15 posts tagged “pre-indo-european”
I've been reading a lot of Kortlandt's articles lately, which are conveniently almost all available on the web. His idea's are interesting, his writing is tormenting. I spent hours trying to figure out his article Hittite hi-verbs and the Indo-European perfect which I think I understand now. To give the man some credit, he does write about really difficult subjects, which will never give birth to easy to understand articles, but a 57 word sentence should not be allowed, no matter how difficult the subject matter.
Anyway, I wasn't going to talk about that article, though it is an interesting read. I am going to talk about his article on Indo-Uralic Consonant Gradation. Why? Because it has a lot of interesting stuff, and also some stuff I have trouble accepting. But I believe he is on to something.
He first talks about the Proto-Uralic stress pattern, which accourding to him is:
(C)É(C)-CE(C)-CÈ(C)-CE(C)
Where acute stand for primary stress and grave for secondary stress. Any odd syllable is considered strong, while every even syllable is considered strong. A certain Proto-Uralic system of consonant strengthening and weakening has been found. Kortlandt, completely in style, gives absolutely no examples, so I'm left guessing here what it might have looked like.
Nevertheless he mentions two rules:
1. Consonants which follow the vowel of a weak syllable are weakened.
2. Consants which precede the vowel of a closed weak syllable are weakened.
Read the article for specifics.
Kortlandt aims to transpose such a weakening due to 'strong' and 'weak' syllable to Indo-European, his implication being, that if Indo-European has it, the process must be Proto-Indo-Uralic.
For this he choses to bring up The System of Nominal Accentuation in Sanskrit and Indo-European by my current Vedic Sanskrit teacher, Sasha Lubotsky.
Lubotsky takes a look at the barytona and oxytona in Sanskrit. Barytone is the accent on the penultimate syllable, oxytone is the accent on the ultimate syllable.
Looking at the data Lubotsky concludes that the oxytona almost exclusively have voiceless consonants as opposed to voiced aspirates, whily the barytona almost exclusively have the voiced aspirates and next to no voiceless consonants.
That's quite the discovery. The conclusion that the type of consonant is influenced by the type of accent is so blatantly obvious that I feel silly for mentioning it. I wasn't aware of this distribution.
Kortlandt tries to connect this weakening to the Uralic weakening. For this he needs a third rule.
This rule is the following: An open strong syllable becomes weak and loses its stress to the following syllable, which will become strong if it is closed.
And here the article loses much of its comprihensability. Partially because he starts *o juggling through analogies, while I tend to agree with Glen Gordon that it's more probable and thus more preferable that such *o's appeared through phonotactic developments (mostly).
Also a lack of clear paradigms of his reconstructed proto-languages makes it hard to understand what is meant. This lack of giving examples is typical of Kortlandt's writing style, who will rather use a periphrastic explanation of what happens, rather than showing what happens. I guess I am more of a visual person than he is. Insights on the interpration of the rest of the article are appreciated.
I challenge anyone to figure out what is meant here.
Even if it somehow works out though, I think it's still more viable to with a penultimate stress based syncope, but one should keep in mind that a very early form of Indo-European must have had consonant gradation as a result of the position of the stress in combination with syllable shape. I need to overthink how this fits in with the penultimate stress syncope.
But before rethinking the model, I would like to understand what Kortlandt is trying to achieve, even though I might not agree. So any help is appreciated.
Sceptics to the consonant gradation due to stress, could maybe say the stress is dependant on the type of consonants, besides it being typologically unlikely this would actually make the series of stops difficult to explain, and it wouldn't have to find some really nice explanation for verbal pairs like *grebh- 'to grab' and *kerp- 'to pluck', which are a bit to similar for comfort in my opinion. And there's more pairs like it.
[Edit: I misread a bit of the article, I thought it said the third rule took place between the first and second, but it simply takes place after the two, I am still not getting the results I want though.]
So, probably to close of this year's posts I will write one more article. Merry Christmas and a Happy new year to you all.
A while ago I had to read an article of Kortlandt, something which is always incredibly interesting, but due to his writing style also means you'll read about one page every half an hour. Nevertheless it presented some interesting things.
The article I read was Hittite hi-verbs and the indo-european perfect . Definitely worth reading, though I won't get into the details right now. Actually I'm discussing the last part of the article, which was put in as somewhat an afterthought it seems.
Kortlandt proposes that the verbal affixes *-(e)i- *-(e)m- *-(e)s- *-n- and *-t/dʰ- originally were verbal elements suffixed to roots. An interesting thought, although maybe a bit hard to prove. The affix I want to specifically talk about is the infix *-n- which Kortlandt glosses as 'to lead', which means he connects it with the verbal root *neiH-.
