20 posts tagged “sanskrit”

After discussing Tibeto-Burman prefixes, and touching upon the *s- prefix in Tibeto-Burman, I sort of ran into the Indo-European s-mobile again.

For those unknown to the s-mobile, it is a unexplained element *s that seems to optionally appear in front of words. There are several words even in English today that form an s-mobile pair. For example melt besides smelt with some differentiation in meaning but not much.

I have been pondering about the origin of this s-mobile for some time now, it is something that will occasionally bug the mind of any Indo-Europeanist, only to leave them confused and dissatisfied without a proper answer. I too, do not have a proper answer, but I have a little theory that I'd like to explore.

Several ideas have been explorer in the past. Some say it is simply an irregular shift of *s/_C > ø. I don't like irregular shifts that are as wide-spread as this shift is, since it is found in every single branch of Indo-European. If there was a shift that never became particularly popular, I'd at least like to see one of the branches that got rid of it completely.

Another explanation that has been explored by some, is that it might be the s-prefix as found in Semitic languages, which often has a causative meaning. This explanation would be very nice if all s-prefixed verbs could be explained as Semitic loanwords. The problem with this theory is though, that the s-mobile seems to appear in front of nouns as well.

As an example we find the Dutch stier 'bull' and Old English stêor OHG stior. In Old Norse we find the s-less form þjôrra. It won't come as a surprise to anyone that this word is related to Lat. taurus and Gr. ταῦρος. This seems to be a very early loan from Semitic. Arabic has ṯawr. It can't have gone in the other direction because Semitic had access to a t so there would be no reason to replace Indo-European *t with *ṯ. It should be noted that this s-mobile appears in Indo-European, but is absolutely impossible to find in Semitic. This fact led me to think that it must have been some sort of productive suffix in Indo-European.

If I were trying to connect Indo-European with Sino-Tibetan I wouldn't have hesitated to say that the PIE *s  is the animal prefix in PST *s. But since such a claim would make me look like a maniac, I will not even go into that, but the resemblance is just a funny coincidence which I wanted to mention.

Now then, we have the strange situation of an element *s that can appear both before verbs and nouns. I asked myself what kind of element can appear before verbs and nouns in Indo-European. And then I realised, that, although only very productive in Graeco-Aryan, Indo-European has a lot of prefixes that can be place before verbs and nouns. Elements such as Skt. pra-, su-, a-, apa- etc. which all have direct reflexes in Greek as well.

So what *s is a prefix like this as well? The s-mobile sometimes seems to give a somewhat intensifying meaning to verbs (although I should really once look into the semantics of that, but this is what is often claimed).

I was wondering if maybe, the *s is a strongly reduced form of the prefix *h₁su- which yields su- in Sanskrit and  εὐ- in Greek. Semantically it would make sense. smelting is then 'well-melting'. And a stier would be a 'good-bull'. If this reduced form really does come from a reduced form of *h₁su- it would explain why this prefix is not found in any other languages but Graeco-Aryan languages, since the *s would be that form. Why both forms occurs in Graeco-Aryan though, remains unexplained.

Although the idea is pretty nifty, I'm still very hesitant about this hypothesis. Can pretonic *u really reduce to schwa and then disappear completely? Do we have precedent of this? And then there's the laryngeal. Although the reflex of it wont be commonly found in languages, you would expect indirect evidence of lengthened vowels before an s-mobile in Vedic Sanskrit. As far as I am aware, this does not exist, but it is definitely worth looking into. If I can indeed find indirect evidence in Vedic, I'll be a lot more confident about this hypothesis.

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.

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!

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.

No, scirpture was not a typo, but a display of an odd sense of humor.

Anyway, I just thought I'd give a little update on a possible subject for my Bachelor Scripture. Ah while ago I already mentioned in passing the odd correspondence between the verbal roots *gʰrebʰ- 'to grab' and *kerp- 'to pick'. I think these two roots might be a result of lexicalisation of one root that split into two gradation groups. The fact that there also is a schwebeablaut (that is a full-grade vowel that is not always in the same position within the root) seems to indicate a certain correlation between consonant gradation and accent shifts.

Outside of the verbal system we find another word that curiously seems to display such a gradation and that is *ḱerd- 'heart', while in Sanskrit we find hṛd- and in Avestan we find zərəd- which both seem to go back to *ǵʰrd-, and then there's the Sanskrit śrad- (notice the schwebe ablaut!) which in combination with dhā- 'to give' give a lovely indo-european experession also found in Latin Credere 'to believe'. This form seems to go back to *ḱred-.

I'm not sure if I can collect enough material to make a sound point yet, but I'm currently surveying the verbal roots of the Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben with the computer, and if all goes well all roots that might be elligible should roll right out.

If this works though, Kortlandt will have a much stronger point with his vowel gradation. So far he seems to have only the correspondence between Accent and consonant grades, but no proof that there was actual paradigmatic shifting within one root.

Seems like a fun enough subject doesn't it?

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.

One of the bigger mysteries of the Indo-Iranian branch is its reflexes of the Indo-European *l. As a rules all *l's become *r. In the Iranian branch this is well attested; Avestan, Old and Middle Persian all have this regularly. Then all of a sudden in Modern Persian this /l/ starts showing up again in etymologically logical places. How did this happen? I have no idea. I'd rather not tuch on the Iranian branch right now, since I know nothing about it.

