The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread's Sequel

[abahot]

I'm a newer member to this board but back when I was excitedly reading the entire history of this thread and its predecessor, I remember seeing your name quite a bit back then. Welcome back!

[Ketsuban]

Is there any tendency for deponent verbs in one branch of Indo-European to have deponent cognates in others? (For instance, Old Irish seichithir "I follow" is cognate with Latin sequor and Greek ἕπομαι.) Is this an inherited thing, or a coincidence?

[hwhatting]

Is there any tendency for deponent verbs in one branch of Indo-European to have deponent cognates in others? (For instance, Old Irish seichithir "I follow" is cognate with Latin sequor and Greek ἕπομαι.) Is this an inherited thing, or a coincidence?

It's certainly not seen as a coincidence; examples like sequor are normally seen as an indication that that specific verb was mediopassive already in PIE. What that means exactly depends on your model of the PIE verbal system.

[KathTheDragon]

Wow, thanks. I didn't realise anybody still cared.

We do care. Last time I posted here and saw your name at the start of the thread, I was wondering whether you were still around, maybe just lurking...

No, I'd got pretty uninterested in visiting the board, as there really weren't any threads I cared to read. Funnily enough, what got me to peek in again were my Bob post screenshots of all things. I'll probably be checking in only every so often now.

[hwhatting]

No, I'd got pretty uninterested in visiting the board, as there really weren't any threads I cared to read. Funnily enough, what got me to peek in again were my Bob post screenshots of all things. I'll probably be checking in only every so often now.

There's always a cup of tea and some pickles waiting for you

[KathTheDragon]

The pronoun *yo- IMHO may be related to the *-yo which is suffixed to the thematic genitive singular in many non-Anatolian IE languages, and may once have been an attributive marker added to clauses and noun phrases functioning as an attribute to a noun phrase.

(Commenting here rather than in the OE relative pronouns thread, since it's not really on-topic for OE relative pronouns)

I consider the genitive extension to be an uninflected relic form of the genitive adjective found across Anatolian - Hittite iugassa- "yearling", Luwian -assa/i- "gen.adj", Lycian -hi "gen.adj." (in this case, the only exponent of the genitive) - which is clearly the well-known adjective suffix *-yo- attached to the genitive singular ending. If the relative pronoun *yo- is in fact actually *h₁yo- and related to the pronoun *h₁e-/*h₁i- then it is certainly plausible that the same derivation is found there too.

[WeepingElf]

The pronoun *yo- IMHO may be related to the *-yo which is suffixed to the thematic genitive singular in many non-Anatolian IE languages, and may once have been an attributive marker added to clauses and noun phrases functioning as an attribute to a noun phrase.

(Commenting here rather than in the OE relative pronouns thread, since it's not really on-topic for OE relative pronouns)

Right. It belongs here, not there.

I consider the genitive extension to be an uninflected relic form of the genitive adjective found across Anatolian - Hittite iugassa- "yearling", Luwian -assa/i- "gen.adj", Lycian -hi "gen.adj." (in this case, the only exponent of the genitive) - which is clearly the well-known adjective suffix *-yo- attached to the genitive singular ending. If the relative pronoun *yo- is in fact actually *h₁yo- and related to the pronoun *h₁e-/*h₁i- then it is certainly plausible that the same derivation is found there too.

Yes, that is my thinking too. Early PIE had a suffix *-yo- which turned something into an adjective (which agreed with the head noun in gender, number and case just like a regular adjective, so there was a kind of Suffixaufnahme going on), and which survives most clearly in Luwian, and a relic thereof is the thematic genitive singular *-os-yo, where it serves to disambiguate it from the otherwise homophonous nominative singular.

[WeepingElf]

What do you think of the two papers discussed in this Language Log post? I think these are from scientists abusing their academic credentials to peddle a hypothesis easily falsified by the linguistic evidence they are blissfully unaware of (or worse, they know but willfully ignore because it gets in the way of their pet theories). Apparently, this is not much else than glottochronology, which has shown not to work long ago because the underlying assumption - namely that the lexical replacement rate was constant across time and languages - has been proven to be wrong (just look at English vs. Icelandic).

If you don't wish to go through the two papers, of which one is behind a paywall such that I could only read the abstract, here is the claim: The non-Anatolian IE languages originate in the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 3000 BC as most Indo-Europeanists agree on, but the common ancestor of those and Anatolian existed south of the Caucasus some 3,000 years earlier. But the linguistic data speak against that. While Anatolian indeed seems to have diverged early, that IMHO cannot be much more than 1,000 years before the break-up of non-Anatolian IE, as there seems to have been very little change in phonology - the "Handbook PIE" phonology accounts for Anatolian reasonably well. Also, according to this post on another blog which seems to get things right here, Anatolian probably is a late arrival on the Near Eastern stage, entering Anatolia only in the Early Bronze Age, not a language that had been sitting in the middle of things for 5,000 years when the Hittites started writing.

