4 posts tagged “pie”

It's relatively universal in languages that the names for father and mother are labials followed by the vowel 'a'. In Dutch we have 'mama' en 'papa'. Sometimes you also see something like 'dada' (or daddy) for father. But all together, it's generally just the easiest sounds to make for a baby that is exploring his speech organ.

There's some languages that go right against these universal laws, like for example Japanese. Japanese has 'haha' and 'chichi' for father and mother respectively. Originally though these sounds where papa and titi. And although titi is still a  bit odd, papa is definitely understandable.

Now these terms generally withstand sound laws, just because they're so typical for mimicking the sound babies make. The above example of Japanese is an exception to the rule.

But like I said, the first sounds a little kid makes are often the simplest. One sound that is without a doubt not the easiest to articulate is the pharyngeal voiced approximant /ʕ/.

The Indo-European words for mother and father are *méh2-tēr and *ph2-tḗr. *h2 is commonly considered to be /ʕ/, although certain readers of this blog will argue with me that it's a uvular fricative. But my point stays, also a uvular fricative is quite a challenge to force out of the throat of a baby.

the word mother and father would sound something [máʕteːr], and [pʕtéːr]. I know, I'm going against all conventions by writing anything of a reconstructed language in a phonetic transcription, but it's important to illustrate my point. As you may know the tēr-suffix is is a suffix for family members. so the original roots are *meh2- and *ph2-. Knowing that both of these words often resulted in ma and pa in daughter languages, you'd expect them to be words imitating a sound of a baby. Which is exactly why I have an enormous difficulty believing that the /ʕ/ is original in these roots. I don't believe an Indo-European baby would have less problems obstructing his pharyngeal passage than I, or Dutch babies have.

Which leads me to believe that these words actually contained real a's. so *mā́tēr and *patḗr.

I don't think there's any evidence against the first example, although Lithuanian accent might notify that there's supposed to be a laryngeal.

The word for father though brings a bigger problem. If there was truly an *a, we'd expect Sanskrit to have  **patṛ **पतृ
but instead it has pitṛ पितृ. A laryngeal between consonants always becomes i.

So there's evidence to assume that *h2 was there, but it still feels weird to think it is. Maybe, somehow an earlier PIE *a had an allophonic distribution with the *h2 in vocalised position. so that *ph2 sounded like [pa]. Because father would then 'have' a laryngeal, mother would take one too.

But this is just guessing. All I'm saying is, the laryngeal was probably there. But you wouldn't expect it to. Somehow at some point this unwanted laryngeal sneaked into both roots.

Another way of going about it, is calling this 'proof' that PIE actually had no *a. If the sound *a is completely unknown as a phoneme to PIE speakers, and their baby would suddenly go about yelling [mama]! The best attempt to emulate this sound would be for them to say *meh2meh2 or *mh2mh2. But although it's nice to have proof that there's no *a, there's the problem that there is  an *a in several words. So maybe *a was a conditioned allophone of another vowel, and to get the [a] sound in other contexts they'd have to resort to laryngeals again.

I hope someone can give his ideas about this interesting issue.

I've just returned from my holiday to Brittanny, France. Of course I picked up a Breton grammar, a dictionary and a book, I wouldn't recognise myself if I wouldn't put time and money into a minority language.

So here I am, writing a small entry on Breton. First of all, it's a very fun language, it's like welsh spoken by French people (which is more or less the case).

What I found incredibly striking when I was reading about the verb, was the formation of the future tense, it has to do with the thematic vowels.

First of all I shall explain what thematic vowels are.

In Proto Indo-European, there's two types of verbs, thematic and athematic ones. An athematic verb is simply the stem followed by its endings. With thematic verbs though, in between the stem and the ending there's a placement of a vowel (either e/o).

So the thematic paradigm looks something like this:

1st singular: *-o-h2
2nd singular: *-e-h1i
3rd singular: *-e
1st plural: *-o-mom
2nd plural: *-e-th1e
3rd plural: *-o

These are the primary endings for the present tense. (and maybe previously only the Subjunctive.)

These thematic endings always have this distribution, and also occur in the secondary (aorist/imperfect endings) and also in the forms of the middle voice.

The distribution is: o goes with 1sg, 1pl and 3pl. While e goes with 2sg, 3sg and 2pl.

Breton more or less follows this pattern:

scriv-a-n `I write'
scriv-e-z `you write'
scriv- `he writes'
scriv-o-mp `we write'
scriv-i-t `you (pl.) write'
scriv-e-r `they write'

both a and o go back to *o. and i and e go back to *e. scriv is quite remarkable, since there's no ending, this is probably due to some law which cuts of word final e's though.

