The Great Macrofamily thread: Indo-Uralic, Altaic, Eurasiatic, Nostratic etc.

[Salmoneus]

Italo-Albanian?

The Albanian language traditionally spoken in Italy. Arbereshe.

[mèþru]

Oh. I know of Arbereshe, I thought it was reference to some idea of an Italic and Albanian clade within Indo-European

[mae]

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[Linguoboy]

Sure, there's a reflexive form u, but why would a reflexive replace the 1SG.NOM? Is this attested anywhere else? And is there any explanation for /u/ in the Hittite 1SG.NOM?

Myself, I can't imagine such a thing ever happening.

I can think of two examples of reflexives or similar becoming the first person (nominative, where it applies) pronoun. In Japanese this can happen with jibun, which is normally a generic reflexive. Another is in some Oceanic languages like Bunama, where the first person pronoun is taugu, etymologically 'my person' > (myself?) > 'I'.

What's the etymology of Japanese watashi? ISTR that it once meant "self".

Mandarin Chinese has 咱 zán which is a contraction of 自家們 "self house COLL". 自家 zìjiā by itself is literary and dialectal for "oneself".

[WeepingElf]

Thinking more ... I need an update on the "Kurgan migrations" proposed by Gimbutas. She proposed three:

1. Into the Lower Danube valley, ca. 4500 BC.
2. Into the Balkan Peninsula, ca. 3800 BC.
3. Into just about every direction, ca. 3200 BC.

What is the current state of knowledge about these? Are they still up to date? Perhaps dated differently today? (Many archaeological events have a tendency of being dated deeper now than a few decades ago.) And which language family arose from which? So far, I guess that Anatolian was from #2, when this was pushed into Anatolia by #3, that a lost branch, spoken by the Bell Beaker people, was from #1, later pushed westward by #3, and that the Non-Anatolian IE languages are from #3. But I am not sure about this at all.

Also, it seems as if #1 and #2 were characterized by Y-DNA haplogroup R1b, and #3 by haplogroup R1a. As I observed yesterday, this may have been due to different social dynamics, #1 and #2 led by R1b-dominant noblemen, and #3 led by R1a-dominant common men or social climbers.

[mèþru]

I don't think there is or ever was a consensus on dates or direction like there is for the Kurgan hypothesis in general

[KathTheDragon]

And is there any explanation for /u/ in the Hittite 1SG.NOM?

Kloekhorst posited that the *u was levelled into the nominative from the accusative ammuk, which itself acquired its *u from the 2sg non-nominative stem *tu-

[Pabappa]

Other end of the planet but ... I wanted to post a link to this:

Austronesian/Ongan

PDF

It's the same woman who linked IE to Basque.... I guess she has a bit of a reputation as an optimist?

[jal]

why would a reflexive replace the 1SG.NOM?

Because it refers to the self?


JAL

[WeepingElf]

I am growing increasingly doubtful of the idea that there were two early western expansions from the PIE homeland, both characterized by R1b, one leading to Anatolian IE, the other to Bell Beaker. These probably were two prongs of one movement into the Lower Danube region which then forked into Bell Beaker and Anatolian. So one earlier movement to the west, carrying the "nobleman" haplogroup R1b, and one later one in all directions, carrying the "common man" haplogroup R1a. And "Aquan", the hypothetical language of the Bell Beaker people, would be a sister of Anatolian.

This would mean that Old Albic (which represents a daughter of Aquan) has the same right of being classified as an IE language as Hittite! I should perhaps adjust a few bits in it, but actually, it is not much farther removed from Early PIE than Tocharian is from Late PIE, as I have already worked most Early PIE features (i.e., common to Hittite and Late PIE) into it, and the remaining disparities can be ascribed to innovations within the history of Old Albic after the split from Anatolian.

[Ketsuban]

What's the etymology of Japanese watashi? ISTR that it once meant "self".

It's an abbreviation of watakushi, which (source) originally meant "private, limited" (examples: 私雨/わたくしあめ "rainfall in a limited area", 私金/わたくしがね "personal money" and 私する/わたくしする "take something public for personal or private use").

[Travis B.]

Are Japanese "pronouns" really true pronouns though - they diachronically and synchronically sure do not pattern with pronouns in most languages?

[Linguoboy]

Are Japanese "pronouns" really true pronouns though - they diachronically and synchronically sure do not pattern with pronouns in most languages?

Define "true pronoun" and I'll tell you.

Personal pronouns are probably best treated as an open class in Japanese, but that's not unusual in East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, even in SAE, where personal pronouns are treated as a closed class, you have examples of ones derived from abstract nouns.

