PhDniX's blog

Lycian bilingual stele

So, in two weeks times we got 'all the grammar' there is to know of Lycian. That's 4 whole pages. This is both saddening, as fun. Picking up 'a little language' in two weeks gives a nice addition to your inventory. But naturally, languages that require but 4 pages to explain everything there is are filled with question marks.

Lycian is a language which is almost exclusively written on grave stones inscriptions, giving us a very limited vocabulary, also because the gravestones were written in an extremely formulaic fashion. Nevertheless I thought it'd be fun to show you all a small 'semi bilingual' of a Lycian-Greek gravestone text. Unicode 5.1 in fact has Lycian encoded, but due to the very few people that actually have support on their computer for Unicode 5.1, I'll make a little picture using the (Unicode 5.1 compliant) Aegean font. But just for kicks, I'll add the Unicode text, so all of those nuts like me who collect all fonts so they can have the whole Unicode can have a little benchmark (it's working for me!).

I'm sorry that I don't have the real inscription. But I guess that is one of the curses of the internet and obsucre languges

The Inscription:
𐊁𐊂𐊚𐊑𐊏𐊚:𐊑𐊗𐊀𐊗𐊀:𐊎𐊚𐊏𐊁𐊓𐊕𐊑𐊏𐊀𐊇𐊙𐊗𐊚:𐊓𐊒𐊍𐊁𐊊𐊏𐊅𐊀:𐊎𐊒𐊍𐊍𐊆𐊊𐊁𐊖𐊁𐊛:𐊖𐊁:𐊅𐊀𐊓𐊀𐊕𐊀:𐊓𐊒𐊍𐊁𐊊𐊏𐊅𐊀𐊛:𐊓𐊒𐊕𐊆𐊛𐊆𐊎𐊁𐊗𐊁𐊛
𐊓𐊀𐊑𐊏𐊁𐊈[𐊆]𐊊𐊁𐊛𐊆:𐊛𐊕𐊓𐊓𐊆:𐊍𐊀𐊅𐊀:𐊁𐊓𐊗𐊗𐊁𐊛𐊁:𐊖𐊁𐊗𐊆𐊅𐊁𐊆𐊎𐊁:𐊖𐊁𐊆𐊊𐊁:𐊗𐊆(𐊁)𐊖𐊁𐊕𐊆:𐊗𐊀𐊅𐊆
𐊗𐊆𐊋𐊁:𐊑𐊗𐊀𐊗[𐊀]:𐊁𐊂𐊁𐊛𐊆:𐊎𐊁𐊆𐊊𐊁:[𐊗𐊒𐊂𐊁𐊆𐊗]𐊆:𐊓𐊒𐊏𐊀𐊎𐊀𐊉𐊉𐊆:𐊀𐊍𐊀𐊅𐊀𐊛𐊀𐊍𐊆:𐊀𐊅𐊀<
ΤΟΥΤΟ:ΤΟ:ΜΝΗΜΑ:ΕΡΓΑΣΑΤΟ:ΑΠΟΛΛΩΝΙΔΗΣ:ΜΟΛΛΙΣΙΟΣ:ΚΑΙ:ΛΑΠΑΡΑΣ
ΑΠΟΛΛ[Ω]ΝΙΔΟΥ:ΠΥΡΙΜΑΤΙΟΣ:ΟΙΚΕΙΟΙ ΕΠΙ:ΤΑΙΣ:ΓΥΝΑΙΞΙΝ:ΤΑΙΣ:ΕΑΟΤΩΝ
[ΚΑ]Ι:ΤΟΙ[Σ]:ΕΓΓΟΝΟΙΣ:ΚΑΙ ΑΝ:ΤΙΣ:ΑΔΙΚΗΣΗΙ:ΤΟ:ΜΝΗΜΑ:ΤΟΥΤΟ
ΕΞΩΛΕΑ:[Κ]ΑΙ:ΠΑΝΩΛΕΑ:ΕΙΗ:ΑΟΤΩΙ:ΠΑΝΤΩΝ

Source:

http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/anatol/lycian/lycco006.htm
There is a certain different in the transcription I use, and the website. The one I use is of what I got in class, the difference is the way the last line is filled in for the part in between brackets (unrecoverable/hard to read text.)
I have: [tubeit]i
TITUS has this: [httẽm]i
Those are two radically different bits of text. I honestly wouldn't know what httẽmi means, so I have absolutely no idea which of the two is more plausible

