is the most likely, since this is what we see in the pronouns, which in most cases seem to work the same as the o-stems.

Gothic has -is, which should be safely derrived from *eso as well.

But then comes Sanskrit to screw it all up!
Taking the same examples (etymologically) as Greek:
pitā > pituḥ पिता > पितुः
This formation is rather weird, I believe it points to a *-r-s ending, and thus proterodynamic rather than hysterodynamic as seen in Greek. It's not that relevent though, the word for horse (an a-stem (PIE *o-stem)) shows a very odd genitive:

aśvaḥ > aśvasya  अश्वः > अश्वस्य

An -asya suffix. This could be from a variety of sources, the likeliest ones are *esio or *osio. It might just be me, but I think the -sy- part looks an awful lot like the Anatolian *-ssi- suffix e-si-o. An *e thematic vowel, *-si- suffix, and an *-o ending. What exactly this *o-ending would be is unclear. Maybe it's an *-e, and then it would be an old vocative suffix. Maybe it's based on the pronominal ending *-eso which might have sounded enough like *-esi to start influencing each other.

When I presented this idea to a fellow student of mine, he pointed out the rather odd dative plural of consonant stems in Greek, which is made with a -σι(ν) suffix as well!

It's hard to explain how a genitive *-si- ended up in a dative plural. But the current explanation isn't too satisfying either. People generally compare it with the Sanskrit locative suffix -su सु/षु. But an ablaut of i/u isn't what we like to see in Indo-European.

So to conclude. There's two types of genitive constructions in Anatolian languages. The true genitive *-as and the genitival stem extension *-ssi-. There are some indications, especially in Sanskrit, that this suffix may have already existed in Indo-European itself, but only ended up being productive as a separate category in the Anatolian languages.

I am quite sure there's other Indo-European languages that have evidence for a -si- genitive like Sanskrit does, maybe Slavic languages? I'm not sure, but if you know, please leave a message.

I've read in several places, that Gothic alphabet is believed to be the Greek alphabet combined with runes and the Latin alphabet. Personally I am strongly opposed to the last notion, and am, in fact convinced it's solely the Greek Alphabet filled up with Germanic Runes when dear Wulfila ran out of runes. I'll discuss the runes individually, and by this I'll show that there's not a single time that a possible Latin variant might not be derived from Runic inscription.

There's also good reason to believe Wulfila did not use the Latin alphabet. Wulfila first of all used the Greek alphabet to fill up as many positions as possible. When he still had some left, he started using runes. It's not a realistic thought to think that he used both Runes and Latin alphabet to fill up the gaps. Why on earth would he want to do that?

