The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread's Sequel

[keenir]

Hmm...

I'm starting to think that we may need to borrow from physics on this matter -- particularly the structure and nature of atoms. There are, if I recall, three ways to depict an atom, and which one a person uses, is dependant upon what they want to demonstrate or convey.

That or we borrow from light itself: it both is and isn't a wave.

[keenir]

I think you’re misunderstanding what the ‘wave model’ actually means. It doesn’t mean that every branch is strongly related to every other: that would be obviously absurd. Instead, it means that many neighbouring branches can and do share sound changes, in ways that the tree model does not predict happening.

Let’s look at Hindi. Of course, English and Hindi have shared no sound changes in the past, say, 2000 years.

This has me wondering if English and Hindi have shared any sound changes in the time since English has begun to be spoken on the Subcontinent and Hindi in the British Isles. (or do they simply influence one another, creating accents?)

But Hindi has shared sound changes with its neighbours, the other Indic and Iranian languages. Indeed, it shares enough sound changes with the other Indic language that we can group them as a single group, and then enough with Iranian languages that we can be justified in grouping them further as ‘Indo-Iranian’. Further up the cladogram, Indo-Iranian shares some sound changes with Greek, Armenian and possibly others — but not enough to draw any exclusive subgrouping, which is the requirement of the tree model.

if its too few for a grouping or subgrouping, is it enough to call it areal or coincidental?

(or, if its not enough for an exclusive subgrouping, is it enough for suggesting that those sound changes were part - but not all - of their history together before they went their separate ways?)

[Talskubilos]

(although I still think "language change looks tree-like on large scales" is undeniably true).

On this point, you just need to look at the difficulties with subgrouping in families like PIE. Some people say, for instance, that Greek forms a distinctive subgroup with Indo-Aryan; others have argued for a relationship with Armenian; still others suggest similarities with Albanian. Which of these is correct? The simplest conclusion is that all of these overlapping groupings reflect different parts of the history, with varying degrees of ‘subgroupiness’ (as François calls it) depending on how much they share.

Not to speak of poorly or not attested IE languages, which only left traces in toponymy and loanwords.

[bradrn]

(although I still think "language change looks tree-like on large scales" is undeniably true).

On this point, you just need to look at the difficulties with subgrouping in families like PIE. Some people say, for instance, that Greek forms a distinctive subgroup with Indo-Aryan; others have argued for a relationship with Armenian; still others suggest similarities with Albanian. Which of these is correct? The simplest conclusion is that all of these overlapping groupings reflect different parts of the history, with varying degrees of ‘subgroupiness’ (as François calls it) depending on how much they share.

Not to speak of poorly or not attested IE languages, which only left traces in toponymy and loanwords.

Oh, sure, but even the directly attested languages show this clearly enough.

[abahot]

How would our knowledge of Proto-Germanic be different if we didn't have Gothic? I assume we might be able to reconstruct the original nominative singular ending through runic evidence, but what else might be missing or different?

[foxcatdog]

that throws out the vocative being reconstructed

[WeepingElf]

Early last year I posted on the CONLANG list the idea that the much-discussed "Caucasian" substratum in Proto-Indo-European was related to Semitic:

https://listserv.brown.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A ... ANG&P=5567

However, I have since grown doubt against my own idea. The Transcaucasian population that contributed to the gene pool of the Yamnaya culture was genetically not much like the Levantine farmers who probably spoke Proto-Semitic, and thus more likely spoke an unrelated language (though both languages may have shared Neolithic Wanderwörter). Also, Semitic does not really fit the PIE phonology much better than Northwest Caucasian. While Semitic has fewer sibilant and lateral phonemes than NWC languages, it still has more than PIE which had only one of each, and furthermore, Semitic does not have palatalized and labialized velars which do occur in NWC.

The Maikop culture, the southern neighbours of the Yamnaya culture in the northern foothills of the Great Caucasus, probably spoke Proto-NWC, a language whose phonology is unknown: while some Russian scholars have tried to reconstruct it, they arrived at a monster with more than 150 consonant phonemes, which is unlikely to be correct. (It can be found on Wikipedia.) It seems more likely to me that the Proto-NWC phoneme inventory was *smaller* than the inventories of the modern NWC languages which may have been grown by vowel losses and cluster simplification.

The genetic studies show that a branch of the Transcaucasians moved west into Asia Minor, which the adherents of the "Southern Arc theory" (according to which "Proto-Indo-Anatolian" was spoken by the Transcaucasians and only "PIE proper" by the Yamnaya people) hold responsible for the spread of the Anatolian branch into Asia Minor. More likely, I think, the language this migration brought into Asia Minor was Hattic, a poorly-known non-IE language sparsely attested in cuneiform tablets from Hattusa which has been conjectured to be related to NWC. The phonology of Hattic is unknown because the cuneiform script is massively underspecifying; while the presence of a minimal set of phonological distinctions can be discerned, these are so generic that they fit almost any language, and there probably were more distinctions not shown in the cuneiform script.