Transcription:
ebẽñnẽ ñtata me ne prñnawãtẽ pulejnda mullijeseh se dapara pulejndah purihimeteh
prñnezijehi hrppi lada epttehe se tideimeseije tiseri tadi
tike ñtata ebehi me ije tubeiti punamaθθi aladahali ada5
τοῦτο τὸ μνῆμα ἐργάσατο Ἀπολλωνίδης Μολλίσιος καὶ Λαπάρας
Ἀπολλωνίδου Πυριμάτιος οἰκεῖοι ἐπι ταῖς γυναιξίν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν
καὶ τοῖς ἐγγόνοις. καὶ ἄν ἀδικήσῃ τὸ μνῆμα τοῦτο ἐξώλεα καὶ πανώλεα εἴη ἀυτῳ πάντων

Translation:

ebẽñnẽ ñtata me-ne prñnawãtẽ pulejnda mullijeseh se dapara pulejndah purihimeteh prñnezijehi
this.acc-encl.3sg.pron.acc burial chamber.sg.acc ptcl. encl.3sg.pron.acc build.prt.3pl-encl.3sg.pron.acc Apolonides.nom.sg Mullis.gen.sg and Laparas.nom Apolonides.gen Pyrimatis.gen house.gen-adj.pl.nom
' Apolonides of Mullis(might be a patronym or an ethnonym) and Laparas of the house of Apolonides of Pyrimatis built this burial chamber.'
(Note the massive amounts of encl-3sg pronomen. This was originally the enclitic shown by nasalisation, but it seems that it started spreading as part of several paradigms.)

hrppi lada epttehe se tideime
on behalf of wife.pl.dat his./theirpl.dat and child.pl.dat
'for their wives, and their children'

seije tise-ri tadi tike ñtata ebehi me-ije tubeiti punamaθθi aladahali ada5
and-encl.prn.3sg.dat indef.prn.nom.sg-rel.pron.nom.sg place.prs.3sg indef.prn.sg.acc burial chamber.sg.dat this.sg.dat ptcl.-prn.3sg.dat punish.prs.3sg P. Care of the grave.sg.dat 5 ada(currency)
'and he who will place something in this burial chamber, now him Punamaththi will punish. For the care of the grave: 5 ada.'
(note tise-ri < tise-ti with rhotacism, typical for Luwian, not as commonly seen in Lycian.)

In the last sentence we have difficult with the word punamaθθi. We're not sure how to translate it, maybe it's a personal name. Also the last part aladahali ada 5 Is a difficult sequence. It's translated as 'for the care of the grave (the fee is) 5 ada.' Because we see it more often, also when not warning grave robbers. So it's possibly not part of the curse, but just a note on how much it cost to make the grave, or to have it cleaned, or something like that.

Now the Greek text is much easier to understand:
τοῦτο τὸ μνῆμα ἐργάσατο Ἀπολλωνίδης Μολλίσιος καὶ Λαπάρας Ἀπολλωνίδου Πυριμάτιος οἰκεῖοι
this.n.sg.acc the.n.sg.acc gravestone.n.sg.acc build.aor.med.3sg Apollonides.m.sg.nom Mollisis.m.sg.gen and Laparas.m.sg.nom Apollonides.m.sg.gen Pyrimatis.m.sg.nom Relatives.pl.nom
'Apollonides of Mollisis and Laparas Relatives of Apollonides of Purimatis built this gravestone,'
(Puzzling is the 3sg aorist, rather than 3pl)

ἐπι ταῖς γυναιξίν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν καὶ τοῖς ἐγγόνοις.
for the.f.pl.dat wife.f.pl.dat the.f.pl.dat poss. himself.m.pl.gen and the.n.pl.dat children.n.pl.dat.
'for their own wives, and children'

καὶ ἄν ἀδικήσῃ τὸ μνῆμα τοῦτο ἐξώλεα καὶ πανώλεα εἴη ἀυτῳ πάντων
and modal.ptcl dishonour.aor.conj.3sg the.n.sg.acc gravestone.n.sg.acc this.n.sg.acc complete destruction.f.sg.nom and  complete destruction.f.sg.nom be.opt.3sg him.sg.dat all.pl.gen.
'And may complete and utter destruction be upon he who dishonours this grave.'

Definitely a lot more terrifying than the Lycian version and also absolutely no mention of 5 ada, therefore not a true bilingual text.

I hope you all found this as fun as I did ;)
 

Greek is a Satem Language!

Okay, Greek isn't really a satem language, but it is a good introduction to this post. First, let me point out that I have no idea whether people have researched the theory I'm about to propose before. I'm guessing that I'm in all likelihood not the first one to notice this.

