The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread's Sequel

[abahot]

On an unrelated note, I was looking at the proposed endings for PIE verbs, particularly the middle voice. I noticed an interesting pattern -- the passive morpheme seems to be *-r after a vowel, and *-dʰh₂ after a consonant. (All except for the secondary 1st person dual and plural *-wedʰh₂ *-medʰh₂, which can easily explained as being analogical from the corresponding primary suffixes. This is even more likely because none of the other secondary middle endings have the suffix whatsoever.) Given how phonetically similar *dʰ and *r likely were in the proto-language, could this be explained as PIE rhotacism from a pre-PIE passive suffix involving *dʰ?

[Richard W]

Yes, this morphology is also found in many other languages from Turkic to Eskimo-Aleut, and it is not certain whether IE and Uralic form a valid node within this macrofamily. Alas, this whole matter is very speculative.

PIU is still quite meaningful even if it isn't a valid node. Aren't the other well-recognised families rather young?

Probably the oldest widely-recognized family is Afro-Asiatic, whose legitimacy is based essentially solely on striking morphological similarities amongst its members rather than on shared inherited lexicons (and even then there are questions, e.g. I have heard that people reject the identity of Omotic as Afro-Asiatic, and furthermore I have heard of people who limit it to just Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber and exclude not just Omotic, but also Cushitic and Chadic).

I meant amongst the Eurasiatic families.

[abahot]

Quick question about PIE: in a lot of reconstructions that I can find, like *múh₂s "mouse", there seems to be *h₂ when (as far as I know) there's no evidence pointing to *h₂ specifically instead of another laryngeal. Is this just convention or is there a good reason to do so?

[Estav]

Quick question about PIE: in a lot of reconstructions that I can find, like *múh₂s "mouse", there seems to be *h₂ when (as far as I know) there's no evidence pointing to *h₂ specifically instead of another laryngeal. Is this just convention or is there a good reason to do so?

I cannot see any reason to reconstruct h₂ vs. any other laryngeal. Greek is thought to have had breaking as a possible outcome of uh₂ and
uh₃ in some cases, but this paper argues that lengthening rather than breaking is regular when the syllable is accented (The Conditioning of Laryngeal Breaking in Greek", Birgit Rasmussen), so that would not provide any evidence against h₂.

[Moose-tache]

In case anyone's still interested in abahot's original question, the map on Wikipedia is just deliberate bullshit. It's attributed to Mallory and Adams, so I went to the source. The map is clearly based on the below image, which as you can see says nothing about "earliest PIE river names." It's about Baltic river names, and the possible origin of the Corded Ware Culture.

[abahot]

In case anyone's still interested in abahot's original question

Oh, I for sure am.

the map on Wikipedia is just deliberate bullshit.

Ah. But not every speculative theory about pre-Proto-Indo-European can be right. And not every Wikipedia map can be accurate.

I'm still wondering if para-IE languages might have influenced Finnic languages, for the reasons I outlined above. Considering that archaic hunter-gatherers on the middle Volga are thought to be one of the genetic components influencing the PIE steppe herders, this isn't totally out of the question.

[WeepingElf]

In case anyone's still interested in abahot's original question

Oh, I for sure am.

the map on Wikipedia is just deliberate bullshit.

Ah. But not every speculative theory about pre-Proto-Indo-European can be right. And not every Wikipedia map can be accurate.

Yes, Wikipedia is sometimes wrong, especially where there are conflicting opinions. The map from Mallory/Adams shows the scholarly consensus on the distribution of both Baltic river names and the Corded Ware culture.

I'm still wondering if para-IE languages might have influenced Finnic languages, for the reasons I outlined above. Considering that archaic hunter-gatherers on the middle Volga are thought to be one of the genetic components influencing the PIE steppe herders, this isn't totally out of the question.

The PIE steppe herder/farmers seem to be a mixture of two populations, one related to the Middle Volga foragers from whom the speakers of Proto-Uralic descend from, and one that seems to have come from south of the Caucasus. And that's what PIE looks like: a language related to Uralic but heavily altered by something else, apparently the language of the Transcaucasians.

[hwhatting]

like *múh₂s "mouse", there seems to be *h₂ when (as far as I know) there's no evidence pointing to *h₂ specifically instead of another laryngeal. Is this just convention or is there a good reason to do so?

I don't know that reconstructing "mouse" to PIE with *H₂ is a convention. Looking at the main reference works that I can access quickly and that have a reconstruction, none reconstructs it with *H₂. Mallory & Adams reconstruct the word without laryngeal (*mūs, p. 137), although they generally work with laryngeals. They accept the derivation from a root *meus- "steal". In LIV, the same root (here with an assumed basic meaning "lift, take away") is reconstructed with an unspecified laryngeal (*meusH-, p. 445). Derksen (s.v. *myšь f.), de Vaan (s.v. mūs, mūris) and Beekes (p. 985) also have an unspecified laryngeal (*muHs-). Mayrhofer, like Mallory & Adams, assumes a laryngeal-less root *mus/mūs- (EWA Vol. 2, p. 370).
My understanding is that the laryngeal-less reconstruction is the older one and that Balto-Slavic accentuation and Tocharian point to a laryngeal being present, but there is not eneough evidence to reconsctruct the colour of the laryngeal. So my question to you is, where did you find the reconstruction with *H₂ and if your source doesn't give a reason for assumimg that specific laryngeal, what source do they cite?

[abahot]

My source is far, FAR too many hours spent browsing Wiktionary.https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Recons ... pean/múh₂s is where I found it, but I guess this incident and the other one is what I need to stop listening to Wiki* as a definitive source on Indo-European linguistics.