Let's start with

𐌰 Phonemic value is /a/ or /ā/, although highly abstract, there's still some indication that this sign was derived from Upper Case α, thus: Α. it could be argued that it's from runic ᚨ, but I consider it unlikely.
𐌱 Phonemic value is /b/. This might go either way, it could be from the Greek Uppercase β: Β, or from runic ᛒ. Assuming that Wulfila first filled up the alphabet with Greek letters, I'm inclined to believe it's from the Greek alphabet.
𐌲 Phonemic value is /g/ Not a doubt here, clearly from upper case γ: Γ
𐌳 Phonemic value is /d/ Again clearly from upper case δ: Δ.
𐌴 Phonemic value is /ē/ This one is clearly from the Greek ε, though it somehow seems closer to the lower case than the upper case Ε, which is not really what we'd expect (Did greek have a lower case at al back in those days?)
𐌵 Phonemic value is /q/ This is an interesting one, First of all, it's in the alphabetical position, and has the numeral value equal to the greek Waw (ϝ). What's interesting is that the sign itself, is a turned around rune /u/ ᚢ. Apparently wulfila recognised that the /q/ and /u/ both had a labio-velar element, so he created a 'like /u/ but different' sign.
𐌶 Phonemic value is /z/ Clearly derrived from uppercase ζ : Ζ.
𐌷 Phonemic value is /h/. This one is probably the most difficult. Greek doesn't really have an /h/ letter around this time anymore η was already used for /ǣ/. But it can't really come from Latin either, although it has a striking resemblance with lower case h, simply because there was no such thing as a lower case in Latin those days. So the only one that's left is the Rune ᚺ. Not too convincing, but due to lack of any other thing to speak against it, I think we have no choice but to conclude this must be right.
𐌸 Phonemic value is /þ/. Of course derived from Greek ψ/Ψ
𐌹 Phonemic value is /i/. Derived from Greek ι/Ι
𐌺 Phonemic value is /k/. Derived from Greek κ/Κ
𐌻 Phonemic value is /l/. Derived from Greek λ/Λ
𐌼 Phonemic value is /m/. Derived from Greek Μ
𐌽 Phonemic value is /n/. Derived from Greek Ν
𐌾 Phonemic value is /j/. This is another one of those terrible controversial letters. Many people will claim that this letter came from Latin G. But honestly, this does not make much sense to me. Latin G has never had the value /j/. The striking resemblance between the Latin G and this letter is thus only coincidence. The real letter it was derived from is the Runic ᛃ, which has quite a similar shape and does have the value /j/.
𐌿 Phonemic value is /u/. This one is not really open to discussion, clearly comes from the Runic ᚢ.
𐍀 Phonemic value is /p/. Derived from Greek π/Π.
𐍁 No phonemic value, purely a numeral '90'. This is an odd letter. It's in the position where we'd expect the Ϟ. While in shape I think it most resembles the Stigma: Ϛ.
𐍂 Phonemic value is /r/. This is a very interesting letter, many people like to connect it with Latin R. But they're silly, it's just from the Rune ᚱ. The real issue here is, why didn't Wulfila just use Greek ρ/Ρ? Surely this would've helped us confused scholars to not mix up k and r up all the time (Notice the near Identical shape). The fact that Wulfila did not want to use the ρ is indirect proof that the Greek sound was quite different from the Gothic. Either Gothic r was [ʀ], or the often assumed aspiration of the Greek ρ thus: [rʰ] was too dissimilar to [r] to Wulfila's ears to use the same letter. Most likely is that the Gothic value of /r/ was [ʀ] though.
𐍃 Once again one of those controversial letters! It looks just like Latin S. It also looks a lot like lower case Greek ς, but like I said, I'm not sure how wide spread the lower case script of Greek was at the time. Therefore I believe this letter comes from the Runic ᛋ, or actually the slightly more tilted version as seen in the 'SS' sign. Because if you believe that  /j/ Was derived from ᛃ, it's not hard to believe that also ᛋ received round shapes. The shapes of these runes isn't all that dissimilar.
𐍄 Phonemic value /t/. Clearly from Greek τ/Τ
𐍅 Phonemic value /w/, and possible /y/ in some Greek loanwords. Without doubt from the Greek Υ.
𐍆 Phonemic value /f/. Some people might want to connect this to Latin F, but it's way to similar to Runic ᚠ to assume another relation, Although the branches are in the wrong directions, they both start at the main branch, while the Latin F has the top bar go over the main branch.
𐍇 Phonemic value unclear probably /kʰ/, It's solely used in Greek loanwords and is thus also clearly related to the Greek χ/Χ.
𐍈 Phonemic value /ƕ/. It seems odd to map this letter to the Greek Θ, but it's without a doubt what happened.
𐍉 Phonemic value /ō/. From Runic ᛟ. An interesting use, why didn't Wulfila just use Ω? An explanations is that Ω was most likely closer to the sound /ɔ̄/. Some might also Argue that this letter isn't from the Rune, but from the Greek Ω after all.
𐍊 The final letter! No Phonemic value just means '900'. The Greek letter for '900' is ϡ. Gothic seems to use the Runic ᛏ with the phonemic value /t/. Pretty mysterious choice, but that's the way it is.