Traditionally we like to split up Indo-European into two main dialectal groups. The Central and Peripheral group. The central group are the so called satem languages, due to the result of the velars in these language. The Peripheral group are the centum languages.

For more information on what actually distinguishes satem from centum read my older blog entry: One Hundred

Now then, let's get to the point. It is true that there is definitely a tendency of Centum languages to be more similar to each other, and similarly Satem languages to be more similar. Nevertheless, I don't believe that the Satem-Centum differentiation was a big enough shift to completely disconnect the two groups as two main dialects not able to influence each other any more.

I even believe that Greek, a Centum language, shares far more feature-isoglosses with the Indo-Iranian languages than it distinguishes itself from those. Therefore, I would like to propose a Graeco-Iranian dialect, rather than an unlikely incredibly similar development of Greek next to Sanskrit without any influence on each other.

Note, that I will not go as far as saying that these languages should be considered a 'branch' of the Indo-European language family. Family trees are starting to become painfully outdated, and are only an easy abstraction when talking about very general groups.

Let me explain why I believe there was a Graeco-Iranian (henceforth G-I) Indo-European dialect.

1. Productive reduplicated perfect

Traditional Indo-European linguistics tells us that the standard form of creating a perfect was reduplication of the first consonant and a o-grade in the root.

The perfect stem of *gen- 'to be born' thus be comes: *ge-gon-. This is terribly biassed towards Greek and Sanskrit (which is a very typical fault in traditional Indo-European reconstructions I must add). Greek and Sanskrit clearly show this system as being the productive one. The most well known perfect that doesn't have reduplication is *ueid- 'to see'
which in the perfect is *uoid- 'to know' (Compare Dutch 'weten', and Gothic 'waitan').

In itself it's very mysterious both Greek and Sanskrit share this as a non-reduplicated perfect, although there's next to no other verbs that do this.

So from a Sanskrit-Greek bias we conclude reduplicated perfect is the Proto-Indo-European form.

If we look at other languages though, we get a very different view of how the perfect is formed. First let's point out that Anatolian has no indication that there was reduplication at that point in Indo-European when the Anatolian languages split of. There clearly was a distribution of verbs with either e or o vocalism though. But this is of lesser importance, we can conclude that reduplication was a later development. Tocharian (one of the other early differentiating languages in Indo-European) there's already proof of reduplication, but solely in the Perfect Participle.

Now we get to Germanic, which will be one of the important branches that will support my theory of a close relation between Greek and Indo-Iranian, and the terrible bias towards those to languages in our reconstructions.

Germanic as we know it today has next to no proof of reduplication. Except for of course, the preterite of do: did <*deda. Old English apparently has some words which might be traced to reduplication, but it's hard to tell.

What Germanic does have though, is o-vocalism in the preterite stems of the strong verbs. almost strong verbs have o-vocalism except for the classes I'll get to later. Know that Indo-European *e often becomes Germanic i, and *o always becomes a.
Examples of o-vocalism in English:
give ~ gave
see ~saw
bear ~bore
lie ~ lay

Gothic though, as the only Germanic language retains a productive category of a reduplicating preterite.
For example
saian ~ saiso 'sow, sowed'
waian ~ waiwo 'blow, blew'
letan ~ lailot 'let, let'

Nevertheless, this is only one of the seven classes of preterites. But etymologically this can be brought back two two classes. Non-reduplicating perfects and reduplicating perfects. It's not unlikely for a language to get rid of its reduplication. But retaining two productive systems is highly unlikely. In Gothic the reduplicating class was a minority class, but definitely an existing one.

I therefore believe that Indo-European had two types of perfects reduplicating perfects, and non-reduplicating perfects. And I tend to believe that the non-reduplicating perfect was the normal variant, whereas Graeco-Iranian had made the reduplicating perfects the productive class.

2. Grassmann's law

Both Greek and Indo-Iranian languages undergo the so called, Grassmann's law. This law says that no two aspirated consonants can follow each other. The first consonant will lose its aspiration. These laws only take place after Greek devoices its aspirates. therfore we have trikhos from earlier thrikhos. And we have Sanskrit Bodhati from erlier bhodhati.

That this law took place, and spread itself over both the Indo-Iranian group and the Greek language is not unlikely. I do not think that the initial differentiation of Greek's aspirate devoicing is enough for the two very similar dialects to lose touch. I thus believe that Grassmann's law was not a law that developed in two different branches, but rather its 'wave' spread itself over both dialectal regions, simply having a different effect due to their initial differentiations.

