PhDniX's blog

Scirpture on Schwebeablaut and Consonant gradation

No, scirpture was not a typo, but a display of an odd sense of humor.

Anyway, I just thought I'd give a little update on a possible subject for my Bachelor Scripture. Ah while ago I already mentioned in passing the odd correspondence between the verbal roots *gʰrebʰ- 'to grab' and *kerp- 'to pick'. I think these two roots might be a result of lexicalisation of one root that split into two gradation groups. The fact that there also is a schwebeablaut (that is a full-grade vowel that is not always in the same position within the root) seems to indicate a certain correlation between consonant gradation and accent shifts.

Outside of the verbal system we find another word that curiously seems to display such a gradation and that is *ḱerd- 'heart', while in Sanskrit we find hṛd- and in Avestan we find zərəd- which both seem to go back to *ǵʰrd-, and then there's the Sanskrit śrad- (notice the schwebe ablaut!) which in combination with dhā- 'to give' give a lovely indo-european experession also found in Latin Credere 'to believe'. This form seems to go back to *ḱred-.

I'm not sure if I can collect enough material to make a sound point yet, but I'm currently surveying the verbal roots of the Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben with the computer, and if all goes well all roots that might be elligible should roll right out.

If this works though, Kortlandt will have a much stronger point with his vowel gradation. So far he seems to have only the correspondence between Accent and consonant grades, but no proof that there was actual paradigmatic shifting within one root.

Seems like a fun enough subject doesn't it?

Linguistics, Archaeology and Indiana Jones

A deviation of the usual style of my posting; I'm not going to talk about Linguistics, well, actually I am, but I wont talk about the content of linguistics, but linguistics as a subject.

Every day I sit in the train to my university, this trip is a bit longer than an hour, I tend to use this time to do some studying. People seeing me decipher Hieroglyphic Luwian texts, or Sanskrit and the like tends to raise some eyebrows.

Like today, the person sitting next to me asked me: "Why in heaven's  name are you learning Sanskrit?".

I tell him, it's not really a choice, since its an obligatory subject for my study. He pops the question what I might be studying. I explain that I learn a bunch of languages from the Indo-European language family and learn to reconstruct the prehistoric language that lies at the base of it all.

Some people get it, other people miss the point ("Isn't Latin the mother of all European languages?"). But the question that is invariably asked is "So, what will you be doing with this later in live", and I tell them I want to become an academic. Sometimes people don't really react, probably having a hard time imagining what it's like, and sometimes people straight up tell me it's worthless, and I shouldn't bother and should just learn Chinese or something.

While of course there's some difficulty in actually becoming an academic considering the size of my study and the continual downsizing of the studies that really matter, I think if I wouldn't try I wouldn't end up doing what I want. And I am terrible at not doing what I want. I generally don't do it.

But I'm straying, back to my title. I find it funny that people ask me what I want to become and are so negative about it when I tell them that there's no use for the study except academic interest.

If I would tell them that I studied Archaeology, would they ask me what I'm going to do with that? Of course not! The answer is obvious, you become an archaeologist. And that suffices, nobody complains about it being worthless, or a stupid career choice.

Yet when I tell them I want to become a Linguist because I'm studying Linguistics, it's weird. And essentially Historical Linguistics is just Archaeology without all the digging and with more making sense of what the people in history and prehistory say about their culture.

So, is it all Indiana Jones' fault? Does Historical Linguistics need a charismatic swashbuckling Nazi-fighting whip-wielding Harrison Ford for it to not be a stupid career choice? Or do we need a E-cup and double magnum-wielding violent British aristocratic Tomb Raider?

I can see people seeing no point in academic studies which seem to purely provide the subject itself with stuff, but you'll never know when it will be relevant. If we would just give up 'useless' academia, there will never be the day a great mind will in one go make it much more useful.

No doubt, in the beginning stages of physics nobody saw any use in Newton's theories, besides it being so cool that you could roll a ball and know what it would do!

But in this day and age where people gladly make use of cars, and their brakes, can you imagine what the highway would look like if we had to 'eyeball' braking, and the technology behind it?

I'm not saying historical linguistics will ever have such an enormous impact like Sir Isaac Newton, but it's important that we leave the option. And this is the case with any minor subject on this planet really. But with this rapidly globalising and capitalistifying (is that a word?! Spellcheck says yes) world, Science is starting to become more and more another way to make money, rather than make the people more knowledgeable and who knows what else.

Conclusion: Small dying academic subjects like the one I study need someone to make a movie about them and create an unrealistic highly exaggerated and spectacular movie character like Indiana Jones!