It takes some steps of reasoning, but might be possible. We'd have to assumed some kind of reduction of *neiH- to either *n- or *nə- I assume that just like the other suffixes this must have once been a suffix, because motivation to infix verbs inside other roots is very small.
To give a small illustration of this root, let me just give an indo-european example. We have the root *bʰeid- 'to split', which in first singular would be *bʰinéd-mi, and in first plural *bʰindmés.
Let's go back a coupla of steps, and look at an early stage of indo-european, where it would still be a suffix, you would get a construction that looks something like this *bʰaid-nə́-mə(i) (*a as a placeholder vowel) and in plural we'd see *bʰaid-nə-mə́s.
Now if we look at what these two forms would look like after syncope, you would get the following:
**bʰid-né-m(i) **bʰidnmés. I think it's obvious that a cluster *dnm wasn't popular at the time, especially since RV cluster don't seem to usually vocalise, only original VR and VRV clusters. so a non syllabic cluster *dnm. It would be only logical to expect a metathesis of the n, to cure this horrible cluster, resulting in the form we know today as *bʰindmés.
Then the singular variant, we can wonder whether *dn- is a legal clusters, but at lest *pn- is like in *pneu-, so that probably wasn't the problem. But a paradigm where a suffix *ne, infixes itself in the root when unaccented, must have felt crazy to the indo-europeans (and with reason). So they moved the whole suffix into the root. giving the perfectly accetable form: *bʰi-né-d-m(i).
So, even if this suffix wasn't from an original verbal root, I'm fairly confident that it was a suffix, rather than an infix that we find in later Indo-European.
I need you, for suggestions what to write my bachelor thesis!
With over 80 blogposts to my name, almost exclusively about Indo-European Linguistics, it is time to figure out what it's going to be about. I originally started writing this blog, so that, after some time, I'd have no trouble picking a worthwhile subject to expand into a thesis. Nevertheless I'm not sure what to write.
Delving into the pre-indo-european syncopé theory is probably too ambitious. I'm going to have to finish the thesis at some point as well. It also, sadly, lacks much academic discussion, making me have to resort to 'internet sources'. and 'personal correspondence', which isn't very acceptable.
Besides that, it's probably just too ambitious. Too make a good case for the syncope theory, I'm going to have to re-reconstruct most of the nominal and verbal morphology.
Then we come to less controversial, and less ambitious subjects I could write about. Personally I'm very interested in establishing the phonemic value of the PIE *o in the accent. Currently. especially in de Leiden school of Indo-European linguistics, it is completely avoided to reconstruct an *o at the earliest stage. I don't find this plausible, and would like to, prove, or at least find indications of this *o.
Proving it by the perfect, isn't going to work, from a non-syncope approach, there is actually quite a nice explanation, which I might try to illustrated before, but was met with some opposition. I should really try to get my hands on the explanation in article form, to see how the rest of the theory is explained.
So then there's either the *o in the causatives, or mysterious *o-grades in presents (which are so incredibly hard to come by, that I wonder whether I'll find any plausible examples).
In the Nominal system there are plenty of *o's to be found, even while accented. Undoubtedly people have been able to get rid of it. But it might be an interesting subject to make a survey out of.
Though that's a whole lot of *o's right there, feel free to suggest any other subjects I could write about.
I've been working on a PDF with a reconstructed grammar and phonology of pre-Indo-European. I'm trying to be as complete as possible, which, sadly, results in very slow progress. But to keep this blog somewhat alive, I'll at least post some of the things that I have already established, one of them is a phonology.
Indo-European phonology has been highly problematic from the start, voiced aspirates without voiceless aspirates, tons of gaps; a more common palato-velar than a normal velar. It's just not very realistic. Just to give you an idea how unrealistic it looks I made a table. I reconstructed the laryngeals on commonly reconstructed places, though many Indo-europeanists leave it at 'something laryngeal'.
What a monster! There's more gaps than there are phonemes, and there's already a lot of phonemes! And I've already merged some of the catagories, fior example the *i is techincally a Palatal, not a Palato-Velar.
The first step I took is, that I established that the Palato-velars can never be original palato-velars, since it's the most common type of velar. And in any language on this planet, such a velar is the plain velar.
If the palatovelars are velars, the velars obviously can't be velars, so the probably were uvulars.
Then there's the laryngeals. The fricative line is very weird in shape. If we were to assume that *h₁ was originally [x], which is perfectly imaginable, Southern Dutch underwent the shift Proto Germanic [x] > West Germanic [h] > Dutch [h] > Southern Dutch [ʔ]. Also Cockney English went through this same shift. This leaves the Pharyngeals to simply fill up the gaps of the Labio-Velar and uvular.