Remarkable is the -e- in the 3rd plural, we'd expect the -o-. Also the ending is remarkable, it seems to be the ending of the perfect/medium rather than the present. but this discrepancy wasn't what I wanted to talk about, the really remarkable thing is when you look at the formation of the future tense:

scriv-i-n `I will write'
scriv-i- `you will write'
scriv-o `he will write'
scriv-i-mp `we will write'
scriv-o-t `you (pl.) will write'
scriv-o-r `they will write'

Can you see what happened? The distribution (except for the 2nd singular) of the e's and o's switches around! So the distribution now is 1st, 2nd singular and 1st plural take *e, while 3rd singular, 2nd and 3rd plural take *o.

What does this mean? That the Bretons (or maybe the Kelts? I'm not to familiar with the Celtic languages) made an interesting innovation which made use of the seemingly meaningless existence of the thematic vowel to form the future tense. It's unlikely that this has anything to do with how Indo-European handled it's future, but it's still a very fun quirk to see in a language.

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.

All right, my blog hasn't been as active as I would like it to be. So, I'm going to change the way I'm going to go about this blog. From now on, I will make a weekly post on saturday. This post will analyse a sentence, or piece of text, from any language that I've studied, and of which I'm fairly confident I can inform people about.

Today I will start of with Tocharian B a.k.a Kuchean.

A small introduction on Tocharian

Tocharian is an Indo-European language which surprisingly enough, used to be spoken in Chinese Turkestan (around Kucha, hence the name Kuchean). The largest part of the texts that were found, were written in the 8th Century AD. This language phase is generally called Classical Tocharian, and most sentences and texts I will analyse will be from this period.

There are two main Tocharian languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B (TA and TB respectively). I do not have much knowledge of TA, all I know is that it already seemed to be a dying language which mostly had ritualistic uses, while Tocharian B was still alive and kicking.

The Tocharians were Buddhists, so most texts that were found were Buddhist texts.

Another interesting thing about Tocharian is that it is not a satem language, but a centum language. With in the Indo-European language family, there's one big subdivision, and that's on what the languages do with the velars.

 The satem languages merge the velars and labiovelars. While the centum languages merge the velars and palatovelars.

For a long time it was believe that this subdivision indicated a big dialectal isogloss which split the Indo-European community in a western and eastern dialectal region. West being centum, and east being satem. And then there was Tocharian, the furthest in the east of all, and a centum language. This first sparked my interest.

The text

Although I'm currently working on a Tocharian font, I do not think I'll annoy you people with it, and I will just write the texts in the standard transcription. Tocharian was written in an Indic script, and thus the transcription might look similar to Sanskrit for some people, because it was more or less based on it.

tarya akṣā-ne pudñäkte: teki ktstaitsñe srukalñe.  toṃ mā tākoṃ śaiṣṣene, mā ṅke tsaṅkoy pudñäkte. toṃ ñyatstsenta wikässiś poyśinta tne tseṅkeṃtär.

The Buddha announced to him three [things]: sickness, old-age and
death. If these would not be in the world, then the Buddha would not arise.
All-knowing ones(Buddha’s) arise here for driving out these dangers.

Analysis

tarya : three (female), meant is 3 things
akṣā-ne : announce preterite 3 singular, with an enclitic 3rd person singular pronoun. This enclitic can either be the direct object or the indirect object.
pudñäkte : Buddha, in the nominative. (though, in morphology it could also be the oblique, the main use of the oblique is to mark the accusative).
teki : sickness
ktstaitsnñe : old-age
srukalñe : death

The Buddha announced to him three things: sickness, old-age and death.

toṃ :  'these' nominative plural.
mā  : not, cognate to classical Greek 'μη'
tākoṃ : 'to be'  pptative 3 plural
śaiṣṣene : world locative. Formed by the oblique 'śaiṣṣe' with locative suffix 'ne'
mā : not
ṅke : then
tsaṅkoy : `to arise' Optative 3 singular
pudñäkte : Buddha Oblique

If these would not be in the world, then the Buddha would not arise.

A point of interest is the optative here. The optative should be considered the past tense of the subjunctive here. The subjunctive is often used for if-then clauses. The main clause in the subjunctive and the condityional clause in the subjunctive give the structure of a specific condition.

toṃ : 'these' oblique plural
ñyatstsenta 'dangers' oblique plural (although in for could also be nominative plural).
wikässiś : 'to drive out'  infinitive with allative suffix(expected is "wikäṣtsiś" which But the cluster ṣts is always found as sts, or ss, as in this case). Allative here giving 'in order to drive out'
poyśinta  : All-knowing one in plural. Meaning 'Buddha' comes from po 'all' + aiśi Nomen Agentis of 'to know'.
tne : here, though a more wide translation would be 'thus' or 'so'.
tseṅkeṃtär. 'To arise' present 3rd person plural (Medium)

All-knowing ones(Buddha’s) arise here for driving out these dangers

Feel free to ask any questions.