The Student’s Guide to Indo-European.pdf

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The Students Guide to Indo-European

Anton RyttingFor Dr. Cynthia HallenLinguistics 450 Winter Semester, 1998

Introduction

Indo-European has always had a special place in the field of Comparative-HistoricalLinguistics. Indeed, in the early stages of the disciplines, Comparative-Historical andIndo-European studies were practically synonymous, the former merely referring tothe preferred method of investigating the latter. Yet Indo-European (IE) is not theeasiest family to reconstruct; indeed, it is still the source of some of the knottiestproblems in Historical Linguistics. Why is this language family the object of so muchfocus? I suggest three reasons. First, it is close to home. The overwhelming majorityof linguists happen to speak an IE language, and there exists a certain fascinationwith studying ones roots. Secondly, about half of the worlds population speaks alanguage from the IE family, making it the worlds most expansive language family.

Third, and perhaps most important, the wealth of written evidence makes it possibleto investigate with some degree of surety back as far the second millennium BC.

The language family called Indo-European is commonly divided into eight livingsub-families (Germanic, Italic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Balto-Slavic, Armenian,and Albanian) and two dead ones (Anatolian and Tocharian). Naturally there existrelationships between these families, but the relationships are quite complex, and itis safe to say that there is more controversy than consensus regarding any highergrouping of these various sub-families. Indeed, as we will see, the history of the fieldmay involve more discarding of misconceptions than actual progress into knownfact. This little guide will introduce you to some of the key-players (both linguistsand languages) in the history studies, and provide a brief overview of scholarscurrent viewpoints of Indo-European (what little consensus does exist).

History of the Discipline

Introductory texts either of Historical-Comparative Linguistics or of Indo-Europeanstudies commonly begin with Sir William Jones 1792 speech to the Royal AsiaticSociety. This is not to say that he began either discipline. Many before him hadnoticed the connections between the European languages and even had connected

them with Sanskrit, and by the end of the 18th century most scholars had stopped

regarding Biblical Hebrew a priorias the mother tongue. (During the middle ages,ecclesiastical tradition considered Hebrew the oldest of human languages.) Forexample, a certain James Parsons in 1767 published a treatise on the "European"family of tongues, which included most of the major families recognized today, andexcluded Hebrew. Many others published treatises claiming this or that language asthe "original" language of the European peoples. However, Jones is usually creditedwith voicing the thought that the "original Indo-European tongue" was not Latin, notGreek, not Sanskrit, but some language for which no written evidence existed. Thiswas a crucial turning point for comparative philologists(as historical linguists werethen called), for they had a new task before them: to reconstruct a language fromscratch.

Jones reputation as a scholar helped his hypothesis catch on. However, althoughthe goal was now in mind, the pathway was not. Etymologists still pieced togetherword-histories haphazardly, one by one, and fell into many errors through lack of a

Students Guide to Indo-European http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch/reports/indo-european.html

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method. A method of scientific inquiry was not to be found until three Germanicphilologists advanced the concept of systematic sound correlations between thevarious members of the IE family. The works of Rasmus Rask (1818), Franz Bopp(1816), and Jakob Grimm (1819) began the formulation of sound laws: rules oflanguage development believed to be absolute.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these sound laws were greatly refined.

Grassmanns internal reconstructions of Greek and Sanskrit (1863) explained someirregularities in their morphology, and Verners law (1875) resolved the seemingexceptions in Grimms phonological law. Karl Brugmanns theory of syllabic liquidsand nasals (1876) helped scholars reconstruct the proto-IE phonemic inventory. Asphilologists began to express their findings as universal laws and principles, thescience of linguistics began to emerge from philology.

While the earliest scholars focused mostly comparative phonology, AugustSchleicher (1821-1868) turned his attention to the proto-IE lexicon. He began to takelists of cognates and reconstruct what he felt to be the original Proto-Indo-Europeanroots, and first employed genetic trees to show relationships between languages

and language sub-families. His only foible was perhaps taking his own results tooseriously, for he later felt confident enough to write a one-paragraph childrens storyin the Proto-Indo-European language! Johannes Schmidt (1843-1901) felt thatgenetic-type trees badly over-simplified the complex relationships between the IEsub-families, and instead proposed a wave-model which showed both the moreancient relationships and also those resulting from later periods of languagecontact. However, the weakness of his model is that it does not try to distinguish

whenor howthese similarities came about; it only shows the similarities.

With the discovery and deciphering of Tocharian (c.1902), Hittite (1915-17), andMycenaean (or Linear B, 1952-53), the whole face of IE studies changed. The newfinds broadened and deepened the scope of IE research considerably. Hittitepre-dated even Sanskrit by at least 600 years, and Tocharian took Indo-European asfar east as Chinese Turkestan.

