Rate of linguistic change in IE languages

[Otto Kretschmer]

What caused increased rate of change in IE languages post 500 BC roughly?

IE in 3500 BC had 7 cases and a complex verbal system. Proto Celtic and Indo Iranian had 7 cases by 500 BC, Proto Germanic 7 as well by 200 BC, Latin had 6 cases by ca. 70 BC. So, fot over 2500 years morphology remained roughly intact in most IE branches


By ca 1300 AD most Indo Iranian Germanic, Romance and Celtic languages have drastically simplified nominal morphology and significantly simplified verbal morphology as well. So in approx 2000 years there was several times more change than in previoud 2500.

Why is that?

[Nortaneous]

Good question, but surely one would want to bring Indo-Iranian into it. (Which nobody ever does for anything involving IE, with the exceptions of Sanskrit and Avestan.)

From Encyclopedia Iranica, it sounds like the Iranian languages replaced the dative with the genitive and extended the use of this new genitive-dative to a general oblique function. Earlier stages of Iranian with more case contrasts are attested - in particular, Yaghnobi has the common Iranian direct-oblique system, but its apparent ancestor, Sogdian, still showed signs of a six-case system.

The replacement of the dative with the genitive is also seen in Tocharian. (And it's considered to be a feature of the Balkan sprachbund.) Which Indo-European cases do the Tocharian languages continue? The sum of TA and TB cases is:

- nominative, continued from PIE
- vocative (TB only), continued from PIE and lost in TA for entirely phonological reasons
- genitive, continued from PIE and partially replacing the dative (possibly there was an earlier stage where the genitive thoroughly replaced the dative before the TB expansion of the perlative), although the origin of TA GEN.PL -śśi is unclear. Considering the full paradigm in both languages - TB -ntse, -nts(i) < *-nesos, *-nesom, TA -s, -śśi - it's possible that this is another piece of evidence for *dʲ > TA ś, TB ts.
- accusative, continued from PIE
- instrumental (TA only), of unclear origin (the form -yo suggests *-yaw / *-yow)
- perlative, postpositional in origin and reconstructible to PToch, from *ā with -s- in TB due to metanalysis in plurals: *-ns-ā > *-n-sā
- comitative, of unclear origin but with non-cognate TA and TB forms, so not reconstructible
- allative, postpositional in origin and reconstructible to PToch, from *de according to Adams but wouldn't this be phonologically irregular? Early TB -śc, TA -c - the TB sibilant can be explained with metanalysis parallel to the perlative (and later TB -ś is a phonological development), but the presence of -c in both languages suggests instead *-(t|dʰ)(e|i) - *de should give -ś, or TA -ś, TB -ts, or something like that.
- ablative, inherited from PIE but non-cognate! According to Adams, TB -meṃ is "from the PIE ablative plural *-mos, rebuilt after the accusative plural as *-mons", and TA -äṣ ( / -aṣ / -āṣ) is from *-d/ti and cognate to Hittite ablative -z, but this looks phonologically irregular - ṣ should be from palatalization of *s, not of *t or *d
- locative, postpositional in origin and reconstructible to PToch, from *h1en
- causal (TB only), actually a rare and entirely fossilized adverbial formulation rather than a case, but possibly continuing the PIE instrumental

So PToch likely continued the PIE nominative, vocative, genitive, accusative, and ablative, and possibly also the instrumental, although it could've been fossilized even then. (This is in principle something it may be possible to gather evidence for or against - the "causal case" only appears on six words, so their etymologies could be examined. The causal would've had to have been productive at the time the words came into common use.)

I don't know what happens in Indic.

But the case systems of most of the "classical" IE languages were already somewhat reduced - excluding the vocative, Greek had four cases and Latin had five, whereas PIE is reconstructed with around seven. So it seems reasonable to say that most of 'Brugmannian' Indo-European had a tendency toward loss of cases, which was arrested in Tocharian and to some extent northern Balto-Slavic due to Uralic influence. The real question is why Proto-Celtic (allegedly) continued so many cases for so long... maybe that's where the Basque monks come into it.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Indo Iranian did occur to me but it did not to include it in the list... Strsnge. Gonna fix it

[WeepingElf]

In Indic, AFAIK pretty much the same happened as in Iranian. The dative was abandoned in favour of the genitive; later, it all caved in and left behind just two cases, the direct (< nominative) and the oblique (< genitive), though some languages developed new case suffixes from the agglutination of postpositions. Also, many languages developed ergativity in perfective/past tense clauses (the same happened in many Iranian languages, though not in Persian).