[Travis B.]

Are Japanese "pronouns" really true pronouns though - they diachronically and synchronically sure do not pattern with pronouns in most languages?

Define "true pronoun" and I'll tell you.

Personal pronouns are probably best treated as an open class in Japanese, but that's not unusual in East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, even in SAE, where personal pronouns are treated as a closed class, you have examples of ones derived from abstract nouns.

I should note that the guys in you guys, which is synchronically definitely a pronoun, directly derives from the first name of a certain Guy Fawkes.

Other examples of pronouns incorporating what used to be independent words are Spanish vosotros (where otros is literally "others") and Dutch jullie (historically je/jou lui, where lui means "people" and is cognate with German Leute).

[KathTheDragon]

I should note that the guys in you guys, which is synchronically definitely a pronoun, directly derives from the first name of a certain Guy Fawkes.

Source? That sounds unlikely and I'd like to see how it could possibly be true.

[Travis B.]

I should note that the guys in you guys, which is synchronically definitely a pronoun, directly derives from the first name of a certain Guy Fawkes.

Source? That sounds unlikely and I'd like to see how it could possibly be true.

guy (n.2)

"fellow," 1847, American English; earlier, in British English (1836) "grotesquely or poorly dressed person," originally (1806) "effigy of Guy Fawkes," leader of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up British king and Parliament (Nov. 5, 1605). The effigies were paraded through the streets by children on the anniversary of the conspiracy. The male proper name is from French, related to Italian Guido.

Etymology 1
Named from Guy Fawkes (1570–1606), an English Catholic hanged for his role in the Gunpowder Plot.

[Tropylium]

While IE and Uralic are geographically closer to each other than to other "Mitian" languages (if we assume, as most linguists do, that Turkic, the next closest neighbour, originated somewhere around the Altai mountains), but that still of course does not mean that they are most closely related. They may constitute two different westward movements which are not especially close in the family tree. But you have to start somewhere ...

I continue to think that the main benefit of IE–Uralic comparison is that both PIE and PU are simply a lot older than anything else putatively "Mitian". Even so far poorly reconstructed units like Macro-Mongolic (with Khitan, etc.), Chukotko-Kamchatkan (the existing "reconstruction" is just Proto-Chukotkan with Itelmen assumed to be always innovative), Proto-Dravidian proper (only Southern Dravidian is well-known; Northern Dravidian may be an outgroup or two and Central Dravidian needs sorely basic field research) are only about as old as some obvious subgroups like Finnic or Germanic. Trying to compare these with each other is kind of like trying to reconstruct Indo-Uralic from comparing Proto-Indo-Iranian with Proto-Permic: you'd end up either with mostly false positives & not enough data to identify what are real leads. Maybe distributional analysis can help (but then again currently we can only run that on look-alikes, not on established cognates).

It could be PIE is conservative and the rest have common innovations, whether genetic or areal

That can't be ruled out, but that would mean that seven families which do not seem to form a valid node all innovated in similar directions. It is IE that seems to be the "odd man out" among the Mitian bunch (besides Chukotko-Kamchatkan, which also looks weird, of course in very different ways than IE), while Uralic looks more "typically Mitian" to me.

Chronology could also be the reason why PIE looks so "un-Mitian". The median North Asian language profile with palatals, uvulars, no clusters, no ablaut etc. looks perhaps "old", but could have regardless come about more recently than PIE was spoken: some 3k to 5k years would be easily enough. PU also dates as likely a bit younger than PIE and may therefore look "more average" among the bunch. Which is not to say I would think a PIE-like starting point is especially likely either… it could have been something else entirely. General typology allows some good guesses, e.g. probably few or no initial consonant clusters, but that runs out very fast if we want any real details.

Like Howl, I e.g. don't believe in a Great Vowel Collapse either — it is probable that some ancestor of IE had a larger vowel system, but usually this would shrink gradually rather than abruptly. The only "Siberian family" though to clearly have a small vowel inventory is Eskimo with *i *u *ə *a (possibly but not necessarily extensible for Eskimo-Aleut), all others are more complicated.

One hypothesis of mine is that Proto-Uralic also had ablaut (…) even in the current reconstruction of Proto-Uralic, I can find cases like PU *kala 'fish, fish net' ~ PU *kältä 'to fish with a net' ~ PU *kulta 'to fish with a net'.

They mean in particular 'to fish with a drift-net', and can be via this linked rather to *kälä- 'to wade' and *kulkə- 'to go' (this was proposed by Aikio in an old draft of his Uralic Etymological Dictionary).