However, these new data also discredited several central hypotheses in grouping theIE sub-families. Although the Mycenaean tablets confirmed Greeks importance asone of the oldest IE languages, they challenged then-current chronologies ofIndo-European migration into the Balkans. And while the Hittite and Tocharian dataadmirably confirmed the existence of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European (a theoryfirst suggested by Ferdinand de Saussure and others, but confirmed with Hittite

data by Kury_owicz in 1927), they also undermined the most fundamental division ofIE language-families: the so-called "centum-satem" split. According to this theory,proto-IE (P-IE) split early on into western and eastern dialects. Western IElanguages, such as Italic and Celtic, preserved P-IE velar consonants; Eastern IElanguages, such as Slavic and Indo-Iranian, shifted them to palatals or sibilants.

Tocharian and Hittite, although both "centum" languages by the standard definition,share many other features with their eastern neighbors. For this reason, somelinguists now theorize that the fronting of velars happened independently in each of

the so-called "satem" language groups, and at different times.

Enough of history for now, however: let us proceed to a brief description of each

sub-family, very roughly in the order of inclusion into the larger family ofIndo-European.

Germanic


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In a sense, Germanic can be said to be the starting point of the ComparativeMethod. In 1818 the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask noticed the shift in Germanicconsonants relative to other IE languages. Grimm named this correspondence theFirst Germanic Sound Shift, and included it, substantiated with examples from

Sanskrit, in his 1822 edition of his German Grammar. This law, also known asGrimms Law, cleanly differentiates Germanic from all other sub-families of IE. As thelaw is usually stated now, IE unvoiced stops become fricatives in Proto-Germanic;

voiced, unaspirated stops are devoiced; and voiced, aspirated stops becomefricatives and then unaspirated stops. In his book In Search of the Indo-Europeans,Mallory dates this sound shift at about 500 BC (see p. 85). As mentioned above,Verner refined Grimms Law by accounting for a seeming exception for consonantsthat occur between unaccented and accented vowels. The tables below sum upGrimms and Verners Laws:

The earliest text in the Germanic family is a partial translation of the Bible by BishopWulfilas into Gothic, the principal member of the now-extinct East Germanic branch.The Goths seem originally to have come from the Black Sea region, and Gothic was

still spoken in the Crimea until the 16th century.

The two living branches of Germanic are Northern Germanic (or Scandinavian) and

the West Germanic. The Northern branch subdivides into East and West groups,claiming respectively Swedish and Danish on the one hand, and Norwegian andIcelandic on the other. West Germanic split into High and Low dialects (referring togeographic elevation, not social status). The High version (comprising Old HighGerman, Standard Modern German, and Yiddish) underwent another soundchange, called the Second Sound Shift, where Common Germanic voiceless stopsshifted to affricates initially, and fricatives medially and finally; voiced stops weredevoiced; and voiced fricatives became voiced stops. The Low version (whichincludes Dutch, Afrikaans, English, Flemish, Frisian, and Low German) underwentdifferent changes.

Indo-Iranian

Next to German, the earliest Indo-Europeanists considered Indo-Iranian the mostimportant family in their research (which is still evidenced by the German term forIndo-European: Indo-Germanic!), for it was the oldest family known at the time. Theearliest Indic literature the Vedic hymns were composed perhaps as early as1200 BC and handed down orally. By 500 BC, Indian grammarians developedexceptionally accurate descriptions of Classical Sanskrit, their literary language. Theoldest Iranian literature include the G_th_s of Zarathustra (written in Avestan, 600BC) and cuneiform from 500 BC, written in Old Persian.

The Indo-Iranian family is a combination of two closely related sub-families: the Indic(including Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, and the various Prakrits from which themodern Indic languages emerged); and the Iranian (Old Persian, Avestan, andModern Persian (Farsi), Kurdish, and Pato). These two branches, which probably


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split before 1500 BC, are sometimes referred to as Indo-Aryan, because the

speakers both of Vedic Sanskrit and of Avestan referred to themselves as AryaorAirya.A third branch, Kafiri or Dardic, is sometimes included in this family.

Proto-Indo-Iranian shows IE */e/, */o/, and the syllabic nasals merging with /a/; */l/merging with /r/; and palatalization of the labio-velars. Both branches are quitesimilar in phonology and syntax, preserving all eight cases known to be IE. Sanskrit

preserves IE voiced aspirates and develops voiceless ones; Avestan changes theseto unaspirated stops and fricatives.