Then the voiced stops were probably creaky voiced, or maybe 'glottalised' whatever that may be. And the voiced aspirates must have been 'voiced'.
If we then reparse the little table into a new model, we get a lovely symmetrical phonology which looks quite realistic, somewhat like a real language. It's almost magic.
The rest of the gaps are common. no /f/ is not a big problem. No /ŋ/ is also normal, especially since, in front of velars there's an allophone of *n as [ŋ]. Labio-velar nasals don't exist. And Uvular nasals exist, but would never exist if the velar nasal doesn't exist either.
There's very few languages that that a contrast between a labial approximant and a labio-velar approximant, so this is also realistic. And a Uvular approximant is almost unheard of.
Also if Glen gordon is right that word final *t > *s at a certain point, then word final *k > *x makes a lot more sense than *k > *ʔ.
One slight problem still remains. I reconstructed labio-velars, but considering the similarity of the way *xʷ and *χ function it is likely that *xʷ was actually *χʷ, and thus the series would be labio-uvulars. In the latest version of Indo-European this was probably also the case, but in its earliest form probably to be avoided as a reconstruction.
As Glen Gordon is currently proposing, I would not be suprised if the Uvulars turned out to be allophones of the velars in an earlier stage. But I'm a bit reluctant to reconstruct it as such yet, since I have not reconstructed indo-european back far enough yet that this becomes apparent.
Note that *y and *w, in the earliest reconstructible face do not vocalise to *i or *u ever, so there's no use to transcribe them as such anymore.
Then there's the vowels. Vowels allow me to be very short. Late indo-european gives *e, *o, *ē and *ō. I think that the long vowels are completely allophonic, at least in an earlier stage. *é and *ó existed accented, while there was no contrast in unaccented syllables. When a language only has 2 distinct vowels, you do not expect [e] and [o], but a vertical vowel system of: *ə and *a, or *ɨ and *a. I reconstruct *ə in unaccented syllables and *ə́ and *á in accented syllables. I tend to write *ə́ as *é since the fonts I use at least, do not make the most attractive schwa with combining acute accent. It shouldn't cause any confusion.
So that's it! The new and improved phonological system of Indo-European. Feel free to make any comments.
The prehistory of indo-european *s-stems is by far the most problematic class of nouns. Today during Vedic Sanskrit class I once again ran into something terribly confusing.
The word in question here is *h₂eusṓs 'Dawn', not only an entity but probably also a goddess, even in Indo-European times. In Latin we find the word as aurora in Greek as ἠώς (Homeric) and ἕώς (Attic). In Sanskrit though we find uṣas उषस्, with the root in the zero grade. I'll first discuss how I would reconstruct the Early Indo-European form, and then discuss the difficulties that arise.
In my reconstruction of indo-european the paradigm of 'Dawn' would look like this.
Nom. *χǝwsásǝ=sǝ [1]
Gen. *χǝwsǝsá-s(y)ǝ
From this paradigm the *e grade in *h₂eusṓs is incredibly hard to explain. There's never a moment in the paradigm that one would expect an accent to fall on the first syllable. If there's never any form of grading in that part of the root, there's no reason to restore it, so it can be analogical, it must be paradigmatic.
The phonetic environment itself doesn't leave room for a epenthetic *e either, since Sanskrit proves that a it is absolutely possible for that syllable to be in zero-grade.
Now one idea is, that maybe the Genitive which, in later indo-european would end up as *h₂eus-s-ós, gave a heavy enough cluster to put in the e grade, but the you would have to assume that two *s next to each other would not merge into one, which is disproves by words like *h₁es-si 'You are', which is actually found as *h₁e-si in all indo-european languages.
Another problem with the putting in the e-grade in the genetive, is that it is generally thought that Sanskrit got its zero grade from the genitive, giving a paradigm like this:
nom. *h₂eusṓs
gen. *h₂us-(s)-ós
The only other way to solve this word, is to chop of a schwa at the ende of the *s-stem suffix *-ǝsǝ, and then to get *-ǝs, but that would give a completely new *s-stem and I would be contradicting myself completely from my last blog post about *s-stems, but just for the sake of it the paradigm would look like this:
Nom. *χéwsǝs=sǝ
Gen. *χǝwsás-s(y)ǝ
Yielding:
Nom **h₂éus-os
Gen **h₂us-ós-(s)
Then there would follow major accent juggling and analogy to get the correct Nominative out.