Kortlandt's Indo-Uralic consonant gradation

I've been reading a lot of Kortlandt's articles lately, which are conveniently almost all available on the web. His idea's are interesting, his writing is tormenting. I spent hours trying to figure out his article Hittite hi-verbs and the Indo-European perfect which I think I understand now. To give the man some credit, he does write about really difficult subjects, which will never give birth to easy to understand articles, but a 57 word sentence should not be allowed, no matter how difficult the subject matter.

Anyway, I wasn't going to talk about that article, though it is an interesting read. I am going to talk about his article on Indo-Uralic Consonant Gradation. Why? Because it has a lot of interesting stuff, and also some stuff I have trouble accepting. But I believe he is on to something.

He first talks about the Proto-Uralic stress pattern, which accourding to him is:
(C)É(C)-CE(C)-CÈ(C)-CE(C)

Where acute stand for primary stress and grave for secondary stress. Any odd syllable is considered strong, while every even syllable is considered strong. A certain Proto-Uralic system of consonant strengthening and weakening has been found. Kortlandt, completely in style, gives absolutely no examples, so I'm left guessing here what it might have looked like.

Nevertheless he mentions two rules:
1. Consonants which follow the vowel of a weak syllable are weakened.
2. Consants which precede the vowel of a closed weak syllable are weakened.

Read the article for specifics.

Kortlandt aims to transpose such a weakening due to 'strong' and 'weak' syllable to Indo-European, his implication being, that if Indo-European has it, the process must be Proto-Indo-Uralic.

For this he choses to bring up The System of Nominal Accentuation in Sanskrit and Indo-European by my current Vedic Sanskrit teacher, Sasha Lubotsky.

Lubotsky takes a look at the barytona and oxytona in Sanskrit. Barytone is the accent on the penultimate syllable, oxytone is the accent on the ultimate syllable.

Looking at the data Lubotsky concludes that the oxytona almost exclusively have voiceless consonants as opposed to voiced aspirates, whily the barytona almost exclusively have the voiced aspirates and next to no voiceless consonants.

That's quite the discovery. The conclusion that the type of consonant is influenced by the type of accent is so blatantly obvious that I feel silly for mentioning it. I wasn't aware of this distribution.

Kortlandt tries to connect this weakening to the Uralic weakening. For this he needs a third rule.

This rule is the following: An open strong syllable becomes weak and loses its stress to the following syllable, which will become strong if it is closed.

And here the article loses much of its comprihensability. Partially because he starts *o juggling through analogies, while I tend to agree with Glen Gordon that it's more probable and thus more preferable that such *o's appeared through phonotactic developments (mostly).
 Also a lack of clear paradigms of his reconstructed proto-languages makes it hard to understand what is meant. This lack of giving examples is typical of Kortlandt's writing style, who will rather use a periphrastic explanation of what happens, rather than showing what happens. I guess I am more of a visual person than he is. Insights on the interpration of the rest of the article are appreciated.

I challenge anyone to figure out what is meant here.

Even if it somehow works out though, I think it's still more viable to with a penultimate stress based syncope, but one should keep in mind that a very early form of Indo-European must have had consonant gradation as a result of the position of the stress in combination with syllable shape. I need to overthink how this fits in with the penultimate stress syncope.

But before rethinking the model, I would like to understand what Kortlandt is trying to achieve, even though I might not agree. So any help is appreciated.

Sceptics to the consonant gradation due to stress, could maybe say the stress is dependant on the type of consonants, besides it being typologically unlikely this would actually make the series of stops difficult to explain, and it wouldn't have to find some really nice explanation for verbal pairs like *grebh- 'to grab' and *kerp- 'to pluck', which are a bit to similar for comfort in my opinion. And there's more pairs like it.

[Edit: I misread a bit of the article, I thought it said the third rule took place between the first and second, but it simply takes place after the two, I am still not getting the results I want though.]

Luwian Text

For finishing my Luwian class, I had the assignment to translate a Luwian text. Since I have been notoriously unproductive on this blog, I thought I'd treat my readers on something relevant to the blog, with has had me productive.

First of all here's the text:

001

I've diligently attempted to get my notes all over the paper off with my trusty eraser, but it has let me down somewhat, the text is almost untouched though. Enjoy!

And then for the file : http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Q5FZ5QLZ

Be aware that this text is still completely unchecked, so there may be mistakes. And the layout is far from beautiful. Once I get back a corrected version of the text, I will probably upload a new version.

Enjoy!