[hwhatting]

but I guess this incident and the other one is what I need to stop listening to Wiki* as a definitive source on Indo-European linguistics.

Yep.

[Richard W]

My source is far, FAR too many hours spent browsing Wiktionary.https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Recons ... pean/múh₂s is where I found it, but I guess this incident and the other one is what I need to stop listening to Wiki* as a definitive source on Indo-European linguistics.

Though it's always a good idea to check the discussion page on Wiktionary. Tropylium queried the colouring there years ago. No answer yet.

[abahot]

Though it's always a good idea to check the discussion page on Wiktionary. Tropylium queried the colouring there years ago. No answer yet.

What is the coloring?

[Travis B.]

Though it's always a good idea to check the discussion page on Wiktionary. Tropylium queried the colouring there years ago. No answer yet.

What is the coloring?

Laryngeals in conventional PIE theory came in three colors, conventionally known as 1, 2, and 3.

[abahot]

Oh, that coloring, sorry.

[abahot]

For all of you Indo-European enjoyers out there, what's been the latest big thing you've learned about Indo-European linguistics?

On the slow path from normal theories to bizarre and/or not-well-known hypotheses, my most recent major topic was how many Indo-European subfamilies may have been preceded where they are now by yet other, potentially lost, subfamilies.

[Zju]

I'm not sure there's anything 'big' left for me to learn about. Just the random word family etymology or external comparison.
Has there even been a new major theory in the field in the last 15 years?

[WeepingElf]

For all of you Indo-European enjoyers out there, what's been the latest big thing you've learned about Indo-European linguistics?

On the slow path from normal theories to bizarre and/or not-well-known hypotheses, my most recent major topic was how many Indo-European subfamilies may have been preceded where they are now by yet other, potentially lost, subfamilies.

Of course, there are plenty of cases of one branch of IE displacing another in historical times, such as the decline and death of Continental Celtic at the hands of Latin. There probably have been things like that happening in prehistoric times, too. It is pretty much accepted that Baltic once was much bigger than today (see the map Moose-tache posted in November in this thread), before Slavic began gnawing on it; and some scholars assume that the Old European hydronymy preserves traces of a lost branch of IE associated perhaps with the Bell Beaker culture.

I'm not sure there's anything 'big' left for me to learn about. Just the random word family etymology or external comparison.
Has there even been a new major theory in the field in the last 15 years?

Not to my knowledge. Various ideas pop up here and there (such as Alwin Kloekhorst's proposal that *h2 and *h3 were uvular stops), but most of them never gain much support. The last major new theory apparently was the glottalic theory, but that has fallen out of favour again with most IEists; so the last major breakthrough still is the laryngeal theory, and that's more than a century old, though it wasn't yet generally accepted when Pokorny edited his etymological dictionary in the late 1950s, and resistance against it did not really end until its last major opponent, Oswald Szemerényi, passed away in 1996.

[abahot]

I'm not nearly as involved in the field as all of you are, but from my readings on it, it seems like much of the progress now is turning toward uncovering the predecessors to Proto-Indo-European itself, but because this is inherently unverifiable there will probably never be a unifying breakthrough. Unless, of course, para-Indo-Europeanese is spoken in one tiny village in western Russia. Or we get a time machine.

[abahot]

Of course, there are plenty of cases of one branch of IE displacing another in historical times, such as the decline and death of Continental Celtic at the hands of Latin. There probably have been things like that happening in prehistoric times, too.

I was also thinking of "Temematic", if that's even accepted, but also Anatolian in the Balkans before Hellenic, as an example of a subfamily we already know to exist.

Speaking of which, I wonder if this is the reason a tree of IE is so hard to piece together -- of course the wave model is probably more accurate, making trees inherently inaccurate, but could it be that widespread substratal effects (as opposed to wave-model-like adstratal sound changes and loans) as successive waves of IE languages displaced one another have severely complicated what once might have been a far neater and more obvious family structure?

[WeepingElf]

"Temematic" is hardly taken seriously - the evidence is too skimpy. The point is that by finding a handful of words without good etymology that seem to match your target, and ignoring the legions of words that don't, you can "prove" just about any relationship theory you like. Just consider how one scholar "shows" how Pre-Greek (the language spoken in Greece before the IE dialect ancestral to Greek spread there) was Anatolian, another that it was an IE language with an Armenian-like consonant shift, yet another that it was related to Kartvelian, still another that it was related to Etruscan, etc.

Speaking of which, I wonder if this is the reason a tree of IE is so hard to piece together -- of course the wave model is probably more accurate, making trees inherently inaccurate, but could it be that widespread substratal effects (as opposed to wave-model-like adstratal sound changes and loans) as successive waves of IE languages displaced one another have severely complicated what once might have been a far neater and more obvious family structure?

I also think that the wave model is more apt than the family tree model. Just look at any dialect landscape - there are multiple innovations spreading through the dialect continuum, intersecting and overlapping in complex ways, such that there is no obvious way to build a family tree. And because language families once were dialect continua, it is obvious that the wave model is closer to the truth. That scholars seem to be able to come up with nice binary-branching family trees for less well-studied families is just a sign that they are operating with poorer standards: most of these trees are constructed by counting lexical cognates, which is easily misled. One family where scholars are currently beginning to look beyond that kind of method is Uralic, and it is beginning to turn out that the classic family tree with its Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic branches is wrong: The "Ugric" languages seem to be more closely related to Samoyedic than to Finno-Permic, and "Ugric" appears to be paraphyletic with regard to Samoyedic.