This is a difficult subject, and I've been stalling to post this post for some time now, since I still do not have a satisfactory answer. I would like to continue to think that the *s-stem suffix was *-ǝsǝ, and not assume a second form to explain nominals like this. But inherent to this type of suffix, a full grade in the root is almost impossible to achieve in a phonologically regular way.
There might be some tie-in here with Glen Gordon's recent thoughts that in fact the thematised suffix variant besides the neuter non-thematic ones.
So *r next to *er for example. Glen Gordon argues that the latter is a later (post-syncope period) development. The only problem I have with this is that it would lead to an assumption that 'Dawn' was once inflected as a neuter noun, and was later 'thematisised'. I'm not sure how convincing I find the idea that a rather abstract thing was later thematisised; Even if it was a Goddess, which arguably is quite animate, you'd expect to still find reflexes of the inanimate phenomenon dawn itself in the Indo-European languages. Nevertheless this theory would explain the *e grade in the root with a paradigm somewhat like this
Nom. *χéws(ǝ)s
Gen. *χǝws-s-ás(y)ǝ / *χǝws-ás-s(y)ǝ
The *ǝ is put between brackets for it is epenthetic, but it's unclear whether it was vissible to the accent. This also accounts for the two variants of the genitive. If the epenthetic *ǝ was visible to the accent, you get the second variant, and if it wasn't, you'd get the first variant with an analogoes inserted á in the suffix of the genitive.
With this both the zero-grade and full-grade in the root have been established, and a later thematisation is accounted for because Dawn was a goddess and thus animate.
Nevertheless I feel like I'm cheating the system a bit by using this explanation. It's almost unfalsifiable, but sadly, also almost impossible to prove with our current knowledge.
[1] I use *χ for *h₂ because I think there's a good chance it was /χ/ and it is typographically more pleasing. Also *h₁ will be *x, and *h₃ will be *χʷ. These were the original values of the Laryngeals I suspect, but many of these shifted, *x was almost certainly [h] or [ʔ] very early on.
In this stage of indo-european there were no vocalic allophones of *w and *y, so I will no longer transcribe them as *i and *u, as I usually do, in this stage.
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.
A while ago, I had a nice chat with my Luwian and Hittite teacher Alwin Kloekhorst, whose ideas about the history of especially the Hittite languages is greatly under appreciated in my opinion.
What was this chat about? About that pesky little thing we know as the Indo-European perfect or 'Hi-verb'. He had an explanation on its prehistory. From what I understood this was mostly based on how Kortlandt sees its development.
First of all I'll re-iterate the conventional reconstruction, then how I currently reconstruct the prehistory of the perfect, and then what Kloekhorst proposed.
As an example we'll take the unreduplicated perfect *woid- 'to know'; Whether there was an early reduplication is currently still unclear to me, but not relevant in this discussion.
1sg *wóid-h2e
2sg *wóid-th2e
3sg *wóid-e
1pl *wid-mh2é
2pl *wid-h1é ?
3pl *wid-ér-s
Going by the ideas of Glen Gordon that Pre-Indo-European had a fixed penultimate stress this paradigm in an earlier stage would've looked like this:
1sg *wáid-h2ə
2sg *wáid-th2ə
3sg *wáid-ə
1pl *wəid-mh2é
2pl *wəid-h1é ?
3pl *wəid-ér-əs
As always the1pl and 2pl are a bit problematic, also to the penultimate rule. If someone can explain those away as well, I'm glad to hear.
The rest goes pretty well. Except for the 1sg, 2sg, and 3sg, where the *ə in the suffix is expected to disappear with the Syncope. Here we have Glen Gordon's Suffix Resistance Exception, which lets monosyllabic suffixes retain their *ə.
Now we get to Kloekhorst's idea, which will have to be explained in stages.
First you have the perfect in this form:
1sg *wid-h2é
2sg *wid-th2é
3sg *wid-é
1pl *wid-mh2é
2pl *wid-h1é ?
3pl *wid-ér-s
Which an accent always in the suffix (thus violating the penultimate accent rule). Later by analogy of the ablaut found in the present, ablaut is introduced into the perfect. But with an *o, because in this stage of indo-european unaccented *e was not yet possible *o thus represented a sort of /ə/.
1sg *woid-h2é
2sg *woid-th2é
3sg *woid-é
1pl *wid-mh2é
2pl *wid-h1é ?
3pl *wid-ér-s
Then the next step, another wave of analogy was applied, and that is the proces in which the accent become mobile just like in the present, but retaining the suffix vowels (all of these developments would have taken place after syncope). This gives the final forms:
1sg *wóid-h2e
2sg *wóid-th2e
3sg *wóid-e
1pl *wid-mh2é
2pl *wid-h1é ?