One can divide the modern IE languages roughly into three large areas plus three smaller ones. The large areas are Western Europe (Germanic and Romance) where the case system broke down in most languages (it is currently happening in German), Eastern Europe (Baltic and Slavic) where it did not, and Indo-Iranian, as discussed above. Of the Eastern European languages, Lithuanian is about as close to PIE as Classical Latin; Latvian is a bit less conservative; in the Slavic languages, the appearance of the endings was altered much by sound changes, and some forms AFAIK aren't ancient, but the overall typology remained intact. The three smaller areas are Insular Celtic, which went weird ways (some blame that to a Semitic substratum, but that's IMHO bullfrogs); the Balkan Sprachbund, with its own typological profile somewhere between the Western and the Eastern European type; and the Caucasus (Ossetic and Armenian), where a more agglutinating typology emerged. Ossetic has innovated a whole lot of new cases by agglutination; Armenian has shed the old plural cases in favour of agglutinating forms (uniform plural suffix + singular case ending; the same change happened in the neighbouring non-IE Georgian language). The maddeningly complicated tripartite verb aspect system of Late PIE has been simplified everywhere, as far as I can tell. Even in Lithuanian.

[Kuchigakatai]

In Indic, AFAIK pretty much the same happened as in Iranian. The dative was abandoned in favour of the genitive; later, it all caved in and left behind just two cases, the direct (< nominative) and the oblique (< genitive), though some languages developed new case suffixes from the agglutination of postpositions. Also, many languages developed ergativity in perfective/past tense clauses (the same happened in many Iranian languages, though not in Persian).

I'd like to hear more about the chronology of this, though. 17th-century Punjabi, at the time of the composition of the Guru Granth Sahib, still had four productive cases: direct<nominative, oblique<genitive, vocative, locative-instrumental, and maybe also the ablative<new formation(?) (I don't remember well where I read this, and can't immediately find it again). The latter two are now vestigial for sure, especially the ablative, tending to appear only in a few nouns in established expressions (compare the vestigial genitive plural -or (< Latin -ōrum) in 12th-century Old French (francor, ancienor < franc-ōrum, anteān-ōrum), but it seems complex case systems may have survived until pretty late, unless Punjabi is an outlier.

[Otto Kretschmer]

What features does PIE need to develop to be more like Turkic languages and stubbornly maintain its declensions and conjugations for millenia?

[WeepingElf]

@Kuchigagatai: I don't know much about the chronology, but the collapse of the PIE case system, after some simplifications in the early Middle Indic period (c. 500 BC), seems to have happened in the Late Middle Indic period around 500 AD, if I remember my source right. Of the Punjabi cases, only the direct and the oblique seem to be straightly inherited from the Old Indic nominative and genitive cases, and the others later innovations, but I am not sure.

@Otto Kretschmer: "Stubbornly maintaining" the PIE declensions and conjugations and "developing more like" Turkic languages seem to be mutually exclusive to me, as Turkic is characterized by very regular agglutination while the PIE declensions and conjugations are heavily fusional. Or do you mean something like Turkic-like vowel harmony atop the IE inflections? That is certainly doable, in fact I have tried something like that once but never developed it further, even if my model was Uralic rather than Turkic, which however is not really that far in terms of vowel harmony.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Can PIE inflectional endings detach and start acting in an agglutinative manner? It happened in English with the Saxon genitive which ended up being a suffix

[WeepingElf]

Can PIE inflectional endings detach and start acting in an agglutinative manner? It happened in English with the Saxon genitive which ended up being a suffix

Happened in Armenian - the singular cases are descendants of the PIE ones (though much altered by sound changes), but the old plural cases have been shed in favour of a uniform plural marker + singular cases. (The same thing happened in the neighbouring non-IE language Georgian, BTW.)

[Linguoboy]

Can PIE inflectional endings detach and start acting in an agglutinative manner? It happened in English with the Saxon genitive which ended up being a suffix

In Modern Irish, you even have an example of a verb ending (1P -mid) detaching and becoming an independent subject pronoun (muid "we") in Ulster and Connacht.

[Richard W]

@Otto Kretschmer: "Stubbornly maintaining" the PIE declensions and conjugations and "developing more like" Turkic languages seem to be mutually exclusive to me, as Turkic is characterized by very regular agglutination while the PIE declensions and conjugations are heavily fusional. Or do you mean something like Turkic-like vowel harmony atop the IE inflections? That is certainly doable, in fact I have tried something like that once but never developed it further, even if my model was Uralic rather than Turkic, which however is not really that far in terms of vowel harmony.

Cappadocian Greek (a natlang) does vowel harmony and, allegedly, agglutinative declension.