Greek

Probably the next most important language in early IE studies was Greek, for itshared with Latin an immense body of ancient texts, but is both older andmorphologically more conservative than Latin. Greeks importance re-surged in the1950's with the discovery and deciphering of dialects 500 years more ancient thanHomers.

These new discoveries, the oldest texts identifiable as Greek, include some 4,500clay tablets from Knossos, Mycenae, and Pylos, during the Late Bronze Age(12th-13th c. BC). The brief scratchings (mostly economic records) are written in aborrowed syllabary termed Linear B. Once deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952,they showed a dialect of Greek much closer to P-IE, and clarified the etymology ofmany Greek words to P-IE roots.

One phonemic shift unique to Greek is the split of labio-velar /kw/, /gwh/ into /t/, /th/

before front vowels, but /p/, /ph/ before back vowels. The weakening of initial /s/ and/w/ to /h/ is also characteristic. IE voiced aspirates became unvoiced in Greek, andsometimes underwent a strange phonotactic transformation called GrassmannsLaw: if two aspirates occur in the same word, the first one becomes unaspirated.

The Greek language shows some aboriginal (non-IE) substratum in its names ofgods and heroes, terms for "king," "slave," and other social ranks, and inMediterranean flora and fauna.

Otherwise, Greek shows some weak evidence kinship with Phrygian, Macedonian,and Armenian. The taxonomy of Greek dialects is still contested, but it is common todivide them into East Greek (Attic-Ionic, Aeolic, and Arcado-Cyprian) and WestGreek (Northwest Greek and Doric). Mycenaean seems to have been a mix of

dialects, like Homers epic dialect. From Homers time till the "classical" period(5th-4th c. BC), the East Greek dialects dominated literature. Indeed, under thegreat leveling of Alexanders empire, Attic and Ionic merged into a common dialectcalled Koin_, which eclipsed all other dialects. From the Koin_ dialect stemByzantine, Medieval, and eventually Modern Greek.

Italic

When writing swept north across Italy from Greek colonists and traders around 800BC, it preserved a hodgepodge of languages along "the Boot" someIndo-European, some not. Of the IE languages, the principal two families were the

Osco-Umbrian group, preserved by Umbrian religious texts (the Iguvian tablets, c.200 BC) and Samnite (Oscan) graffiti at Pompeii; Latin; and the near cousin Faliscanto the north. Linguists disagree as to whether these two groups are geneticallyrelated, or converged through long, close contact. In addition, some linguists see a


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connection between the Italic and the Celtic families, because both Osco-Umbrian

and the Brythonic (p-Celtic) languages show a shift of P-IE labio-velars into labials

(e.g., */kw/ > /p/). (Latin and Faliscan retain the labio-velar.) This link is tenuous,however.

Judging from the evidence of non-IE groups to the west, the Italic peoples probablycame either from the north over the Alps, or from the east across the Adriatic. Latin

gradually extinguished the other languages on the peninsula through Romesconquest (Oscan was probably extinct by the first c. AD), and soon spread all acrossformer Celtic territory, effectively eliminating Continental Celtic by the 4th c. AD. TheRomance languages (Italian, French, Provenal, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese,Galician, Roumanian, and Raeto-Romansh) all stem from Latin perhaps not theelegant Latin written by Cicero or Virgil, but the Vulgar Latin spoken by the commonRoman soldier.

Celtic

The Celts dominated western and central Europe during the Iron Age, originally

settling the area near Belgium and northern France. They soon spread to the BritishIsles, then into the Iberian peninsula (about 600 BC), into northern Italy (400 BC),and into eastern Europe and beyond (300-200 BC). In their western Europeanhomeland, the Celts remained the dominating force until invasions from the Romans(on the south) and Germans (on the northeast) wiped Continental Celtic languagesoff the map in the early centuries of the Christian Era.

Scholars have postulated a number of Continental Celtic languages, such as Gallic,Celtiberian, and Lepontic, but very little is known about these tongues, due to thesparseness of written records. The Celts in the British Isles spoke a language (orlanguages) known as Insular Celtic; this branch spilt into the Goidelic (or q-Celtic)

and Brythonic (or p-Celtic) branches, characterized by shift of IE labio-velars intovelars or labials, respectively.

Displaced from the continent by the Romans and Germans, pushed from most ofBritain by the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, and now under pressure from English andFrench, Celtic today is a dying family. Only Scots- and Irish-Gaelic (on the Goidelicside), and Welsh and Breton (on the Brythonic side) are still spoken. Nearly allspeakers of each of these languages are bilingual (either English or French), excepton the westernmost edges of Ireland. Someday we may be dependant on writtenand audio-recorded records for our knowledge of this family of tongues.

