PhDniX's blog

*sprefixes in Indo-European

After discussing Tibeto-Burman prefixes, and touching upon the *s- prefix in Tibeto-Burman, I sort of ran into the Indo-European s-mobile again.

For those unknown to the s-mobile, it is a unexplained element *s that seems to optionally appear in front of words. There are several words even in English today that form an s-mobile pair. For example melt besides smelt with some differentiation in meaning but not much.

I have been pondering about the origin of this s-mobile for some time now, it is something that will occasionally bug the mind of any Indo-Europeanist, only to leave them confused and dissatisfied without a proper answer. I too, do not have a proper answer, but I have a little theory that I'd like to explore.

Several ideas have been explorer in the past. Some say it is simply an irregular shift of *s/_C > ø. I don't like irregular shifts that are as wide-spread as this shift is, since it is found in every single branch of Indo-European. If there was a shift that never became particularly popular, I'd at least like to see one of the branches that got rid of it completely.

Another explanation that has been explored by some, is that it might be the s-prefix as found in Semitic languages, which often has a causative meaning. This explanation would be very nice if all s-prefixed verbs could be explained as Semitic loanwords. The problem with this theory is though, that the s-mobile seems to appear in front of nouns as well.

As an example we find the Dutch stier 'bull' and Old English stêor OHG stior. In Old Norse we find the s-less form þjôrra. It won't come as a surprise to anyone that this word is related to Lat. taurus and Gr. ταῦρος. This seems to be a very early loan from Semitic. Arabic has ṯawr. It can't have gone in the other direction because Semitic had access to a t so there would be no reason to replace Indo-European *t with *ṯ. It should be noted that this s-mobile appears in Indo-European, but is absolutely impossible to find in Semitic. This fact led me to think that it must have been some sort of productive suffix in Indo-European.

If I were trying to connect Indo-European with Sino-Tibetan I wouldn't have hesitated to say that the PIE *s  is the animal prefix in PST *s. But since such a claim would make me look like a maniac, I will not even go into that, but the resemblance is just a funny coincidence which I wanted to mention.

Now then, we have the strange situation of an element *s that can appear both before verbs and nouns. I asked myself what kind of element can appear before verbs and nouns in Indo-European. And then I realised, that, although only very productive in Graeco-Aryan, Indo-European has a lot of prefixes that can be place before verbs and nouns. Elements such as Skt. pra-, su-, a-, apa- etc. which all have direct reflexes in Greek as well.

So what *s is a prefix like this as well? The s-mobile sometimes seems to give a somewhat intensifying meaning to verbs (although I should really once look into the semantics of that, but this is what is often claimed).

I was wondering if maybe, the *s is a strongly reduced form of the prefix *h₁su- which yields su- in Sanskrit and  εὐ- in Greek. Semantically it would make sense. smelting is then 'well-melting'. And a stier would be a 'good-bull'. If this reduced form really does come from a reduced form of *h₁su- it would explain why this prefix is not found in any other languages but Graeco-Aryan languages, since the *s would be that form. Why both forms occurs in Graeco-Aryan though, remains unexplained.

Although the idea is pretty nifty, I'm still very hesitant about this hypothesis. Can pretonic *u really reduce to schwa and then disappear completely? Do we have precedent of this? And then there's the laryngeal. Although the reflex of it wont be commonly found in languages, you would expect indirect evidence of lengthened vowels before an s-mobile in Vedic Sanskrit. As far as I am aware, this does not exist, but it is definitely worth looking into. If I can indeed find indirect evidence in Vedic, I'll be a lot more confident about this hypothesis.

Thibetan Aspirates

I've been reading up on Proto-Tibeto-Burman/Sino-Tibetan lately. I've run into a problem with the aspirated consonants which I have not yet been able to solve.

In Proto-Tibeto-Burman we reconstruct two series of stops: Voiceless and Voiced. Tibetan though, has a series of three stops: Voiceless, Voiceless Aspirated and Voiced.

Voiceless and Voiceless aspirated consonants can be accounted for as being distributed complementary for all of the cases where these consonants are non-word-initial. Many other cases the voiceless aspirated consonants can also simply be explained as allophones, as is accurately done by Nathan Hill's article Aspirated and Unaspirated Voiceless Consonants in Old Tibetan .