3pl *wid-ér-s
I'm afraid this explanation works pretty well, and it gives a plausible phonetic explanation why the suffix vowels did not syncopate (since they were actually accented during syncope). The implication though, is that, accent can't have been penultimate, or at least not in the perfect, where it really seems to be on the ultimate syllable.
It works well, and it bothers me, since it means I'd have to rethink the whole syncope picture. So before I start all over again, I would like someone to come up with a nice theory to break down Kloekhorst's idea.
If noone is able to do that, I am very interested to hear explanations why Perfect didn't have penultimates stress while pretty much the rest of the rest of the catagories does seem to adhere this type of stress. Would it mean that the perfect was introduced after the introduction of penultimate stress (much like how the clitic *so became a nominative marker after that development)? That has pretty huge implications too. Where did this perfect then come from?
Thoughts! Please! Anyone?
While several days ago I argued that Indo-European must have had the vowel *o for a long time already, and isn't somehow derivative from the *e, there's still a problem with the *o-grade in verbs.
The perfect or hi-verbs or whatever you want to call them, had an *o-grade. In the earliest stage of Proto-Indo-Euroepan, as is seen in Hittite, there were no productive means to convert a mi-verb to a hi-verb or the other way around. In later Indo-european, as is clearly attested in many languages, it became possible to create an *e/o ablaut. To motivate this radical shift of verbal semantic is incredibly difficult to explain.
You could say *o-grade verbs were simply a type of stem with an original *o vowel in the root. And the *e-grade verbs had an original *e. If just any verb could have an *o-grade and any verb could have an *e-grade though, the radical shift of the verbal system would be incredibly difficult to explain.
So that's why it is often believed that the *o-grade verbs generally had a more 'perfective' feel, while the *e-grade verbs were more 'imperfective'. But this would already imply a very early productive ablaut in Pre-Indo-European. Not that these words could shift from *e to *o, but there was a definite link between the vowel grade and the semantics of the verbs.
Now this would be perfectly acceptable, if there weren't special endings for both these types of roots. If you have both different vowel grade in the root and radically different endings to distinguish these two semantical types of verbs, the verbs have a double marking of their semantic field. Both the vowel grade and the ending.
Typically speaking any language tries to get rid of such double marking quickly, since it's terribly superfluous. When there is a double marking, as is the case here, this is highly suspicious. You would come to expect that when these classes were created, their wasn't a double marking, but a single marking, and the second marking is secondary due to phonetical reasons.
It's hard to come up with any plausible phonetic reasoning why an ending *-m/*-mi (earlier *-mə) would change into *-h₂e (maybe earlier phonetically /ʕə/). So it should be the other way around, the endings influenced the vowel grade.
Glen Gordon proposes quite a nice theory in his fantastic PDF Diachrony of Pre-Indo-European . So let us just assume that this problem is 'solved'. The assumption that the *o-grade in verbs brings up a lot of questions. I'll try to summarize them before going into them.
First, there's the question 'Why is there no *e and *o vowel distinction in the verbs, while it's clearly there in the nouns?'. Second 'Why doesn't the Middle voice, whose endings are very similar to the Perfect endings give an *o-grade?' and last but not least 'Why does a suffix like *-eie which has little to do with the Perfect semantically or morpohologically give an *o-grade in the root?'.
Those are three enormous questions, and that will probably show from the length that this post is going to be. But hold on tight, it's going to be a fun trip!
Why is there no *e and *o vowel distinction in the verbs, while it's clearly there in the nouns?
My answer for this question is actually quite simple, I have no idea. More elegantly put, I do not think it is possible for a language to technically have one distinctive vowel in the verb, while it has two distinctive vowels in the noun. If this is, in someway incredibly common in a good number of languages, please point it out to me, because I'm missing it completely.
All roots seem to have been formed from the 'dictionary form' as we like to write it these days, with an *e-grade in the root. Where's my recently established phoneme *o?!
A possible explanation could be, that there were in fact *o's in verbs, and when the vowel harmony showed up, tons of *e-grades were being turned into *o's, while *o grades stayed *o's.
Then all the verbs with Perfect endings would have an *o-grade, while the verbs with Present endings would have mixed *e- and *o-grades. Was this mixed analogically levelled, because the Perfect had all *o-grades? Why weren't the Presents levelled to *o rather than *e?
Any suggestions are welcomed. Don't feel afraid to feel stupid, I'm feeling it too, it's perfectly natural when talking about such a difficult subject.
Why doesn't the Middle voice, whose endings are very similar to the Perfect endings give an *o-grade?
