The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread's Sequel

[WeepingElf]

There is this study, but it is perilous to draw linguistic conclusions from genetics. The area in which bell beakers were found is roughly the same as that of the Old European Hydronymy, which hints at a lost IE language distinct from Italic and Celtic, but this, too, may be spurious. Otherwise, what Ketsuban said.

[WeepingElf]

I wish to share a thought with you.

I have the feeling that among the non-Anatolian IE languages, Celtic, and especially Insular Celtic, was most similar to the Anatolian languages. Especially the enclitics from which the absolute vs. conjunct verb forms of Old Irish originated (as Warren Cowgill has convincingly stated), remind me of the clitic chains of Hittite. However, the idea of a Celtic-Anatolian node is of course nonsense, but maybe the language of the Bell Beaker culture, which IMHO was IE but not the ancestor of Celtic (for instance, the Bell Beaker language seems to have merged PIE *o with *a, which did not happen in Celtic), was related to Anatolian.

Yet, I am not sure about this, and may be misguided by my own Hesperic/Albic conlang project which is based on that kind of idea. What do you think about this?

[Ketsuban]

You seem to assume the existence of a "the language of the Bell Beaker culture" which corresponds in some way to the Old European Hydronymy, but the more I research that the more it seems like cherry-picked data. This slide deck presents some criticisms, including specific examples and more parsimonious derivations for some things that get included. On the other hand, the suggestion I found based on pollen evidence that bell beakers are associated with the spread of the technology of beer brewing has to represent something of a null hypothesis, since if true it would imply that there is no Bell Beaker language at all outside of maybe the etymology of words like Latin cervēsa "Celtic wheat-beer", cēlia "a beer made in Hispania" (where Wiktionary is unhelpfully inconsistent about the quantity of the first vowel) or Greek ζῦθος "Egyptian barley-beer".

[Glass Half Baked]

Cowgill's proposed clitic was *(V)s.

Do you really expect people to take any connection between that and any other morpheme seriously?

[WeepingElf]

You seem to assume the existence of a "the language of the Bell Beaker culture" which corresponds in some way to the Old European Hydronymy, but the more I research that the more it seems like cherry-picked data. This slide deck presents some criticisms, including specific examples and more parsimonious derivations for some things that get included. On the other hand, the suggestion I found based on pollen evidence that bell beakers are associated with the spread of the technology of beer brewing has to represent something of a null hypothesis, since if true it would imply that there is no Bell Beaker language at all outside of maybe the etymology of words like Latin cervēsa "Celtic wheat-beer", cēlia "a beer made in Hispania" (where Wiktionary is unhelpfully inconsistent about the quantity of the first vowel) or Greek ζῦθος "Egyptian barley-beer".

Fair. The "Old European Hydronymy" may be the linguistic equivalent of ley lines - a meaningless pattern falling out of the sheer mass of data. After all, there are thousands of river names in the area, so it is no wonder that many of them occur more than once. The fact that two scholars (Krahe and Vennemann) managed to ascribe these names to two utterly different language families tells us that there are many ways of interpreting these names, and they can't both be right, so it seems likely that both are wrong. And the Bell Beaker phenomenon may just have been an interregional fad for a particular type of drinking vessel, and linguistically heterogenous. The evidence of a lost IE language in Western Europe is tenuous, and nothing suggests that it was related to Anatolian.

Cowgill's proposed clitic was *(V)s.

Yes. And this is probably just a reduced form of what ultimately was *h₁esti 'it is'. No real connection to Hittite clitic chains.

This paper by Craig Melchert discusses alleged lexical connections between Anatolian and western IE languages, with a skeptical conclusion. It is IMHO not impossible that a language related to Anatolian was once spoken in Western Europe, but the evidence is so meagre that this remains sheer speculation.

Do you really expect people to take any connection between that and any other morpheme seriously?