[Moose-tache]

So in approx 2000 years there was several times more change than in previoud 2500.

I'm not sure I agree with this analysis. For one thing, we can only reconstruct what is extant or at least apparent in its impact in attested languages, so it's tricky to say how much change occurred between 2900 BC and 800 BC. But we'll leave that aside since we do have a pretty good image of what PIE looked like.

The larger issue is that "change" does not mean the presence or absence of categorical features. If you look at modern Irish and modern Welsh, for example, the former retains noun cases while the latter does not. But Irish has not "changed" less. It has undergone massive sound changes, including final syllable losses that are parallel with the changes in Welsh. The noun cases system in Irish is hanging on by a thread, and shows signs of further deterioration in the colloquial language. One day we may pass the tipping point and noun case disappears entirely, but that will be the culmination of changes that have been happening for millennia, not a discreet event.

When it comes to PIE, we can see plenty of change occurring during the unattested time you point to. If we look at Proto-Balto-Slavic, for example, it has several noun cases, but there is almost no evidence for any PIE TAM systems remaining intact on PBS verbs. There must have been an s-subjunctive at some point, but its form and usage can't be reliably reconstructed since it didn't survive in most BS languages. PIE stress was rearranged; an entire grammatical number was lost; any productive reduplication in PIE became a relic at best. Plenty of morphological change took place, it just wasn't enough to bring PBS over the tipping point of losing most of its noun cases.

[WeepingElf]

@Otto Kretschmer: "Stubbornly maintaining" the PIE declensions and conjugations and "developing more like" Turkic languages seem to be mutually exclusive to me, as Turkic is characterized by very regular agglutination while the PIE declensions and conjugations are heavily fusional. Or do you mean something like Turkic-like vowel harmony atop the IE inflections? That is certainly doable, in fact I have tried something like that once but never developed it further, even if my model was Uralic rather than Turkic, which however is not really that far in terms of vowel harmony.

Cappadocian Greek (a natlang) does vowel harmony and, allegedly, agglutinative declension.

Yes. I did not mention it because I knew too little about it, namely only what the English and German Wikipedias have to say about it.

[Richard W]

When it comes to PIE, we can see plenty of change occurring during the unattested time you point to. If we look at Proto-Balto-Slavic, for example, it has several noun cases, but there is almost no evidence for any PIE TAM systems remaining intact on PBS verbs. There must have been an s-subjunctive at some point, but its form and usage can't be reliably reconstructed since it didn't survive in most BS languages. PIE stress was rearranged; an entire grammatical number was lost; any productive reduplication in PIE became a relic at best.

Are you saying that Old Church Slavonic reinvented its dual? It has it in both nominal and verbal declension.

[Zju]

Slovenian and Upper Sorbian both have dual as well.

[Richard W]

Why is that?

The old explanation is that the terminations, and more particularly their distinctions, simply wore out. This may have been helped by a widespread shift from a pitch accent to a stress accent.

[Linguoboy]

But Irish has not "changed" less. It has undergone massive sound changes, including final syllable losses that are parallel with the changes in Welsh.

Not to mention a phonological distinction between palatalised and unpalatalised consonants exactly parallel to that found in East Slavic but unlike anything found in the languages historically in contact with Irish

The noun cases system in Irish is hanging on by a thread, and shows signs of further deterioration in the colloquial language. One day we may pass the tipping point and noun case disappears entirely, but that will be the culmination of changes that have been happening for millennia, not a discreet event.

Moreover, the existing noun declensions have been greatly reshaped by analogy. This is most evident in plural formation (as in Welsh, there's a lot of extension of syllables lost from singular forms to create "weak" plural endings) but analogical reshaping of genitive forms is also common as is replacement of nominative/accusative forms with historical dative forms. You can see an example of the latter in the contrast between Éire, the official name of the Republic in Irish, and Éirinn go brách, which reflects popular usage in the dialects of Connacht.

Does anyone else think that analogical reshaping and extension tend to get ignored in discussions of morphological conservatism? As long as inflections persist, a lot of linguists seem willing to handwave the fact that they don't necessarily attach to the same lexemes.

[Otto Kretschmer]

So what if in late PIE the endings detached and became agglutinative? Both the verbal and nominal ones

[alice]

Is there any realistic way to actually *quantify* linguistic change and reduce it to a number?

[Otto Kretschmer]

Is there any realistic way to actually *quantify* linguistic change and reduce it to a number?

You can calculate average rate of linguistic change and vocabulary replacement. It was calculated that relative to Old Norse, Norwegian is 800 years old while Icelandic is only 200 years old.