It is true that according to archaeogenetics, the Yamnaya people descend in part from a population that lived south of the Caucasus in the Neolithic - but only in part. In order to form the ancestors of the Yamnaya, those Transcaucasians mixed with a population of "Eastern Hunter-Gatherers" closely related to the likely speakers of Proto-Uralic. And who says that it was the Transcaucasians whose language prevailed, as the papers discussed above claim? The language may have been contributed by the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers but altered by influence from the language of the Transcaucasians. And indeed, PIE looks like a language related to Uralic heavily altered by a Caucasian or Transcaucasian substratum. Perhaps there is something real hiding in Arnaud Fournet and Allan Bomhard's misguided idea that Hurrian was related to IE - it may have been related to the lost language of the Transcaucasians. Alas, I know far too little about Hurrian-Urartian or the genetics of its speakers to decide whether this idea makes sense.

[KathTheDragon]

As I recall, the Hittites themselves claimed to be a recent arrival in Anatolia, having come from across the sea.

[hwhatting]

Apparently, this is not much else than glottochronology, which has shown not to work long ago because the underlying assumption - namely that the lexical replacement rate was constant across time and languages - has been proven to be wrong (just look at English vs. Icelandic).

Abstracting from whether current glottochronolgical approaches like those from the Moscow school still assume constant change (hint: they don't), this is not what the paper assumes. For a discussion of the methodology, go towards the end of this monster thread on Languagehat and read the posts by David Marjanovic. Short version: it's not glottochronology, it doesn't assume constant change, but it still has methodological flaws which make the results highly doubtful wrt to time depth. One more thing - the people curating the word lists used for this endeavour are a who-is-who of leading IEanists, so there were enough people on board who know the history of IE languages. But how much say they had on the methodological parts and on sanity-checking the results, I don't know.

[WeepingElf]

Well, this seems to be a case of good data put through a bad algorithm, and when that happens, the results are flawed no matter how good the data are. And indeed, the genetics say that the Yamnaya people in part descend from a population from south of the Caucasus (the so-called "Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers" (CHG)). But there is a second component to it, the "Eastern Hunter-Gatherers" (EHG), and these appear to be related to the probably speakers of Proto-Uralic. These EHG in turn are a blend of European hunter-gatherers and "Ancient North Eurasians" (ANE), a group that entered eastern Europe from Siberia.

So, PIE may have been either a CHG language influenced by an EHG language (which is essentially what the proponents of the "hybrid theory" claim for non-Anatolian IE), or an EHG language influenced by a CHG language (which is essentially a variant of the Caucasian substratum theory proposed by C. C. Uhlenbeck in the 1930s). The striking morphological resemblances between IE and Uralic point at the latter (most of the lexical resemblances seem to be loanwords from IE into Uralic, though). A problem with the hybrid theory is furthermore that there are agricultural terms shared by Anatolian and the rest of IE (they may not have yet had wagons, but at least ploughs, sleighs or whatever drawn by animals), and the CHG are not called "Caucasian hunter-gatherers without reason. Nobody had domestic animals drawing anything, whether wheeled or not, at the time when the hybrid theory has Anatolian diverge from the rest of IE, and yet, the common ancestor of Anatolian and non-Anatolian IE has terms for that.

[Moose-tache]

Reminds me of that time the virologists thought "Eh, this doesn't look so hard" and determined Anatolia must be the urheimat, because that's where their virus-spread software told them the earliest data points were from.

[WeepingElf]

There is a very harsh critique of the hybrid theory on the Eurogenes blog, but this is both inappropriate in tone and criticizes it for the wrong reason.

Those geneticists aren't idiots, nor are they the usual kind of crackpots one frequently meets on the Web. No, they are accomplished scientists who have done very valuable work in their discipline, but ventured into a realm where they are not experts, and made a mistake. And the theory they propose (actually have been proposing for several years, it is, for instance, already featured in a popular science book one of the authors wrote in 2019, and I think I have seen a paper from 2016) looks plausible enough to anyone not knowing the relevant details. The Yamnaya people do descend in part from a population south of the Caucasus, and the IE branch that branched off first - Anatolian - was spoken not far from there. The idea cannot be dismissed out of hand, those Transcaucasians probably did contribute to the formation of PIE, but it seems more likely that the main substance of the language stems from the other population contributing to the Yamnaya people, which apparently was closely related to the speakers of Proto-Uralic.

And the blog poster's argument does not even run this way. He has a track record of rejecting the widely accepted theory that people from south of the Caucasus contributed to the Yamnaya gene pool at all, and even to a non-geneticist like me, this seems to be no more than an idée fixe of the Eurogenes blogger, and he has used rude language in promoting his idea before.

[foxcatdog]

I've read somewhere that Anatolians only had caucasian hunter gatherer dna no eastern hunter gatherer dna so perhaps they are right.