Beekes reconstructs the perfect and middle endings as follows:
|
Perfect |
Middle |
|
*-h₂e |
*-h₂ |
|
*-th₂e |
*-th₂o |
|
*-e |
*-o |
|
*-mé |
*-medʰh₂ |
|
*-(h₁)é |
*-dʰue |
|
*-ḗr |
*-ro |
Personally I (for now) reconstruct these forms:
|
Perfect |
Middle |
|
*-h₂ə |
*-h₂ər |
|
*-th₂ə |
*-th₂ər |
|
*-ə |
*-ər |
|
*-ə́rs/ər |
*-r |
So if the endings come from the perfect, why didn't these endings influence the vowel grade in the root? The only viable explanation is, that the middle endings were formed only after the arisal of the *o grade after these endings had become phonemisized, rather than a case of vowel harmony. This explanation works quite well.
Why does a suffix like *-eie which has little to do with the Perfect semantically or morpohologically give an *o-grade in the root?
Here we're talking about a much later stage of Indo-European. One where Anatolian had long split of, nevertheless there's a funny *o-grade popping up in Presents stems, where the language first seems to've excluded them completely from these paradigms.
*-eie when functioning as a causative always has an *o-grade in the root. *men- --> *mon-eie. Looking at the shape of the suffix it looks like the thematic vowel *e + thematic root suffix *-ie. What I don't understand though, is why the *o-grade arose. Semantically a causative is nothing like a perfect, and phonetically *-eie is nothing at all like the common verb endings we find in a perfect. In post-anatolian languages this formation is very well attested though. In Sanskrit it was still 100% productive, and even in English we still find some forms which go back to this formation.
For example lie/lay sit/set etc.
I'd love to play around with schwa's and having them colour according to their environments, but this is a clear post-anatolian formation, a stage in which the schwa's were gotten rid of nicely. I believe some new ones may have arisen when reduplication was introduced, but these seem to've only changed into *i and *e, and there's actually no reason for a schwa to be in the root, at the point this suffix was introduced accent was no longer needed to have full grades.
Suggestions to explain this weird *o popping up are very welcome.
So there you have it, a lengthy post about the problems with the function of the verbal *o grade. Almost no answers, and a lot of questions.
Never thought it would happen, but I've come to disagree with some of the theories of Beekes. He is still considered one of the most important Indo-Europeanists over here in Leiden, but not everything he says should be taken for granted (which some people do).
His idea of the Indo-European vowel system seems wrong to me. He identifies several stages of vowels and their distribution in Indo-European.
First there's one vowel *e which appears both accented and unaccented.
The stage after that the unaccented *e develops into both *e and *o.
In the last stage the unaccented *o spreads to the accented syllables.
I dislike this theory from the start, since I find a 'One-vowel hypothesis' rather unrealistic. But this dislike should only be an indication not a dismissal, so I shall continue to elaborate.
I believe that in the first stage there were vowels *e and *o (or probably more accurately *e and *a), while eventuall neutralised when unaccented into *e, which then subsequently split into *e and *o again.
The spread of *o from unaccented to accented syllables most definitely did happen, it helps to explain alternations of suffixes like the nom sg. *-tṓr and *-tḗr. Probably the orignal paradigm alternated between accented *é and unaccented *ó, and it was neutralised both ways (some paradigms now only have *o, and some only have *e). But this analogy theory simply isn't enough to account for all accented *o's.
The most important of these unexplicable *o's are the one's we find in the perfect. There's no way to get unaccented *o's in the root in verbal paradigms. So the analogy theory would never work. Also in root nouns there's quite a few *o's flying around that don't 'just' explain themselves. Take the word *pṓds that actually has an unaccented *e in the root rather than an *o when we look at the genetive *pedós. Still though, the amount of true accented *o's are quite sparse, and it does seem that Indo-European was out to get rid of them for a while.
But even that is not certain, maybe the unequal distribution of *e's and *o's is because of a prior collapse of the vowel system where more vowels merged to *e rather than to *o.
The bottom line is, I believe there is an abundance of proof that in fact the *o didn't exclusively come from the unaccented syllables, but is in fact native to Indo-European
One might not realise it, but typologically the Indo-European verb is actually incredibly strange. Depending on your reconstruction the Aspect is marked in two or three ways, while actually marking it once would be enough and is enough in the majority of languages.
To illustrate this let me give you some examples.
*h₁és-mi 'I am' a athematic present 1.sg
*wóid-h₂e 'I know' a perfect 1.sg
Not only does the vocalism *é/ó mark whether the verb is a present or a perfect, also the ending *-mi and *-h₂e mark that the verb is a present or a perfect. This double marking is superfluous, and most languages try to get rid of such features, or don't develop it at all.