For more information about this 'wave' theory of dialectology and linguistic differentiation I refer you to Language waves and the satem innovation in PIE.

This is it for now. I had a lot more in my head, and it has currently flow out of my head (remind me to make notes from now on!). There is some stuff on the pronominal system in Greek and Sanskrit that makes me go Hmmmmm, but it is difficult to prove. I also believe that maybe the 8-case system as seen in Sanskrit is a Graeco-Iranian innovation. Although Classical Greek only has 4 cases (and a vocative), there's clear indications of older cases. But these are all speculations. I will write more once I get to it. Personally though, I think the productivity of the reduplicating perfect is a very strong indication of a seemingly close relationship.

Tell my readers that I say the following:

I'm currently busy picking up some Hieroglyphic Luwian. Interesting language, quite significantly different from the Hittite language. One thing that's really interesting, though odd about the language, is the way the Luwians wrote their letters. They would actually tell the letter to tell the reciptient what they said.

Here let me give you an example from the so called Assur letters:

|á-sa5-za [|]pi-ha-mi |hara/i-na-wa/i-za-sa-wa/i-' ("LOQUI"-')ha-ri+i-ti

asaza Pihami(n) Haranawizas hariti:
asaza = to say, with 2nd person imperative Ø-suffix.
Pihami(n) = Personal name in the Accusative, coda n was not written in Hieroglyphic Luwian and may have been lost.
Haranawizas = Personal name in the nominative (s-suffix)
hariti = to speak with the 3rd person indicative present ti-suffix.

So this translates like this:

Say to Pihami (that) Haranawizas speaks:

After that line the actual content of the letter begins. It's funny to see such a formulaic opening of a letter telling a tablet to say something. It's not precisely without precedent. Also in Hittite texts you often see the author telling a tablet to say what he says.

Nevertheless I thought I'd show it to you.

Do you speak Abaric?

A question which you have probably never heard is "Do you speak Abaric", though there are singals that once maybe the word for Arabic should have been Abaric. What brought me to this thought is the Hebrew word for the Hebrew language 'ivrit' Or עברית in Hebrew. The Arabic word for the Arabic is 'ʕArabiyya' عربيّة. both -iyya and -it go back to a same suffix which was something like *-iyyat-um. which leaves us with the stems respectively עבר  ʕ-b-r and عرب ʕ-r-b.

It's almost unthinkable to think that ʕ-b-r and ʕ-r-b do not go back to the same proto-root. Only one of these two languages must have metathesized it. Problem is if course that I know of absolutely no other roots where this happens. Never the less it's rather odd to think it didn't.

I just looked up both roots in my fantastic Arabic dictionary (The Hans Wehre dictionary of Modern Written Arabic), turn out both the root ʕ-b-r and ʕ-r-b exist in Arabic, with not an uncommon meaning.

ʕabara: to cross, to traverse; to ford, wade; to swim; to pass; to ferry; to carry someone across or over some thing; etc. etc.

ʕaraba: This word has taken a strong meaning to be connected with the Arabic nationality and has meanings like 'to translate into Arabic, to Arabicise etc. But in my dictionary there seems to be some indication of the original meaning if we look at the female noun derivation with suffix -atun

ʕarabatun: swift river; carriage, vehicle, wagon, cart; car, coach

So this also seems to have something to do with crossing/transporting. There's a very odd correlation here. Some of the derivations of the first root seem to refer to the latter root. And the other way around.

I don't have much to add to this, just thought I'd let you see the funny words and their similarities.

Wanna watch some aflām?

Arabic has a very odd quirk. It has so called 'broken plurals', besides the normal plurals, which are simply a suffixed form of the singular, there's plurals which consist of the same root, but vowels just in different places.

An example of this is to be seen in the title 'aflām' أفلام is the plural of 'fīlm' فيلم that's right, it's the loanword 'film'. From this even today, we can conclude that broken plurals are a productive category of the Arabic language. There's several common patterns, and several very rare ones. Which word takes a broken plural and which one takes a 'sound' plural is completely irregular. There's of course some indication, feminine nouns tend to have sound plurals, but this is by no means a fixed rule. Also which pattern goes with which noun is unpredictable.

Experience in historical linguistics teaches us that what are now irregularities were probably once regular patterns which got lost over time. To find such regularities you look back at other languages from the same language family. But here it gets disturbing.

The other Central Semitic languages (which include the languages Hebrew and Aramaic) have next to no indication of so called broken plurals. They're only sound plurals. In fact the split of the Central Semitic groups is done based on the existence of broken plurals:

There are two branches of Central Semitic, North-West Semitic and Arabic (The should really work on their terminology). The greatest distinguishing factor is the appearance of broken plurals in Arabic.