Balto-Slavic

Just as with Continental Celtic, our knowledge of early Balto-Slavic is hampered bylack of written evidence. Both these sub-families acquired their alphabets, along withChristianity, at the hands of foreign missionaries. The Slavic tongues were first

written down in the 9th c. AD, when St. Cyril and St. Methodius translated the GreekOrthodox liturgies into a south Slavic tongue (now appropriately called "Old ChurchSlavonic"). The oldest Baltic texts are Lutheran catechisms in Lithuanian, from the

16th century. By this time the Baltic peoples once-expansive territory had been muchreduced by the expansion of Slavs and Germans. Several Baltic languages werenever written at all; indeed, the whole west branch was nearly lost. Old Prussian,the last West Baltic tongue, died out about 1700 AD, not long after it was firstwritten.


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Because both families histories are shrouded by lack of documentation, the exactrelationship between Baltic and Slavic is hotly contested. Vladimir Georgiev, in hiswork Introduction to the History of Indo-European, posits a Balto-Slavic unity during

the 3rd millennium BC, with Proto-Slavic branching off during the 2nd and 1st

millennia BC (p. 219). Other scholars feel that the two are not closely relatedgenetically, but converged during their long mutual contact. This latter view is notunreasonable: neither language family seems particularly averse to outside

influence. Although the Baltic languages are said to be among the mostconservative of all the IE languages, they still show considerable contaminationfrom Germanic. The Slavic languages also show significant borrowing fromGermanic (especially Gothic) up until 400 A.D., as well as borrowing religiousvocabulary from Iranian sources.

Armenian

Even though literacy reached Armenia as early as the 5th century AD (again, at thehands of missionaries), Armenian still puzzled IE scholars for quite some time. Itsconnections with the rest of the family are somewhat obscured by extensiveborrowings from non-IE languages. Even after its belated inclusion in the IE family, itwas mis-classified for some time as an Indo-Iranian offshoot. Finally, HenrichHbschmann established it as an independent branch in 1875. Today severalscholars connect Armenian with Phrygian, Thracian, and also with Greek. As well asshowing phonetic and morphological similarities, Greek and Armenian share some400 cognates. About 10 percent of these are found in no other known language.

The Armenians migration route can be traced from their borrowings: from theAnatolian languages before 1200 BC, and from Iranian and Semitic languages(especially Aramaic) between 500 and 100 BC. It seems, therefore, that the

Armenian people actually migrated west, from the Balkans, through Anatolia, intoAsia Minor. They also must have borrowed substantially from the (non-IE)inhabitants of their new homeland, since many words in Armenian cannot be tracedto any other known language.

Albanian

Like Armenian, Albanian was not definitely established as IE until the end of the 19 th

century, and also mis-classified at first because of its wealth of loan-words. Albanianshows much influence from its neighbors: Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Turkish. Also,

since its first written records appear very late (during the 15

th

century AD), neitherAlbanians history nor its relationships to other IE languages can be known with any

surety. Albanian maybe a descendant of the Old Illyrian tongue, but there is no wayto know for sure, since all we have preserved of Illyrian itself are personal namesand place names. Since the Albanian terminology for fishing and boating isborrowed, and there is no mention of the Albanian people living in Albania until the

9th century AD, some linguists have argued that the Albanians migrated from inland,perhaps from the same homeland as the Dacians (Rumanians).

Despite Albanians frustrating lack of historical data, linguists can learn much fromits similarities with its present-day neighbors. There exists a peculiar convergence of

grammatical and syntactic patterns among Albanian, Greek, Rumanian, and theSouth Slavic languages, which has lead some researchers to posit a Balkan

Sprachbund, or linguistic area of mutual influence. For example, all of theselanguages have substituted a particle plus the subjunctive for an older infinitive


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construction, and several of these languages have merged the genitive and dativecases.

One important lesson from this modern convergence is that similarities betweenlanguages may have nothing to do with genetic inheritance, but may spring fromlater contact sort of a peer pressure among languages. Thus, Albanian calls intoquestion the traditional emphasis in IE studies on genetic relationships. Schmidtswave model, in its conservative way, may often be the more accurate representationof the data for IE languages, or groups of languages in general.

Tocharian

The discovery of two extinct families of Indo-European, Tocharian and Hittite,

marked an auspicious start to 20th-century IE studies. The first Tocharianmanuscripts, which seem to date from 600 AD, were originally discovered rightaround the turn of the century. Because they were written in an Indic alphabetalready known to scholars, the texts were deciphered quite quickly. Many of thesewere Buddhist texts, translations from the Sanskrit; others contained treatises on

magic or medicine, or business transactions for caravans. The name "Tocharian"comes from a people called by the Greeks "Tocharoi," who moved from Turkestan to

Bactria during the 2nd c. B.C. This identification is still hotly debated. but the name,accurate or not, has stuck.