It get's even more extreme when we look at reduplicated presents and perfects. These verbs mark their aspect three times. For example:
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-mi 'I place'
*de-dórḱ-h₂e 'I saw'
Typo of reduplication, type of grade in the root and the ending mark the aspect of the verb! This is overkill to say the least. The overkill is so bad, that it makes these forms highly suspicious.
I'm not one to quickly suggest a completely different reconstruction for actual indo-european. I'd sooner accept that the currently reconstructed form were in fact 'true' at some point in time, but their unlikelihood is a strong indication to a likelier system in a not too distant past.
For example I am quite confident that the stop series T/D/Dʰ is correctly reconstructed, at least for the more eastern dialects. But this doesn't take away the fact that this system is so unlikely that it must have been something else first (for example Glen Gordon's Voiceless/Creaky voiced/Fully voiced system is quite nice).
Well the same goes for this double/triple marking of the verbal aspect. I have no doubt that this was once true, it's way to widely attested to argue the existence; nevertheless this can't have been the original situation, it's just too unlikely.
So this begs the question, how did it work? Several options come to mind. First the, in my opinion, most blatantly obvious one is that the *e vocalism in the verb is actually a form of i-umlaut. the *i of reduplication would then actually be an umlauted *ə, while the *e we find in the verb root iself is actually an *ä (i-umlated *a, phonetically probably [æ] before merging with *e). Now the question is how did this umlaut occur.
The first origin of this proposed 'i' to cause the i-umlaut that comes to mind is the *-i we find in the present endings. There's a problem with this though, we do not find this *-i ending in past tense of the present (that sounds odd, remember the 'present' is an aspect not a tense in Indo-European, it's a horrible misnomer actually). For example
*dʰi-dʰéh₁-mi in the past tense would become *(h₁e-)dʰi-dʰéh₁-m.
Nevertheless we still find this 'i-umlaut' even though there's an absense of the *i. This is still possible, one could propose that the i-umlaut was reanalysed as a marker of the present aspect. And then this i-umlaut was spread through the paradigm, even in places where techinically it wouldn't even exist.
Whether one finds this convincing, is another story. I can definitely see it as a possibility, but would not dare to call it proven, until we'd compare Pre-Proto-Indo-European with another proto-language and can confidently say that those two are related. Right now it's only a 'tendency' that can be noted. I like the elegance of the explanation though.
There's still problems with this though, as we'd also want to see a very consequent i-umlaut in the instrumental singular. But would such a thing be preserved if only one case would affect it?. There's several other cases where such an environment would occur that would cause an i-umlaut. But none of them would be as commonly occuring as in the present aspect. So therefore it's imaginable that it would only survive in the present aspect. But because of this, it makes it really hard to find undisputable proof for the idea.
Then again, if the *-i was the particle that brought about the i-umlaut, we would have to see this as quite a recent development, as this present marker is probably a later addition to mark the present. We can deduce this from the form we find in the aorist, which takes the endings without *-i (so called secondary endings), while the Aorist probably wasn't a past tense (although it is in Greek and Classical Sanskrit), but rather a perfective or 'focus' aspect, which is by no means a past tense.
Another explanation that Glen Gordon proposed in his lovely PDF of Pre-Indo-European changes is that due to Altaic influence Indo-European went through a short period where it had Vowel Harmony. The sheer coolness of this theory makes it incredibly appealing. Often though, 'cool' ideas are incredibly exotic, and thefore highly unlikely. I know of know language that 'gained' vowel harmony through intensive contact with a Vowel Harmonic language.
Maybe we could point out Old Norse as having done that. Due to exsessive i and u umlauts, words have ended up having either only back vowels, or front vowels rather often. In some way we could definitely consider this vowel harmony Except that it's regressive (The vowels of the suffix influence the whole word, while usually vowel harmonic languages have the word that influences the vowels of the suffix). Maybe we could see this appearance of Regressive vowel harmony as having been influenced by the Finno-Ugric languages with Progressive vowel harmony that were spoken in this region.
Back to Glen's Vowel Harmony. He describes this occurence like this Proto-Indo-Aegean development like this:
A brief period of Vowel Harmony, an isogloss shared with Pre-Proto-Altaic to the southeast,
may be warranted to explain the source of qualitative ablaut of *ə and *a between active and
stative conjugations. Presumably, the active conjugation which used personal endings
exclusively with *ə-vocalism (i.e. 1ps *-əm, 2ps *-əs and 3ps *-ə) and the stative
conjugation which used personal endings exclusively with *a-vocalism (i.e. 1ps *-ax, 2ps *-
at, 3ps *-a) acquired their distinctive vocalisms in the stem by way of regressive vowel
harmony emanating from their contrastive personal endings.