One, to me, blatant omission in his article though, is that he only looks at the phonetic distribution of these consonants. But one could argue that there is a phonemic contrast that isn't immediately obvious from the outside form. Stephan Beyer addresses this in his book 'The Classical Tibetan Language' when discussing the results of the combination of stops with the verbal prefixes on page 174. I have taken the liberty to copy this table on this blog.

ROOT INITIAL	N-	B-	G-	Ø-
K	Nkh	bk	dk	kh
KH	Nkh	kh	kh	kh
G	Ng	bk	dg	kh
T	Nth	bt	gt	th
TH	Nth	th	th	th
D	Nd	bt	gd	th
P	Nb	ph	db	ph
PH	Nph	ph	db	ph
B	Nb	b	db	b
C	Nch	bś	gś	ś
CH	Nch	bc	gc	ch
J	Nj	bź	gź	ź
	Nj	bc	gź	ch
TS	Ntsh	bs	gs	s
TSH	Ntsh	bts	gts	tsh
DZ	Ndz	bz	gz	z
	Ndz	bts	gz	tsh

As you can see, Beyer needs two types of voiceless stops to account for the distribution of consonants. Beyer's aim is to accurately describe Tibetan rather than give proto-Tibetan forms so the voiceless aspirates might not be etymological voiceless aspirated stops, but then I don't get the distribution.

For example we have the verb 'to wash' Root: KRU-D Conjugation: Class I
Present Nkhrud-pa Perfect bkrus Future bkru Imperative khrus

This root has an etymology I could find as PTB *krəw 'to wash'
Written Burmese khyûi, Dimasa gru < *krəw
Jingpho krùt < *krəw-t
(Examples cited from Matisoff's Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman)

And a contrasticve example would be the verb 'to carry, bring' Root: KHYER Conjugation: Class I
Present Nkhyer-pa Perfect khyer Future khyer Imperative khyer

If k and kh are truly from one phoneme *k why is there this asymmetry? I fail to understand this, and Hill fails to give an answer to this.

Other more obvious examples of this Class I verbs are the following:

Nchiṅ-pa P bciṅs F bciṅ I chiṅs ‘to bind’

Nchad-pa P bśad F bśad I śod ‘to say’

These two are readily understood. In the second form ś (<*sy-) is the orginal form, which is turned into an affricate by the stop-feature of the prefix *N-. While the first example is a true consonant c (<*ty-).

 Another word is the following:

Nbyin-pa P byiṅ F dbyuṅ I phyuṅs 'to send forth'

Matisoff does not mention this Tibetan form, but it seems to me that it is related to *pyiŋ- 'release, send forth' Written Burman: phyâñ. Though I think the form implies a variant of this root with an *u as *pyuŋ-

And then there's:

Nphral-ba P phral F dbral I phrol 'to separate, to part' which is the active counterpart to Nbral-ba 'to be separated'.

Usually an active counterpart to an intransitive verb is made with the s- prefix, but *Nsbr- would not yield *Nphr-s but rather *sbr- as can be seen from

sbrud-pa P sbrus F sbru I sbrus 'to stir' from an earlier paradigm

*N/g-sbru-d, *b-sbru-s F *b/g-sbru I *sbru-s. It is not 100% certain that the cluster *sbr- is not a result of *g-sbr.

The etymology for Nphral-ba and Nbral-ba seem to be the reconstructed TB form *p/bral 'leave/depart, seperate' which is sadly only reconstructed for TB because it seems to have a Old Chinese cognate.

Another, and probably the most solid etymology I could find for *Np reflected as *Nph is the following:

Nphur P phur 'to fly' from TB *pur Tankhul Naga puy, Magar bhur-ke, Thakali pyuhr-wa among others.

As you can see these different inflections prove to be problematic. It is a shame that I couldn't find any of these "voiceless" and "voiceless aspirate" pairs that both had a unambiguous etymology. Nevertheless, I can see no conditioning based on the examples I've cited. I too, would very much like to reconstruct only an opposition between voiceless and voiced stops, but I am currently not sure how to account for the reflexes that Beyer called the voiceless aspirates.

For kh and th one could imagine that it was simply a loss of prefix one way or the other, But for p/ph this does not seem to be an option since you find the curious relfex Nph beside Nb.

I might be missing something, Tibeto-Burman is pretty new to me, but I can't find any conditioning. Any suggestions? Or a nudge to someone who wrote an article figuring it all out?