[WeepingElf]

While IE and Uralic are geographically closer to each other than to other "Mitian" languages (if we assume, as most linguists do, that Turkic, the next closest neighbour, originated somewhere around the Altai mountains), but that still of course does not mean that they are most closely related. They may constitute two different westward movements which are not especially close in the family tree. But you have to start somewhere ...

I continue to think that the main benefit of IE–Uralic comparison is that both PIE and PU are simply a lot older than anything else putatively "Mitian". Even so far poorly reconstructed units like Macro-Mongolic (with Khitan, etc.), Chukotko-Kamchatkan (the existing "reconstruction" is just Proto-Chukotkan with Itelmen assumed to be always innovative), Proto-Dravidian proper (only Southern Dravidian is well-known; Northern Dravidian may be an outgroup or two and Central Dravidian needs sorely basic field research) are only about as old as some obvious subgroups like Finnic or Germanic. Trying to compare these with each other is kind of like trying to reconstruct Indo-Uralic from comparing Proto-Indo-Iranian with Proto-Permic: you'd end up either with mostly false positives & not enough data to identify what are real leads.

Yes, there is nothing comparable to PIE and PU in both time depth and quality in any other branch of "Mitian". It also seems to me that Proto-Eskimo-Aleut suffers from a similar problem as Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan: it is basically Proto-Eskimo with some fudging to get Aleut to comply with it. But then, it is basically the same with PIE and Anatolian! The PIE reconstruction found in most handbooks does not account for the Anatolian languages well, and it seems as if it describes a stage of the language reached only after Anatolian (and Aquan) has broken off. And it need not be pointed out here, I think, that Proto-Altaic, as reconstructed by Starostin, Dybo and Mudrak in their monumental two-volume Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages, shows the usual problems of macro-comparative work and cannot be accepted as established.

Maybe distributional analysis can help (but then again currently we can only run that on look-alikes, not on established cognates).

I have seen a study of that kind (running on look-alikes rather than true cognates), I think by Don Ringe, in the volume Nostratic; Sifting the Evidence, which suggested a much closer relationship between IE and Uralic than between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, though the latter three also formed a cluster. Of course, the Indo-Uralic result may have been skewed by loanwords, and there indeed seem to be quite a few of them (which are often interpreted as true cognates, but the sound correspondences resemble quite exactly the sound substitutions that one would expect from loanwords from PIE into PU). A distributional analysis on morphology (where significant quantities of loanwords are less likely) would surely be better.

It could be PIE is conservative and the rest have common innovations, whether genetic or areal

That can't be ruled out, but that would mean that seven families which do not seem to form a valid node all innovated in similar directions. It is IE that seems to be the "odd man out" among the Mitian bunch (besides Chukotko-Kamchatkan, which also looks weird, of course in very different ways than IE), while Uralic looks more "typically Mitian" to me.

Chronology could also be the reason why PIE looks so "un-Mitian". The median North Asian language profile with palatals, uvulars, no clusters, no ablaut etc. looks perhaps "old", but could have regardless come about more recently than PIE was spoken: some 3k to 5k years would be easily enough.

Yes, we may deal with a Sprachbund that emerged only long after "Proto-Mitian" has broken up (if it had ever existed), and failed to include IE, which is of course a geographical outlier. It may have developed long after even PIE had broken up, and the emergence of the "satem" phonological profile in Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian may be a weak western outcrop of this (at least there are palatals; but no uvulars, and clusters and ablaut did not disappear).

PU also dates as likely a bit younger than PIE and may therefore look "more average" among the bunch. Which is not to say I would think a PIE-like starting point is especially likely either… it could have been something else entirely. General typology allows some good guesses, e.g. probably few or no initial consonant clusters, but that runs out very fast if we want any real details.

PU is probably younger even than Late PIE (i.e., the common ancestor of the non-Anatolian IE languages). PIU may have been something else entirely, as you say. One argument in favour of PU being more conservative than PIE may be that the prehistory of PIE seems to have involved two language shifts (first from "Arwanbi", i.e. an unknown language, to Indo-Uralic in the Samara-Khvalynsk people, second from another unknown language which I call "Paleo-Pontic", in the Dniepr-Donets people when they were taken over by Khvalynsk intruders and became Sredny Stog), which would have been conducive to massive typological restructurings, while the Uralic branch of Indo-Uralic seems to have evolved in a more tranquil setting where the language was just handed down from germane parents to germane children generation after generation.

