PhDniX's blog

On the prehistory of the Neuter *s-stems

To get a better image of the model of pre-indo-european that I'm currently trying to reconstruct, I've been attempting to compile a PDF with a bunch of reconstructions and explanations in them. Of course, this brought me to some lovely problems that I hadn't foreseen before I started working on the PDF. One of these, and one of the major ones at that, is the prehistory of the *s-stems; But I now believe that I have quite a nice explanation.

First let me bring up a nice and proper word from Latin, which I hate bringing up because I know very little about it. But, I'll quickly switch to Sanskrit after that.

opus 'work', genetive operis, it has all the traits of a *s-stem, which it also is.
In Sanskrit we have this word as well ápas- अप॑स्. 'work'. It's easy to see that this word goes back to PIE *h₃épos. What is important to know though, is that Sanskrit besides the noun, also has an adjective that in Classical Sanskrit has become homophonous with the noun, but in Vedic Sanskrit was still distinct: apás अ॒पस् 'active'. Only the accent is different, but this is essential. It is also a feature which is definitely indo-european as it is also found in Greek. For example γένος 'one's descent', besides εὐγενής 'of good descent'. Most Greek examples are less ideal, since it doesn't have tonal minimal pairs such as Sanskrit, it usually has a prefix like εὐ- or δυσ-.

Continuing with the word *h₃épos, let's look at a bit of both the adjectival and nominal inflections:

Nominal:
Nom. *h₃ép-os
Gen. *h₃ep-es-ós

Adjectival:
Masculine-Feminine flection:
Nom. *h₃ep-ḗs
Gen. *h₃ep-es-ós

Neuter flection:
Nom. *h₃ep-és
Gen. *h₃ep-es-ós

Why the *e in the root doesn't disappear when unaccented is a bit of a mystery to me. Especially in the adjectival form. But of course playing around with analogy will yield us this *e eventually anyway.

So, I think that possibly, the Adjectival form isn't a derrivation of the Nominal forms, but the other way around. Why? Well if we go back into pre-indo-european, the Adjectival forms actually look more correct.

Let's have a look:

Nom. M/F *h₃əp-ə́sə=sə
Nom. N. *h₃əp-ə́sə
Gen. *h₃əp-əsá-sə

I have some doubts whether the sequence *-ésə=sə would yield *ḗs As per Szémerenyi's law, but it would easily be explained by other similar forms which do have a long accented *e, like the *r-stems.

In the next stage Syncope took place, but not yet schwa differentiation in unaccented position (those that were left anyway).

Nom. M/F *h₃(ə)p-ə́s-z
Nom. N. *h₃(ə)p-ə́z
Gen. *h₃(ə)p-əsá-z

(For the *z, which will surely look weird I refer you to Glen Gordon's blog Here and Here)

This is the stage where the accent was retracted to the previous syllable to create a noun of the same stem. There was no longer a rule for the accent to be on the penultimate syllable, and was happily jumping around in quite a few forms.

Much like how the noun *uĺkʷos may have been formed from adjective *ulkʷós around that time, the same happened with the *s-stems. Thus creating forms like the following (Note how the possible syncopated *ə definitely returns here, because there's nothing else to give the accent):

Nom. N. *h₃ə́p-əz
Gen. *h₃əp-ə́sə-z

This late innovation might even explain why we find the heterodynamic genitive *-os, on a proterodynamic word.

This is all still pretty rudimentary but I think it works pretty well. But I've probably overlooked something, and everything that I built up here might subsequently be horribly slaughtered. But hey that's what I blog for, so I don't end up as Edo Nyland reconstructing all languages back to conlangs constructed from Basque.

The IE perfect and its penultimate stress

A while ago, I had a nice chat with my Luwian and Hittite teacher Alwin Kloekhorst, whose ideas about the history of especially the Hittite languages is greatly under appreciated in my opinion.

What was this chat about? About that pesky little thing we know as the Indo-European perfect or 'Hi-verb'. He had an explanation on its prehistory. From what I understood this was mostly based on how Kortlandt sees its development.

First of all I'll re-iterate the conventional reconstruction, then how I currently reconstruct the prehistory of the perfect, and then what Kloekhorst proposed.

As an example we'll take the unreduplicated perfect *woid- 'to know'; Whether there was an early reduplication is currently still unclear to me, but not relevant in this discussion.

1sg *wóid-h2e
2sg *wóid-th2e
3sg *wóid-e
1pl  *wid-mh2é
2pl  *wid-h1é ?
3pl  *wid-ér-s

Going by the ideas of Glen Gordon that Pre-Indo-European had a fixed penultimate stress this paradigm in an earlier stage would've looked like this:

1sg *wáid-h2ə
2sg *wáid-th2ə
3sg *wáid-ə
1pl  *wəid-mh2é
2pl  *wəid-h1é ?
3pl  *wəid-ér-əs

As always the1pl and 2pl are a bit problematic, also to the penultimate rule. If someone can explain those away as well, I'm glad to hear.