Not really. It was just a brain fart of mine. Something to explore in conlangs, nothing else. We as conlangers have the advantage over academic linguists that we can wildly speculate with impunity. Like an author novelizing the Arthurian legend doesn't have to find out where Camelot and Avalon really were (if they ever existed at all), he only needs to come up with a localization that makes sense in the framework of his story. Or, as I remarked several times, if Octaviano/Talskubilos rolled his etymological ideas into a conlang instead of claiming that they were real, he'd be fine and well-respected in our community.

[WeepingElf]

But perhaps this brain fart is not that bad. It seems at first glance easiest to assume that the Bell Beaker people spoke Proto-Italo-Celtic, but the Celtic languages can't have evolved in situ from that, especially not in the British Isles - rather, whatever the Bell Beaker people (if those ever existed and not just a fad for a specific kind of drinking vessel, but Olalde et al. (2018) say that there were such people, and they apparently originated from the steppe) spoke, was later clobbered by the languages we find spoken in Western Europe in historical times, so the Bell Beaker people may have spoken anything.

The idea that the Bell Beaker language may have been closely related to Anatolian ultimately comes from a German popular science book about the Nebra sky disc and the Únětice culture who produced it. In that book it is said that the Bell Beaker people came from a more southerly part of the Yamnaya horizon than the Corded Ware people. I couldn't trace the source of this statement yet; it seems as if I have to re-read the relevant papers more attentively. From this I developed the idea that the Corded Ware originated in the Yamanya heartland near the present Russia/Ukraine war zone, and the Bell Beaker from the southwestern Yamnaya outlier on the Lower Danube. This outlier may have spoken a more archaic dialect than the heartland, and I consider it very likely that Anatolian came from there, too. From there, I developed the idea that the Bell Beaker language may have been closely related to Anatolian.

There is a saying in the science fiction fandom, "Bad science can make good fiction". But I feel that good science makes better fiction. And perhaps my science isn't all that bad here, even if I am not yet sure about it.

[Zju]

Alright, this is something new to me: wiktionary gives the nasal infix as *-né- (oblique stem *-n-) and references a (related?) transitiviser *(Ø)-néwti :

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstr ... opean/-né-

Has the presence of a vowel in the nasal infix been posited since the early 20th century, or is it a recent reconstruction?

[Lērisama]

Alright, this is something new to me: wiktionary gives the nasal infix as *-né- (oblique stem *-n-) and references a (related?) transitiviser *(Ø)-néwti :

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstr ... opean/-né-

Has the presence of a vowel in the nasal infix been posited since the early 20th century, or is it a recent reconstruction?

I don't actually know, but I think it's quite an old reconstruction – I haven't seen any references to it being new or even controversy over it¹ and Sanskrit ablauts the infix e.g. 3s yunákti ‘he/she/it yokes’ vs. 3pl yuñjánti² and ancient grammarians must have known about it because they assigned to to class VII³, so I'd be surprised if the rather prominent ‘PIE is lightly modified Sanskrit’ school that first started the reconstruction effort hadn't reconstructed it as ablauting. What is notable is that everywhere outside Indo-Iranian and Anatolian, it lost its ablaut, and so looks a lot less affix-like, but there are still traces in e.g. Latin 1s vincō 1pl vincimus (look, no ablaut), but dissappearing in the perfect vīcī, although iungō now has a perfect iūnxī, with the -n- now incorporated into the root.
¹ Except what happened to it in Anatolian, but the discussions of that I've seen presupposed an ablauting infix
² Both via wiktionary
³ For remembering which numbers go with which class, thank you Zompist's India Construction Kit

---

Edit: Oops, I forgot the *néw/nu class. That also corresponds to classes in at least Sanskrit (class V), and Greek (verns in -νυ-), and again I've seen no indication the reconstruction is modern, but I don't know anything else at all about it, sorry.

Edit edit: misunderstood the question slightly

[Glass Half Baked]

Vowels have been in n-infix reconstructions as far back as I can remember*. But I have never bothered to look into the data used to support those reconstructions.

* I should have specified: I am extraordinarily old, so this is a meaningful thing to say.

