The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread's Sequel

[dhok]

Just checking: is Cowgill the regular English reflex of *gʷowkólos?

(oh god never mind why did I decide to make a bad obscurantist pun)

[Vijay]

I don't think so. The gill in Cowgill AFAICT comes from PIE *ǵʰēy-.

[Pabappa]

You might just be able to pull it off, but note that /gʷowkólos/ is not the PIE word behind Greek /boukolos/, because the boukolos rule itself shows that the original medial consonant was /kʷ/.

[KathTheDragon]

(As we know, of course, the boukólos rule states that all labiovelars in an Indo-European word are delabialized, except for the rightmost viable one.)

Pardon?

[Nortaneous]

(As we know, of course, the boukólos rule states that all labiovelars in an Indo-European word are delabialized, except for the rightmost viable one.)

Pardon?

an exceptionally bad pun about William F. Buckley

[KathTheDragon]

I see. I've never heard of the guy.

[Frislander]

I had to look up that and I was just like "I don't care, why did I even bother?"

[Pabappa]

well, i think he was trying to make two puns, really .... it would be quite funny if boukolos was Cowgill, since the boukolos rule and Cowgill's law are both well known sound laws in Greek, and interact with each other. It was a nice shot, at least.

[Moose-tache]

I had to look up that and I was just like "I don't care, why did I even bother?"

Here is William F Buckley showing up to lecture James Baldwin about black people. Oh, and notice how perfectly he fits into the ecosystem of yawning school prats.

[Frislander]

I had to look up that and I was just like "I don't care, why did I even bother?"

Here is William F Buckley showing up to lecture James Baldwin about black people. Oh, and notice how perfectly he fits into the ecosystem of yawning school prats.

Nice to know the Cambridge Union hasn't changed a bit in the kinds of twattish insincere debates it hosts in the past 70 years (Also well done for finding a video of him speaking at my university).

Anyhow let's end this discussion here this is definitely off topic.

[2+3 Clusivity]

@Moostache and @WeepingElf re celtic pronouns. Thanks!

[Pabappa]

is the evidence for the fourth laryngeal restricted to just the single word herdhe in Albanian? given the late attestation of Albanian, its propensity for loanwords, and the word's meaning, I suspect that it's just a coincidence and may not even be inherited from the original PIE root.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstr ... B5%CA%B0is

[Nortaneous]

Albanian is also, at least judging by Orel's etymological dictionary, nowhere near as well-behaved or Neogrammarian as one would like - not only are there a great deal of loans, there are apparent random splits (*e > ie ~ je, IIRC *l, *r > l ~ ll ~ j, r ~ rr in some cases) and cases where two different reflexes are about equally probable (*sw- > v- ~ d-). So if it's just the one word, I don't think I'd put too much stock in it; and if there are many words, one could in principle just as well chalk it up to sporadic borrowing from a dialect where word-initial *h1 gave h-, since one probably needs to resort to dialect mixing anyway for the reflexes of *e. (Or maybe there's some sort of accentual deal...?)

[KathTheDragon]

I think there are cases of unetymological h- in Albanian, so this could be another case of that.

[2+3 Clusivity]

Found an interesting article on Armenian dialects with a breathy (murmured?) series with actual field work. Highlights include discussion on certain fronted vowel allophones near such series that show up as adjarian's law in other dialects. Also some minor discussion of a limited set of RUKI like effects following at least K.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... 8119665848

[WeepingElf]

Found an interesting article on Armenian dialects with a breathy (murmured?) series with actual field work. Highlights include discussion on certain fronted vowel allophones near such series that show up as adjarian's law in other dialects. Also some minor discussion of a limited set of RUKI like effects following at least K.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... 8119665848

Thank you! An interesting paper, which, while I can't follow the phonetic argumentation, confirms my opinion that the Old Armenian voiced stops were in fact breathy-voiced, thus unchanged from Late PIE. If the Late PIE voiceless stops also were aspirated (which is at least possible), all that remains of the fabulous "Armenian consonant shift" is a devoicing of the *D set of stops! This, of course, is another nail in the coffin of the glottalic theory.

[Tropylium]

Interesting points: the notion of a phonetic difference between breathy voice, which they identify in Armenian, and voiced aspiration, which they note to be common in Indic; and the observation of variable tenseness in the "plain" series. If this breathy voice is indeed an archaism (all the way from PIE or LPIE that is; the argument for breathy voice in Classical Armenian times seems watertight to me by now), then it probably points more to something like *[d̤ d̰] than *[dʱ d]. About the latter I don't know, it could be viewed as an archaism also, but just as well it could be considered a natural enhancement in response to breathy voice.

[WeepingElf]

With the Indo-Aryan languages, it is definitely a factor to be considered that there are also voiceless aspirated vs. unaspirated stops, thus forming a neat 2x2 system. A system */t tʰ d̰ d̤/ (with /tʰ/ from */t/ + laryngeal) would easily shift to /t tʰ d dʱ/ as we observe it in Indo-Aryan.

[Pabappa]

Is it possible that the three laryngeals were all neutralized when occurring immediately after a voiceless stop in PIE? I remember seeing in an etymological dictionary from the 1980s a four-series setup for PIE, with the voiced aspirates given as /bh dh gh gʷh/ (dont remember if they had palatovelars too) and the voiceless ones given as /pH tH kH kʷH/. In other words they analyzed PIE as having phonemic voiceless aspirates, while acknowledging that they were different in composition from the "stuck together" voiced aspirates.

[2+3 Clusivity]

The 2*2 system of middle and modern Indo Aryan languages was not quite as solid in old Indo aryan. The voiceless aspirates were a bit tenuous in OIA and even more so in proto Indo Iranian. Even within OIA, the voiced aspirates had near holes in the palatal stops. Indo aryan languages of all ages strongly disfavor voiced aspirates fricatives and disprefer affricates a bit too. The 2*2 system really only seems to solidify in middle Indo Aryan.

The following is, I think, one of the best sources on old indo-aryan pholonolgy. Note that the voiceless aspirates are often simply found in or descend from clusters with /s/ or /*H/. See for example the various words with /sC/ going to /sCh/.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/H ... 63f4e4e7ad

Also, looking elsewhere in indo-iranian, the middle north east Iranian language Khotanese had voiceless aspirates. Many of the words with those, aside from Sanskrit/prakrit loans, have difficult etymologies or appear to be from clusters too. I think Kümmel writes about this, but let me find the source.