At least, the genetic patterns seem to point at such a scenario: Khvalynsk was R1b, Dniepr-Donets R1a and Uralic N1c in terms of Y-DNA haplogroups. N1c is common in Siberia, so this seems like the original "Proto-Mitian" haplogroup. Yamnaya (Late PIE) is usually considered dominated by R1b, but the samples this is based on are all from kurgans, i.e. graves of chieftains, while the common men probably were R1a. (The relationship between R1a and R1b is way too deep to be connected with the break-up of PIE.)

Like Howl, I e.g. don't believe in a Great Vowel Collapse either — it is probable that some ancestor of IE had a larger vowel system, but usually this would shrink gradually rather than abruptly. The only "Siberian family" though to clearly have a small vowel inventory is Eskimo with *i *u *ə *a (possibly but not necessarily extensible for Eskimo-Aleut), all others are more complicated.

The "Great Vowel Collapse" need not have been a single big sound change; it may have been a gradual process that began when the Samara-Khvalynsk people adopted their own version of Proto-Indo-Uralic, and ended not long before Early PIE broke up. That would be 2 or 3 thousand years for the vowel inventory to "cave in" gradually. The last merger may even have been at a time when ablaut was already beginning to emerge, which could perhaps explain some irregular o-grades for which Rasmussen invoked an "infix", or instances of *a where no *h2 is anywhere near (though the latter may just be loanwords from another language).

One hypothesis of mine is that Proto-Uralic also had ablaut (…) even in the current reconstruction of Proto-Uralic, I can find cases like PU *kala 'fish, fish net' ~ PU *kältä 'to fish with a net' ~ PU *kulta 'to fish with a net'.

They mean in particular 'to fish with a drift-net', and can be via this linked rather to *kälä- 'to wade' and *kulkə- 'to go' (this was proposed by Aikio in an old draft of his Uralic Etymological Dictionary).

Nobody says that Proto-Uralic never had vowel alternations of any sort; but they seem to have been unproductive at the time of break-up, and the question is, are they in any way cognate to PIE ablaut?

[Salmoneus]

One argument in favour of PU being more conservative than PIE may be that the prehistory of PIE seems to have involved two language shifts (first from "Arwanbi", i.e. an unknown language, to Indo-Uralic in the Samara-Khvalynsk people, second from another unknown language which I call "Paleo-Pontic", in the Dniepr-Donets people when they were taken over by Khvalynsk intruders and became Sredny Stog)

At risk of starting up the everrunning argument again: I just don't see how you can happily say things like that. This is a very elaborate and specific sequence of events that you say "seems to have happened", for which we have no evidence at all, so far as I can see.

It certainly seems likely that at some point Yamnaya spoke PIE (or a descendent or an ancestor of PIE). It's likely that Yamnaya is primarily culturally and genetically derived from Khvalynsk. But it's also the case that Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog were closely culturally and genetically related groups, who traded and intermarried. They aren't, as it were, nations, with borders and authorities - indeed, Sredny Stog has been described as a cluster of cultural traits borrowed from Europe into a steppe culture, rather than a distinct culture in its own right. Later Yamnaya seems genetically to owe a lot to both group. We don't know which group spoke which language, or how Yamnaya began. Khvalynsk could have conquered Sredny Stog; or vice versa (borrowing the cool new kurgans they found); or, Yamnaya could just be a cultural package that developed across several different, neighbouring, related cultures at the same time. They may all have spoken PIE (or closely related languages)!
And I can see no evidence at all for your "Arwanbi". Even if you insist on Indo-Uralic, the easiest solution simply has that developing naturally among eastern european hunter-gatherers. I don't see why you'd need the steppe people to start with one language and then adopt another?
Language shifts do happen, but they're not common, so it's best not to assume them unnecessarily.

which would have been conducive to massive typological restructurings, while the Uralic branch of Indo-Uralic seems to have evolved in a more tranquil setting where the language was just handed down from germane parents to germane children generation after generation.

That seems unlikely to me. They weren't noble savages!

At least, the genetic patterns seem to point at such a scenario: Khvalynsk was R1b, Dniepr-Donets R1a and Uralic N1c in terms of Y-DNA haplogroups.

It's not so simple! You can't look at an entire culture and say that it "was" one haplogroup or another. They're all mixtures. Even today, Poland (in corded ware territory) is around 20% R1b. And the number of individuals tested from these cultures so far is tiny.



And while we're on pedantry: of course traditional PIE reconstructions fail to incorporate insights from Aquan, because Aquan is a fictional language!

[mae]

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