[bradrn]

Just now I discovered, purely by accident, that gora means ‘hill’ in Georgian and ‘mountain‘ in Slavic languages. But Wiktionary traces those back to two different protoforms, with no mention of any relationship. So is this just coincidence?

[WeepingElf]

Just now I discovered, purely by accident, that gora means ‘hill’ in Georgian and ‘mountain‘ in Slavic languages. But Wiktionary traces those back to two different protoforms, with no mention of any relationship. So is this just coincidence?

Well, the languages aren't (known to be) related, so there is good reason to assume a coincidence. However, Klimov suggested that the Kartvelian word may be a loanword from PIE *g^werH- 'to elevate', which apparently is the origin of Slavic gora. So the words may indeed be related to each other, even if the languages are not.

[bradrn]

Just now I discovered, purely by accident, that gora means ‘hill’ in Georgian and ‘mountain‘ in Slavic languages. But Wiktionary traces those back to two different protoforms, with no mention of any relationship. So is this just coincidence?

Well, the languages aren't (known to be) related, so there is good reason to assume a coincidence. However, Klimov suggested that the Kartvelian word may be a loanword from PIE *g^werH- 'to elevate', which apparently is the origin of Slavic gora. So the words may indeed be related to each other, even if the languages are not.

Yes, that’s what I meant — could the words be cognate? I know that there are other loanwords between IE and Kartvelian.

[WeepingElf]

Just now I discovered, purely by accident, that gora means ‘hill’ in Georgian and ‘mountain‘ in Slavic languages. But Wiktionary traces those back to two different protoforms, with no mention of any relationship. So is this just coincidence?

Well, the languages aren't (known to be) related, so there is good reason to assume a coincidence. However, Klimov suggested that the Kartvelian word may be a loanword from PIE *g^werH- 'to elevate', which apparently is the origin of Slavic gora. So the words may indeed be related to each other, even if the languages are not.

Yes, that’s what I meant — could the words be cognate? I know that there are other loanwords between IE and Kartvelian.

I know hardly anything about this, but I have heard of such loanwords, too.

[Richard W]

Well, the languages aren't (known to be) related, so there is good reason to assume a coincidence.

Nostraticists beg to differ.

They do fit the general pattern of <velar><vowel>/r/ seen in numerous 'horn' words across Nostratic, so there may be something going on, probably in the area of phonosemantics.

[WeepingElf]

Well, the languages aren't (known to be) related, so there is good reason to assume a coincidence.

Nostraticists beg to differ.

They do fit the general pattern of <velar><vowel>/r/ seen in numerous 'horn' words across Nostratic, so there may be something going on, probably in the area of phonosemantics.

Yes, that's why I inserted "(known to be)" in parentheses - they may be related, but we don't know. I am undecided about Nostratic - I am not convinced by it, but it is nevertheless possible. At least, I think that some of the "Nostratic" languages - IE, Uralic, Altaic (if that's a family), Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut) show resemblances in morphology (especially pronouns) that are perhaps best explained by a common ancestor. I call that "Mitian", after the 1st and 2nd person pronouns these languages seem to share, using a term coined by John Bengtson. The relationship of Kartvelian, Afroasiatic and Dravidian to this is more doubtful.

[abahot]

I will flesh out a little more of a topic I thought up earlier.

If various languages (living or extinct) were missing, how would our reconstruction of PIE change? Here are some thoughts of mine:
- As far as I know, Indo-Aryan is the only branch of IE to keep all eight cases distinct. So even if every case is attested in at least one subfamily besides, it's possible that we would not have realized that all eight cases were originally separate. Also, I think we might not have called the voiced aspirates what they are called, as it seems (whether accurate or not) that this assignment was originally entrenched because of Sanskrit.
- I wonder if we would have reconstructed *w as [w] instead of as [v] if Germanic languages had never existed. Sure, Latin preserves the value of *w at least in Classical Latin, but we might have just written that off as a sound change [w] -> [v] and back, which is probably less remarkable than every language but Latin shifting.
- Without Anatolian, a lot would be different, specifically with regards to morphology. (Others can probably talk about that much more than I can). I wonder if the laryngeal theory would have ever gained widespread acceptance without the direct evidence found in Anatolian?
- Without Greek, certainly some of our reconstructions of laryngeals would have been more difficult without the triple reflex?
- Certainly proto-language reconstructions would have been different. Without Gothic, the Proto-Germanic we have reconstructed would look very different, even if PIE would have remained the same.

