PhDniX's blog

Prenasalised Iⁿdo-european?

For my job I have to work through an enormous amount of Journals, collecting every single article I can find that may be relevant to the Etymological dictionary of Greek. After collecting them I put them into a database and pass them on to R.S.P. Beekes. Needless to say, I see a lot of articles, not always directly related to Greek. But every now and then there's one that stands out a lot.

A couple of weeks ago I found one of those; It was an article proposing Prenasalised stops within Indo-European or some earlier stage of Indo-European. This obviously drew my attention, because it sounded absolutely ridiculous. Nevertheless, the idea's that were proposed were actually quite convincing. The only reason why I'm hesitant to reconstruct prenasalised stops now, is simply because it would double the consonant inventory, which is rather big already for a natural language; especially one which apparently only has two vowels.

The article I'm talking I found in BSL 86 [1991] p361-365 By André Martinet called "Finales nasales mobiles et prénasalisées indo-européennes". As you may deduce from the name of the article, it also discusses a n-mobile. The proof for this I did not find particularly convincing, and I will not discuss it here, if you want to know more, go read the article!

The first pre-nasalised stop Martinet proposes is the *ⁿt which would be the source for the r/n-heteroclitics.

Normally the paradigm would look something like this:

Nom-Acc sg. *uód-r 'water'
Gen sg. *ud-n-ós

This r/n alternation is obviously strange, But if we assume that this changing letter was actually the reflex of *ⁿt in two different positions you'd get a paradigm like

Nom-Acc sg. *uód-ⁿt
Gen sg.  *ud-ⁿt-ós

It's more likely for a stop like *ⁿt to be come an /r/ word finally than a nasal. Another interesting thing about this theory is that it would explain away the rather odd paradigm found in Greek of this word:

Nom-Acc sg. ὕδωρ
Gen sg. ὕδατος

The Genitive is generally explained as ground for *udn- with added *t as found in the n-stems (σῶμα, σῶματος 'body' from PGr.*sōmn, *sōmntos); This would be perfectly acceptable if there was any reason for the *t to be there in the n-stems; which it isn't.

But assuming that a  *ⁿt was actually retained into Proto-Greek as *nt ὕδατος would be instantly explained as *udntos. It works incredibly well.

Later then the t was actually carried over from the r/n-stems to the n-stems (Not particularly convincing either, but lack of better explanation makes it necessary).

Having just indications for the *ⁿt wouldn't really be enough though. Therefore Martinet also proposes another prenasalised stop namely *ᵐbʰ And this one would then be used to account for the odd *mus versus *bʰus distribution for the dative plural ending. One language would have the *ᵐbʰ with *m and the other with *bʰ. This is also very plausible.

An enormous problem is though; it's impossible to think that these would be the only two prenasalised stops, it would leave a massive asymmetry in the phonemic system. Besides that of course, any proof for prenasalised stops is inexistant except in the r/n-stems and the said dative plural ending. This might be an indication that it was a dinstinction already very early on in Indo-European and that these are archaic remains. It's still difficult to prove.

Nevertheless the possibility that Indo-European may have had prenasalised stops at some point should be taken into account when going about pre-Indo-European buisiness.

[EDIT]
In Retrospect, I think this theory is too far out there to be in any way plausible. I wanted to write about this article way sooner than I did. But maybe it's good that I gave it some thought. Although it's a very nice attempt at solving some of the issues in Indo-European; There's simply not enough proof to actually make this believable.

Nevertheless I'll keep it on here, maybe other people will find a way to make the theory more plausible, or even less plausible.

A strange *i/u alternation

What I've always found fascinating about Indo-European is that there seems to be many isoglosses that alternate certain vowels. *e/o alternations in, for example the genitive *-es/-os. Then there's the *i/e alternation in reduplications. Where we find i in Present/Aorist reduplications, and e in perfect reduplication (although we find many variants of the reduplication where the root vowel seems to influence the reduplicated vowel). And last but not least there's the *i/u alternation, which is what I'll talk about today.

I have no idea what may be the solution to this odd alternation, but I thought I'd bring it up to our collective awareness.

Sanskrit has the locative plural -su सु/षु. This is  apparently related to the Greek dative plural ending -σι(ν). As you can see u/i seem to alternate. But this doesn't always happen between Sanskrit and Greek. For example the prefix *dus- seen in both Greek and Sanskrit both display proof for an original *u. Sanskrit has the prefix dus- दुस्- And Greek has δυσ-. For example in Sanskrit you have the word durjanaḥ दुर्जनः 'a bad man' which is quite similar to the greek word: δυσγένεια 'low of birth'.