This gives the impression that the so called broken plural patterns just 'emerged' out of no where. This is hard for me to accept. A completely irregular system to create plurals while there was, and still is a perfectly regular system in the proto-language is very hard to accept.

There is no good reason why such a group of plurals would be created. The best explanation would be that a broken plural usually has fewer syllables, but this need for brevity would have also worked if they had just generalised one broken plural pattern instead of several.

Due to the unlikelihood that Arabic just sprouted irregular plurals, I'd like to think that Central Semitic in fact did have broken plurals, maybe not as wide spread as in Arabic, but definitely a big enough number of words to become productive. Then Aramaic and Hebrew generalised the simpler Sound Plural, while the broken plural became productive in Arabic.

I suspect that, at one point the different broken plural patterns attributed to some kind of class system, similar as you see in Bantu languages (maybe this is even areal influence?). Later this distinction become lost, especially in Arabic where several patterns became quite randomly productive.

Maybe the sound plural was an alternative way of forming a plural. Possibly when the speaker didn't feel it was necessary to categorise the plural into a class. Or maybe when he was speaking of a group of these things in general. There's countless  scenario's you could think of to explain a 2 types of plurals system within one language.

If anyone has another idea, or can make the 'broken plurals sprung out of nowhere' idea sound plausible, please do reply.

[maʕmaʕ] I love you

It's relatively universal in languages that the names for father and mother are labials followed by the vowel 'a'. In Dutch we have 'mama' en 'papa'. Sometimes you also see something like 'dada' (or daddy) for father. But all together, it's generally just the easiest sounds to make for a baby that is exploring his speech organ.

There's some languages that go right against these universal laws, like for example Japanese. Japanese has 'haha' and 'chichi' for father and mother respectively. Originally though these sounds where papa and titi. And although titi is still a  bit odd, papa is definitely understandable.

Now these terms generally withstand sound laws, just because they're so typical for mimicking the sound babies make. The above example of Japanese is an exception to the rule.

But like I said, the first sounds a little kid makes are often the simplest. One sound that is without a doubt not the easiest to articulate is the pharyngeal voiced approximant /ʕ/.

The Indo-European words for mother and father are *méh2-tēr and *ph2-tḗr. *h2 is commonly considered to be /ʕ/, although certain readers of this blog will argue with me that it's a uvular fricative. But my point stays, also a uvular fricative is quite a challenge to force out of the throat of a baby.

the word mother and father would sound something [máʕteːr], and [pʕtéːr]. I know, I'm going against all conventions by writing anything of a reconstructed language in a phonetic transcription, but it's important to illustrate my point. As you may know the tēr-suffix is is a suffix for family members. so the original roots are *meh2- and *ph2-. Knowing that both of these words often resulted in ma and pa in daughter languages, you'd expect them to be words imitating a sound of a baby. Which is exactly why I have an enormous difficulty believing that the /ʕ/ is original in these roots. I don't believe an Indo-European baby would have less problems obstructing his pharyngeal passage than I, or Dutch babies have.

Which leads me to believe that these words actually contained real a's. so *mā́tēr and *patḗr.

I don't think there's any evidence against the first example, although Lithuanian accent might notify that there's supposed to be a laryngeal.

The word for father though brings a bigger problem. If there was truly an *a, we'd expect Sanskrit to have  **patṛ **पतृ
but instead it has pitṛ पितृ. A laryngeal between consonants always becomes i.

So there's evidence to assume that *h2 was there, but it still feels weird to think it is. Maybe, somehow an earlier PIE *a had an allophonic distribution with the *h2 in vocalised position. so that *ph2 sounded like [pa]. Because father would then 'have' a laryngeal, mother would take one too.

But this is just guessing. All I'm saying is, the laryngeal was probably there. But you wouldn't expect it to. Somehow at some point this unwanted laryngeal sneaked into both roots.

Another way of going about it, is calling this 'proof' that PIE actually had no *a. If the sound *a is completely unknown as a phoneme to PIE speakers, and their baby would suddenly go about yelling [mama]! The best attempt to emulate this sound would be for them to say *meh2meh2 or *mh2mh2. But although it's nice to have proof that there's no *a, there's the problem that there is  an *a in several words. So maybe *a was a conditioned allophone of another vowel, and to get the [a] sound in other contexts they'd have to resort to laryngeals again.

I hope someone can give his ideas about this interesting issue.