topics: |  linguistic | language-family | indo-european | phonetics

 
						Indo-european peoples (~ 500 BC)

Focuses on pronunciation change and other aspects of reconstructing
languages and families.  covers a lot of the theory on "laryngeal" changes
and other diachronic processes.   phonology, morphology, and syntax of
reconstructed Proto-Indo-European.

The focus of analysis can be seeen in the sequence of chapters:

   Proto-IE: chapters 2 to 4
   Proto-IE Verb, Noun, Pronoun, Syntax: ch 5 to 8
   Anatolian: 9  [PIE vocab I: man, woman, kinship] p. 154-179 [26]
   Indo-Iranian I: Indic : 10  	 [PIE vocab II: animals]  p. 180 [23]
   Indo-Iranian II: Iranian : 11    [PIE vocab III: food and agriculture] p.203 [19]
   Greek : 12 p.222       [PIE vocab: the body]
   Italic: 13 p.245       [PIE vocab: body functions / states]
   Celtic: 14 p.274       [PIE vocab: natural environment]
   Germanic: 15 300       [PIE vocab: position and motion ]
   Armenian: 16, 337      [PIE vocab: material culture, technology]
   Tocharian: 17, 351     [PIE vocab: Form and Size]
   Balto-Slavic, 18 364   [PIE vocab: Time]
   Albanian: 19 390       [PIE vocab: Utterance]
   Fragmentary Languages: 400	[PIE vocab: basic physical actsa]

However, a cursory look at the map (based on map from p.11 of the book),
reveals the large geographical area, traditionally closely populated from
very ancient times, between the Indic and the Iranian.  Indeed, this is the
region that has given the world the first description of phonology; surely
this area deserves a finer discrimination than what has transpired so far.

1 Introduction: The Comparative Method and the Indo-European Family

Reconstructing dead languages

Sources of evidence for reconstructing ancient languages:
   - contemporary descriptions
   - descendant languages [can apply comparative method]
   - orthographic practice (including spelling errors)
   - rendering of loanwords from known source languages
   - metrical evidence from poetry

Sometimes, as in the case of Sanskrit, we are fortunate in having detailed
descriptions of the language's pronunciation and structure by ancient
grammarians.

e.g. educated romans of the 1st c. BC rendered the greek letter phi (Φ) as ph
in words such as philosophia.  The sequence ph was not used in native
words, so it must have represented a sound that was missing in their own
language - an aspirated stop consonant, as it happens, different from the
latin unaspirated p, and also from the Latin fricative f. 6

Philology

linguistic analysis of texts : philology - "the art of reading slowly", now
called comparative historical linguistics.  7

Comparing copied versions of ancient texts,
where the original source manuscript (archetypes) are lost,
looking at errors and modernizations reveal
systematicity in the change.

Example 1. Gk prophetes, prophet.  -phetes = 'sayer', and pro- can be
'before' or 'forth'.   There is a verb prophemi 'I speak before',  so one
may conclude that prophetes is derived from this verb and means 'one who
speaks beforehand'.  However, looking at textual occurrences show that
prophetes appears a good 700 years before prophemi.   We conclude that
'prophet'  was originally one who spoke forth or announced the will of the
gods, rather than one who foretold the future.

Example 2. Sanskrit naveda-, 'knowledgeable', is clearly related to
veda-, 'knowledge', but the first element, na-, is not a known prefix
anywhere else in the lg, and seems to have little effect on the overall
sense.  ... Frequently naveda- appears as part of the phrase 'be ye
knowledegeable (of)'.  A version of this is bhUta navedAH,
'be ye knowledegeable', where bhUta is the plural imperative 2nd p of the
verb 'to be'.  A common variant of bhUta is bhUtana with the optional
element -na.   We can thus reasonably surmise that someone in the course of
transmission misanalyzed this particle as prefix.
As in the English an ekename, 'a supplementary name', was reanalyzed as
a nekename  --> nickname.  p.7-8

Controversy and change in IE linguistics

The discovery of Anatolian and Tocharian in the 20th c. has fueled debate on
the internal structure of the PIE family tree.  Anatolian, the oldest
attested branch, is significantly different from the picture of PIE that
scholars had developed at the end of the 19th c.

[the picture of PIE has been in constant change over more than two centuries
of study, hence]
The account of linguistic history given in this book is not an immutable
truth.

Links

Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov
Early History of Indo-European Languages
Scientific American 1990

 
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov argue that the European branches of PIE emigrated
from a version spoken east of the Caspian.

[AM: Given that all the early evidence is well east of the caucasus, it is not
clear why the posited homeland should be so far to the west. ]