[Darren]

It's hard to thing what else the voiced aspirates could be reconstructed as, given Greek's reflexes. I mean /p b pʰ : p b b : f p b/ is a pretty rough set of correspondences. I think you'd have to go voiced aspirates.
As for /w/, I think for structural reasons it would of been pretty obvious it was an approximant, assuming ablaut was still worked out.
The rest I pretty much agree with.

[WeepingElf]

I am flummoxed. For my IE conlang Proto-Hesperic, I used The Oxford Introduction ... by Mallory & Adams as a source of lexicon, but for verbs, it only gives roots. So I tried to find actual verb forms in the Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben, but it turned out that more than half of the verb roots aren't even listed there, or with completely different, unrelated meanings. It appears as if the two books describe two different languages - related but different, at least as different as Latin and Greek. What is wrong here, that two teams of respectable Indo-Europeanists present us two different languages as PIE?

(Edit: Part of the problem seems to be that the LIV reconstructs more laryngeals, especially initial pre-consonantal ones which move the root to a very different region of the alphabet, than Mallory & Adams; and indeed, checking for such laryngeals, I have found some of the "missing" roots in the LIV. Still, there are apparently many controversial reconstructions where the opinions of Mallory & Adams and the LIV actually differ whether they are valid or not. Also, given that Proto-Hesperic is meant to be an early breakaway, and is after all just a conlang, I feel justified to "just wing it" where I don't find anything.)

[hwhatting]

(Edit: Part of the problem seems to be that the LIV reconstructs more laryngeals, especially initial pre-consonantal ones which move the root to a very different region of the alphabet, than Mallory & Adams;

Interesting how "more laryngeals" is ambiguous here. One could say that M&A actually reconstruct more laryngeals in that they reconstruct 4, while LIV adheres to the mainstream set of 3 laryngeals. LIV, OTOH, reconstructs them in more positions.
One reason for the difference between the two is simply that LIV is about 20 years later than M&A. Not saying that newer is necessarily better, but LIV includes scholarship that has accrued since M&A was published.

[WeepingElf]

(Edit: Part of the problem seems to be that the LIV reconstructs more laryngeals, especially initial pre-consonantal ones which move the root to a very different region of the alphabet, than Mallory & Adams;

Interesting how "more laryngeals" is ambiguous here. One could say that M&A actually reconstruct more laryngeals in that they reconstruct 4, while LIV adheres to the mainstream set of 3 laryngeals. LIV, OTOH, reconstructs them in more positions.

I meant tokens, not types. LIV sometimes reconstructs a laryngeal where M&A have none, e.g. *HReC- where M&A just have *ReC-.

One reason for the difference between the two is simply that LIV is about 20 years later than M&A. Not saying that newer is necessarily better, but LIV includes scholarship that has accrued since M&A was published.

Yes. Also, M&A include items that are regionally skewed, which may be a reason for LIV to exclude them.

But as I said, I am not trying to reconstruct the language of the Bell Beaker people in a scholarly way (that is an endeavour which I deem impossible, at least at the current state of knowledge); I am only trying to re-create it - I am building a conlang that portrays, certainly very imprecisely, that language. And for that, it suffices to avoid obvious blunders - it need not be entirely correct. Also, my idea is that Proto-Hesperic broke off early, together with Anatolian or even a bit earlier, so root etymologies are acceptable - many of the forms reconstructed for Late PIE are not even found in Anatolian, so one would rather not expect them in Hesperic. If you ask me why I don't just use a Hittite dictionary, it is because that would be full of loanwords from Ancient Near Eastern languages such as Akkadian, Hattic or Hurrian which of course should not exist in Hesperic, which is meant to be spoken in Western Europe.