The rest goes pretty well. Except for the 1sg, 2sg, and 3sg, where the *ə in the suffix is expected to disappear with the Syncope. Here we have Glen Gordon's Suffix Resistance Exception, which lets monosyllabic suffixes retain their *ə.

Now we get to Kloekhorst's idea,  which will have to be explained in stages.

First you have the perfect in this form:

1sg *wid-h2é
2sg *wid-th2é
3sg *wid-é
1pl  *wid-mh2é
2pl  *wid-h1é ?
3pl  *wid-ér-s

Which an accent always in the suffix (thus violating the penultimate accent rule). Later by analogy of the ablaut found in the present, ablaut is introduced into the perfect. But with an *o, because in this stage of indo-european unaccented *e was not yet possible *o thus represented a sort of /ə/.

1sg *woid-h2é
2sg *woid-th2é
3sg *woid-é
1pl  *wid-mh2é
2pl  *wid-h1é ?
3pl  *wid-ér-s

Then the next step, another wave of analogy was applied, and that is the proces in which the accent become mobile just like in the present, but retaining the suffix vowels (all of these developments would have taken place after syncope). This gives the final forms:

1sg *wóid-h2e
2sg *wóid-th2e
3sg *wóid-e
1pl  *wid-mh2é
2pl  *wid-h1é ?
3pl  *wid-ér-s

I'm afraid this explanation works pretty well, and it gives a plausible phonetic explanation why the suffix vowels did not syncopate (since they were actually accented during syncope). The implication though, is that, accent can't have been penultimate, or at least not in the perfect, where it really seems to be on the ultimate syllable.

It works well, and it bothers me, since it means I'd have to rethink the whole syncope picture. So before I start all over again, I would like someone to come up with a nice theory to break down Kloekhorst's  idea.

If noone is able to do that, I am very interested to hear explanations why Perfect didn't have penultimates stress while pretty much the rest of the rest of the catagories does seem to adhere this type of stress. Would it mean that the perfect was introduced after the introduction of penultimate stress (much like how the clitic *so became a nominative marker after that development)? That has pretty huge implications too. Where did this perfect then come from?

Thoughts! Please! Anyone?

Whatevel happened to Sanskrit's /l/?!

One of the bigger mysteries of the Indo-Iranian branch is its reflexes of the Indo-European *l. As a rules all *l's become *r. In the Iranian branch this is well attested; Avestan, Old and Middle Persian all have this regularly. Then all of a sudden in Modern Persian this /l/ starts showing up again in etymologically logical places. How did this happen? I have no idea. I'd rather not tuch on the Iranian branch right now, since I know nothing about it.

I know slightly more about the Indo-Aryan branch though. Here also as a rule all *l's change into *r, creating a sort of 'Japanese-like' Indo-European as I like to see it. In Vedic Sanskrit, especially the Rig Veda, there's next to no /l/'s, even words that in Classical Sanskrit have an /l/, still reliably have an /r/ in Vedic.

aram ~ alam 'enough'
roman ~ loman 'hair on the body of men and beasts'
rabh- ~ labh- 'to receive'
ramb- ~ lamb- ''to hang down'
rikh- ~ likh- 'to write'

And the list goes on endlessly. A bit too often for my liking, the 'newer' form retains a historical *l, while it does happen that a etymological *r becomes an *l, this is not quite as common.

An example of that is the root kḷp- 'to be in order' for example (the only root with a vocalic l) which is often compared to Latin corpus.

So as time progresses, Sanskrit gets more and more /l/'s, of which many seem to be etymologicaly correect, but some come from *r.

To explain this theory some people have tried to come up with dialectal change. Some say there must have been an r-only-dialect  and an l-only-dialect. And that due to influence of the l-only-dialect the r-only-dialect started using /l/. This seems like an okay explanation, but I do find it a bit problematic.

Not all roots that have an /r/ have a /l/ counterpart, and remarkably often only the roots that historically are supposed to have an /l/ get it. So other people proposed an r-only-dialect to explain vedic, an l-only-dialect for 'wrong l's' and an l/r-dialect to explain the etymologically correct l's.

This seems like a terrible difficult explanation, but I must say I can't come up with a better explanation. What I can come up with though, is a little observation I made about the distribution.

As I said there's only one verb out there with a vocalic l, and that's kḷp-, so at least at one point a vocalic l was phonotactically forbidden, and probably in all dialects. But if it was forbidden you would expect verbs to have an l in full grade and vocalic r in zero-grade sometimes. But no such alternation exists between a hypothetical root *lak that alternates between **ṛc for example. This is of course suspicious, a syllable /la/ is perfectly legal in Sanskrit, but alternation isn't liked. You could say that analogy got rid of all these examples, but I personally would expect some more vocalic l roots then.

So in what kind of roots does the /l/ appear? Well almost exclusively in roots of the type laSC- where S stands for a n, m, u, i. This really is a pretty odd restraint. But did these consonants somehow influence the /r/ to turn into an /l/ ? I don't know. But I just thought I'd point out this odd distribution. Maybe it gives someone an incredible idea to explain this odd *l.