I know slightly more about the Indo-Aryan branch though. Here also as a rule all *l's change into *r, creating a sort of 'Japanese-like' Indo-European as I like to see it. In Vedic Sanskrit, especially the Rig Veda, there's next to no /l/'s, even words that in Classical Sanskrit have an /l/, still reliably have an /r/ in Vedic.

aram ~ alam 'enough'
roman ~ loman 'hair on the body of men and beasts'
rabh- ~ labh- 'to receive'
ramb- ~ lamb- ''to hang down'
rikh- ~ likh- 'to write'

And the list goes on endlessly. A bit too often for my liking, the 'newer' form retains a historical *l, while it does happen that a etymological *r becomes an *l, this is not quite as common.

An example of that is the root kḷp- 'to be in order' for example (the only root with a vocalic l) which is often compared to Latin corpus.

So as time progresses, Sanskrit gets more and more /l/'s, of which many seem to be etymologicaly correect, but some come from *r.

To explain this theory some people have tried to come up with dialectal change. Some say there must have been an r-only-dialect  and an l-only-dialect. And that due to influence of the l-only-dialect the r-only-dialect started using /l/. This seems like an okay explanation, but I do find it a bit problematic.

Not all roots that have an /r/ have a /l/ counterpart, and remarkably often only the roots that historically are supposed to have an /l/ get it. So other people proposed an r-only-dialect to explain vedic, an l-only-dialect for 'wrong l's' and an l/r-dialect to explain the etymologically correct l's.

This seems like a terrible difficult explanation, but I must say I can't come up with a better explanation. What I can come up with though, is a little observation I made about the distribution.

As I said there's only one verb out there with a vocalic l, and that's kḷp-, so at least at one point a vocalic l was phonotactically forbidden, and probably in all dialects. But if it was forbidden you would expect verbs to have an l in full grade and vocalic r in zero-grade sometimes. But no such alternation exists between a hypothetical root *lak that alternates between **ṛc for example. This is of course suspicious, a syllable /la/ is perfectly legal in Sanskrit, but alternation isn't liked. You could say that analogy got rid of all these examples, but I personally would expect some more vocalic l roots then.

So in what kind of roots does the /l/ appear? Well almost exclusively in roots of the type laSC- where S stands for a n, m, u, i. This really is a pretty odd restraint. But did these consonants somehow influence the /r/ to turn into an /l/ ? I don't know. But I just thought I'd point out this odd distribution. Maybe it gives someone an incredible idea to explain this odd *l.

*n stems in PIE traditionally end in *-ōn in the nominative which comes from an earlier *on-s (Known as Szemerenyi's law). While this is a very common reconstruction, much of the reconstruction is dependant on one language, Greek.

Greek n-stems indeed end in -ων, but I have my doubts whether that n isn't just an analogy from the other cases (for example the genitive is -ονος). If we look at Latin, Sanskrit and Gothic you would certainly get this impression.

For example Sanskrit rājan- 'king' loses its word final n in the nominative as rājā राजा. Also the Latin word for man homō, hominis clearly shows an absence of an n.

Lastly there's Gothic who has quite a few n stems. but the most interesting is guma 𐌲𐌿𐌼𐌰, mostly because it's cognate to Latin homō. Also guma is an n stem, its genitive is gumins and the accusative is guman.

With so much evidence that the *n disappears. Must we say that this is an PIE process? Or just a very common thing to happen in individual languages?

It is not usual for Sanskrit to lose the word final n if it is not in front of a long vowel, for Latin, I have no idea, Gothic, sadly, takes pleasure in taking off the last letter of almost any word.

It's actually quite difficult to determine when this shift then took place. But I prefer to go for the 'easier' solution, that it happened in one language, and then split into several languages retaining this development.

Assuming an isogloss after the split-up is also all but preferable. We like to see isoglosses between Greek and Sanskrit, not Sanskrit Latin and Gothic.

Another theory, which I'm not at all fond off, but that likes to pop up in articles every now and then is the 'sandhi' hypothesis.

This hypothesis claims that words ending in resonants usually had two variants, one in the form that it was followed by a vowel, and the other in the form when it was followed by a consonant. This for exmaple tries to explain the difference between the thematic Primary and Secondary endings.

*-om is the secondary ending and (according to these theorists) *-ō is the primary ending.

*ō would be the result of a pre-consonantal variant of the parent form *om, losing the m, with compensatory lengthening.
While *-om would be the pre-vocalic variant of the form *om, retaining the m, and of course, not undergoing compensatory lengething.

From there onwards, people can conclude that PIE was a SVO language, because a sentence final V would never have Sandhi variation (since nothing follows, usually). And though this idea is somewhat elegant (it allows to explain the medio-passive 3pl ending variation of *-ēr *-er *-r) I prefer to keep it simpler and going for the reconstruction of *-oh₂ for the primary ending rather than *ō.

This Sandhi idea could then also be stretched to the n-stems to explain why some languages retain it, and others don't.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, there's more readily available less exotic explanations for all these variations which have my preference.

So to conclude, my suspicion is that the disappearance of a word final *n before long vowels did indeed occur before the Indo-European languages split up, and where this *n does appear in one of its daughter languages, this is due to analogy from the other case forms.

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.