But then if we look at the Latin equivalent of this prefix we find dis-! It's the dis- we find in dislocation for example. So somehow the *u/i alternation does not seem to be a steady, or split by isoglosses that can be strictly defined in the modern day languages.

I applaud anyone willing to come up with an explanation to this bizarre alternation. I for one, do not have a clue where it came from.

The Unification of Genitives!

For some time I've been wondering about the Indo-European genitive forms; Which anyone who reads my blog with any regularity has surely noticed.

As some of you may know, Indo-European has a different genitive form the nominal inflection than for the pronominal inflection. Later on the o-stems have taken up a lot of features of the pronominal inflection, as well as the pronominal genitive, but Hittite has convincing proof that this was not always the case; there Nominative and Genitive of a-stems (< PIE o-stems) are identical, ending in -aš.

The Indo-European pronominal ending is *-eso or *-oso; while the nominal ending is *-os or *-es. I believe I have found a way to unify these two forms as an originally identical ending.

To explain this I'll first have to bring in some theories which Glen Gordon has been working on considering a Pre-Indo-European syncope. Let me just stress that everything I present here are my theories, I'm not doing this to get respect and honour, but just so people won't think badly of Glen Gordon's awesome work if I make some terrible mistake in my reasoning.

Now for some spelling conventions. I am fairly traditional in displaying *e as *e and *o as *o, while it is quite likely that in fact the *o was an *a at some earlier stage. For an unknown vowel in my reconstructed pre-Indo-European forms I will use *a. Well, on to the actual theory now then!

For a word like 'father' we find the following paradigm
Nom. *ph₂tḗr
Gen. *ph₂trós

Now considering the 'Quasi-Penultimate Accent Rule' (QAR) and the syncope of almost all, if not all vowels outside of the accent we'd expect a Pre-Indo-European paradigm like this:

Nom. *p(a)h₂téro=so With pseudo-suffix *so-/to- 'this'
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-sa With a true suffix and thus agreeing to the QAR.

The *so suffix later gave rise to a *rs cluster which lost the *s with compensatory lengthening, hence *ḗ. A similar process is later seen in classical Greek.

The syncopated final letter *o which appears in the genitive could also be the vowel *e, which gives a very nice explanation why most languages have generalised the *-ós suffix, while some (like Latin) show an *-és suffix.

Having shown this, let's now get to the really interesting part, the pronouns.

The previously mentioned stem *so-/to- 'this'(with it's curious alternation of stem *so- in the nominative *to- in the oblique) is great to show as an example.

Nom. *so(s)
Gen. *toso

The *-s ending in the nominative is obviously highly curious if it is indeed from the stem *so-/to- because you'd be saying *so=so 'this-this' in  Pre-Indo-European. Luckily there's some proof that this is not the original form. Greek has the form ὁ which goes back to *so, and definitely not to *sos. Also there's the Sanskrit form of this word सः saḥ which has a variant 'Sandhi' form स sa. Although this variant isn't usable in all contexts, the form is not a regular sandhi variant, which makes it likely that this is in fact the older form.

I think with that I have sufficient proof to not reconstruct this nominative *-s for pre-Indo-European

Now onto the pre-Indo-European forms

Nom. *so
Gen. *to-so

What can be said about these forms?
First, the nominative taking the penultimate accentuation into account, should be accented before itself, which is not even unthinkable (accentless words in Greek can do this). How come it didn't syncopate then? Well, that can have several reasons. Either the form *so was in fact *só dealing with the impossible accentuation by simply placing the accent on the only possible position. We do not have much proof for this though. It is in fact likelier that this particle was just 'unaccented'. How come it didn't undergo syncope? Well the fact that the word would've then be **s might be an indication. Another reason is that really short particle-like words like *so-/to- tend to be very resistant to such syncopations which normal words regularly take part in.

Although the Genitive could in fact have been accentuated as **tóso giving a later form like **tós it clearly didn't. An explanation for this might be that the stem *so-/to- wasn't accentuated in the nominative and was thus felt as an 'unaccentable word'. Besides that this is of course still one of these particle-like words, even though it's in the genitive. Therefore not taking an accent but still being strangely resistant to syncopation.

Now, if we put next to each other the reconstructed genitive of father, and that of this we see the following:
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-sa
Gen. *to-so

Where in the first form the suffix' vowel was still a mystery vowel, from the pronominal form it is quite clear that this should be *-o thus giving:
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-so

With this the two forms of the genitive have finally been unified into a single suffix *-so. So obvious that I'm astounded it hadn't occurred to me sooner. Besides that it's also so obvious I'm sure it has occurred to other people too. nevertheless I'm here to inform both myself and my readers, so even if I'm the last one to discover this, it's still useful for me.