[WeepingElf]

Be careful. What you say holds, according to my research, for the people of Anatolia from 5000 to 3000 BC (you are probably referring to this paper, whose authors don't conclude but assume that they spoke IE), of whom we don't know which language they spoke. If you assume that they spoke an IE language, concluding from the lack of steppe DNA in this population that IE originated south of the Caucasus would be circular reasoning. What would be interesting is ancient DNA from the Hittites, and apparently, we don't have any because the Hittites cremated their dead and thus literally burned a big hole into the archaeogenetic record.

[Travis B.]

Be careful. What you say holds, according to my research, for the people of Anatolia from 5000 to 3000 BC (you are probably referring to this paper, whose authors don't conclude but assume that they spoke IE), of whom we don't know which language they spoke. If you assume that they spoke an IE language, concluding from the lack of steppe DNA in this population that IE originated south of the Caucasus would be circular reasoning. What would be interesting is ancient DNA from the Hittites, and apparently, we don't have any because the Hittites cremated their dead and thus literally burned a big hole into the archaeogenetic record.

It should also be remembered that the language Hattic was not an IE language.

[WeepingElf]

Be careful. What you say holds, according to my research, for the people of Anatolia from 5000 to 3000 BC (you are probably referring to this paper, whose authors don't conclude but assume that they spoke IE), of whom we don't know which language they spoke. If you assume that they spoke an IE language, concluding from the lack of steppe DNA in this population that IE originated south of the Caucasus would be circular reasoning. What would be interesting is ancient DNA from the Hittites, and apparently, we don't have any because the Hittites cremated their dead and thus literally burned a big hole into the archaeogenetic record.

It should also be remembered that the language Hattic was not an IE language.

Yes. As were Hurrian and Urartian, spoken where those geneticists place Early PIE. This brought me to an idea which may be utterly nuts: There is this paper, which is a collaboration of a patent crackpot (Arnaud Fournet) and a less crazy but still adventurous Nostraticist (Allan Bomhard), which claims that Hurrian and IE were related to each other. But maybe Hurrian-Urartian was related to the language of those Transcaucasians who contributed to the gene pool of the Yamnaya people, and we are dealing with words from their language which made their way into PIE. But maybe there is really nothing to this at all.

At any rate, it is pretty certain that the Hittites, Luwians etc. were newcomers in Bronze Age Anatolia, arriving not long before 2000 BC, and that they came from the northwest. The northwesternmost Anatolian language, Lydian, appears also to be the most divergent one, though this is hard to say as Lydian is attested only late. See also this blog post. By the way, the map shown there, which is from one of the papers discussed here, shows an IE family tree which is utter bullfrogs: Greek is clearly not closer to Anatolian than to Italic, Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic! We are clearly dealing with people who don't know the relevant facts here.

[Richard W]

Yes. As were Hurrian and Urartian, spoken where those geneticists place Early PIE. This brought me to an idea which may be utterly nuts: There is this paper, which is a collaboration of a patent crackpot (Arnaud Fournet) and a less crazy but still adventurous Nostraticist (Allan Bomhard), which claims that Hurrian and IE were related to each other. But maybe Hurrian-Urartian was related to the language of those Transcaucasians who contributed to the gene pool of the Yamnaya people, and we are dealing with words from their language which made their way into PIE. But maybe there is really nothing to this at all.

Bomhard has recanted of this idea.

Hurrian and PIE, or at least Anatolian, do seem to have grammatical similarities, but the notion of lexical matches is not plausible.

At any rate, it is pretty certain that the Hittites, Luwians etc. were newcomers in Bronze Age Anatolia, arriving not long before 2000 BC, and that they came from the northwest. The northwesternmost Anatolian language, Lydian, appears also to be the most divergent one, though this is hard to say as Lydian is attested only late. See also this blog post. By the way, the map shown there, which is from one of the papers discussed here, shows an IE family tree which is utter bullfrogs: Greek is clearly not closer to Anatolian than to Italic, Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic! We are clearly dealing with people who don't know the relevant facts here.

And the actual family tree published in the paper, as opposed to the map, doesn't make such a claim. Rather, the relatedness of Greek-Armenian-Albanian to the rest of core-IE comes out as not well supported by the lexical evidence. The map attempts to depict them as stay-at-homes; it can't depict deep divisions.

[Nortaneous]

See also this blog post.

The claim that Tocharian, which is known to have been extensively restructured by contact with Uralic, "had little or no substrate influence as it expanded into thinly populated regions en route to and in the Tarim Basin" is bizarre. This could charitably refer to a common non-Anatolian and non-Indo-Iranian substrate, but how to square this with Adams's "Northwest Group"? Lines like "the Appalachian dialect of English is the closest the English dialect of Shakespeare as it was isolated on the frontier" also don't inspire confidence, and the reduction of Icelandic conservatism to isolation doesn't seem quite right - Icelandic is an unusual case, lacking dialect differentiation and possessing a native written grammatical and phonetic tradition and an early literary culture that could easily impact the language as a whole.

[bradrn]

See also this blog post.

The claim that Tocharian, which is known to have been extensively restructured by contact with Uralic

I didn’t know this. Do you have more information anywhere?