69 posts tagged “indo-european”

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.

As the title says, I am often perplexed by afro-asiatic. I've learned some Arabic and Hebrew, followed a class on comparative semitic, I have a (hardly looked at) book on Egyptian, and I'm currently following a class on Riffian Berber and general Berber Linguistics.

Studying these languages it seems silly to deny that Proto-Afro-Asiatic must have existed. So I won't. But what always puzzles me, is the fact that unlike Indo-European the 'proof' for Afro-Asiatic is quite the opposite of what kind of proof we find in Indo-European.

Lexical items in Afro-Asiatic that are cognate, are extremely hard to find. This is quite the opposite in Indo-European, where lexical items were the first things to catch the attention of a certain relation between the languages.

But the morphology of Afro-Asiatic is disturbingly similar. Obvious are things like -t suffix for the feminine, but even personal endings of verbs are surprisingly similar in Afro-Asiatic.

This is completely unlike Indo-European. Sure Sanskrit and Greek grammatically are almost clones of each other, but I make it no secret that I believe that the relation between Sanskrit and Greek is a lot closer than some people claim. But reconstructing a uniform image of the verbal system or even morphology when comparing Sanskrit to, say, Germanic, stuff gets a lot more confusing.

And then we're talking about Germanic and Sanskrit. The time depth of Indo-European is a LOT less than that of Afro-Asiatic. Is there something inherent to the way the language's  structure which makes morphemes more resistant to change? That seems odd, structurally you could argue Indo-European at an early stage (but post-syncope) was quite similar to Afro-Asiatic languages.

Of course this 'morphological but not lexical' change resistance is more of a 'feeling' I get, then anything I ever measured. So maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe Afro-Asiatic is just as innovating in the morphological department as Indo-European, but just a whole lot more innovating in the lexical department.

This is me just rambling to a point that it's appallingly unscientific, but I guess it'll set some of your brains into motion, and that'll be enough. :-P

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.

The other day I had a discussion about the Dutch verb willen 'to want'. It is a funny verb, because it formally has two past tenses. Both wou and wilde.

I was watching a movie in which the form wou was used in the subtitles and the person who I was watching it with pointed out that it looked silly and was incorrect. She claimed that wilde was the correct formal form. Luckily our lovely language hasn't been prescriptivised to a level that a perfectly correct form like wou is deemed incorrect, but it does show how people feel about it. Even I tend to avoid wou when writing formal letters.

The funniest thing is, wou is the historically correct form. willen belongs to a small class of funny germanic verbs that are ja-verbs in the present, but behave as normal verbs in the preterite. So, willen goes back to *wiljan while its past tense is a perfectly normal Germanic preterite *wal. In other words, it's a strong verb.

In general though ja-presents are weak verbs, while those without a suffix are strong, and this is the reason why it was changed to wilde. For example rillen 'to shake' has a past tense rilde from *riljan and *riliða where in the preterite the *j-suffix shows up in its vocalised form *i. By analogy of this class of verbs, a secondary preterite of willen was easily made, making the verb regular rather than irregular.

What I find remarkable is that, generally more 'formal' language tends to be a bit more archaic, but in this case, people seem to prefer an analogically levelled form over a form that preceeds it by well over a 1000 years.

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!

*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 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.

*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.