Note that, indeed, this is also Regressive Vowel Harmony, just like Old Norse, while Proto-Altaic has Progressive Vowel Harmony. I am not completely sure about the credibility of Glen's reconstructions, I have not yet ventured even further back than Pre-Indo-European. What I do wonder is where these proposed vowels that caused the Regressive Vowel Harmony went.
The Indo-European endings for the ə-vocalism are *m, *s, *t which go back to an earlier *mə, *sa, *ta. The last two might be innovations of Indo-European but the first person singular is *mə and not *əmə as this would ruin the Syncopation.
The same goes for the endings that caused the a-vocalism they are: *h₂e. *th₂e and *e. These go back to earlier h₂ə, *th₂ə and *ə. Only *ə goes back perfectly to an earlier *a. *ax would have an expected result *h₂. The second person singular ending is clearly built of the *t that Glen reconstructs + *h₂ from the first person singular ending. But from the forms *-ax and *-at I failt to see where those *a's went, and where those *ə's came from.
Hopefully, Glen will shed some light on this in the comments box, so keep your eyes peeled ;-).
Whether this Vowel Harmony truly developed is very dependant on how likely you think it is that Regressive Vowel Harmony arises by areal influence of Progressive Vowel Harmony*. Or even whether a language can 'gain' Vowel Harmony from areal influence at all.
After reading Glen's PDF, and his idea of Vowel Harmony, I came with an idea that originally motivated me to write this lengthy post.
In Proto-Indo-Aegean there used to be an *i and an *u which were lost due to vowel centralisation, Glen formulates it as follows in his PDF:
Due to influence of neighbouring Pre-Proto-Abkhaz-Adyghe to the east, the original 4-vowel
system of *a, *ə, *i and *u collapsed into a centralized system of only *a and *ə. In open
syllables *i and *u were diphthongized to *əi and *au respectively while in closed syllables,
they became *ə and *a respectively. Note that at this stage, while *i and *u may have
continued to exist on the phonetic level as allophones of diphthongs *əi and *au, they were
now only variants of *y and *w on the phonemic level.
From reading this was, if *ə can come from *i, then wouldn't it be possible that the i-umlaut took place much earlier than in Indo-European itself, namely in the Pre-Proto-Aegean stage. Glen indeed does reconstruct endings with *i in this period giving some credibility to this idea. On the same page as mentioned above he replies to this suggestion though. I see no reason why I'd reformulate it, while he explains it best, so I'll quote:
Yes. I presume you are pointing to a "pre-Indo-Aegean" stage then? I call that stage "Proto-Steppe", the ancestor of Indo-Aegean, Boreal (Uralic, EA, Chukchi-Kamchatkan) and Altaic. In the Proto-Steppe stage, I'd reconstruct transitive personal endings *-im (1ps), *-it (2ps) and *-i (3ps) plus intransitive endings *-uh (1ps), *-un (2ps) and an endingless 3ps. Since Steppe *u > IAeg *a and Steppe *i > IAeg *ə via Centralization, your i-umlaut idea almost works and was something that I initially thought of.
However, since Centralization and the concommitant transfer of labialization from the vowel to the neighbouring consonant is naturally heavily dependant on vocalism, I would have to oppose i-umlaut at the Proto-Steppe stage unless you can find a different formulation of Centralization that works to explain the rise of labialized consonants in PIE.
If this ablaut preceded Centralization, we would find verb stems alternating between labialized (eg. *kʷ) and non-labialized consonants (eg. *k). This is why I opt for vowel harmony *after* the dissolution of the Proto-Steppe speech area and after the Centralization rule had already taken place, circa 8500 BCE or so. This hypothesis is in alignment with Allan Bomhard's views in Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996).
So there you have it, a very lengthy, and an inconclusive survey of the theories that fly around in my head about explaining the odd occurence of the vocalism in the Indo-European verbal roots, and on top of that an explanation why it is so important to try and explain this odd occurence due to its highly unnatural superfluency to mark the Aspect.
*I just realised, that maybe I'm all wrong, and Pre-Proto-Altaic originally had Regressive Vowel Harmony. This would definitely surprise me, as the Altaic languages that I have a bit of knowledge of namely Turkish, but mainly Classical Mongolian, both have Progressive Vowel Harmony (I'm not a big proponent of adding Japanese to the Altaic family, and besides that, it has no obvious Vowel Harmony at all). If for some kind of bizarre twist of history Altaic shifted from Regressive Vowel Harmony to Progressive Vowel Harmony, I believe that this does add a bit more plausibility to the 'areal influence' theory.