The so-called "Tocharian A" is preserved just in the eastern part of ChineseTurkestan,

mostly in liturgical texts. The "B" variety is spread out also to the west, and seems tohave been more vernacular. The dialects do not differ greatly from each other:

Tocharian A tends to drop off word-final vowels, and shows simple vowels /e/ and /o/

where Tocharian B has diphthongs /ai/ and /au/.

Tocharians relationship with the other IE families is far from clear, and the history ofits migration still just speculation. As mentioned before, the velar /k/ in such words

as knt(Toch. A), kante(Toch. B) (=Latin centum, or 100) has been preserved, and a

medio-passive -rsuffix is similar to Latin, Irish, and Hittite. However, it sharesadjectival suffixes with Slavic, and certain cognates with Greek. Other scholars seeconnections with Thracian and Armenian; still others with Germanic and Balto-Slavic. Because it shows similarities to both eastern and western IE languages,Tocharian poses serious problems for a fundamental east-west split such as the

traditional centum-satemhypothesis.

Anatolian (Luwo-Hittite)

Late in the 19th century, large numbers of cuneiform were found in an unknownlanguage at Tell el-Amarni in Egypt. Ten years later, about 25,000 tablets werediscovered 90 miles east of Ankara, Turkey, in the same language. In 1906, Winckler

found the "Archives of the Hittite Kings," with records dating from the 14th and 13th

c. BC. In 1915, Bed_ich Hrozn suggested that this previously unknown "Hittite"language was a particularly ancient member of the Indo-European family. Although

the oldest inscriptions date back to around 1800 BC, these merely consist of isolatedwords. Actual continuous texts do not appear in Hittite until 1650 BC, and in Luwian(a related language) until 1400 BC. There is some evidence of other languages inthe Anatolian sub-family, such as Lycian, Lycian, and Palaic, but they are not wellattested. Palaic, for example, is known only by 200 words.


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There is considerable influence on both Luwian and Hittite from Non-IE languages,especially from neighboring Semitic tongues. They show many interestinginnovations: the merging of masculine and feminine gender into a common oranimate gender; the use of postpositions (prepositions which come afterthe noun)and postpositional possessive pronouns; and the loss of special markers forcomparatives and superlatives. Nevertheless, Hittites and Luwians most basicwords and syntax structures are definitely IE, and Hittite plays a crucial role in

confirming de Saussures Laryngeal Theory mentioned above.

The Present State of the Discipline

We can never be sure when a new language will be unearthed from anarchaeological site, or some other breakthrough will revolutionize the field. For thetime being, however, linguists are keeping themselves quite busy with the data theyhave. There is still much work to be done on the phonology and morphology of morerecently discovered languages (Tocharian and Hittite), and in reconstructing thephonological inventory of P-IE. Saussures laryngeal theory has evolvedconsiderably from the time he first proposed it, and it continues to receive

considerable attention. Another hot phonological theory is the glottalic theory. In1973, linguists who were uncomfortable with P-IEs unbalanced typology of stops(i.e., voiced aspirates with no voiceless counterparts) proposed that P-IE possesseda series of glottalic stops. Vennemanns The New Sound of Indo-Europeancontainsnothing but articles on these two theories.

There is also continuing interest in making the genetic relationships, families, andsuper-families ever more inclusive, and numerous scholars have tried, and are stilltrying to connect the whole Indo-European family to other families. The mostpersistently recurring of these attempts is the grouping of Indo-European,Afro-Asiatic (a.k.a. Hamito-Semitic), Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian and others into the

superfamily called Nostratic. Nostratic Scholars have amassed quite a bit of data,but traditional IE scholars question their methods, and point out that there is noclear way of distinguishing cognates from loan-words so far back in time.

As the field of archeology continues to progress, IE scholars and pre-historians keepon trying to find a when and a where for P-IE, seeking to connect it with someculture known to archeologists. As Mallory so aptly quips, "One does not ask, whereis the Indo-European homeland? but rather where do they put it now?"

Among the hard-core linguists, the trend of reconstructing IE syntax continues amuch slippier task than phonology or even morphology. Although this problem is far

from adequately solved, a few scholars in very recent years have gone one stepfurther, to begin a theory of comparative poetics. Calvert Watkins (1995) and RankoMatasovi_ (1996) have set their hands to the task of reconstructing the metrical form,patterns, and even stock storylines and common motifs of IE poetry and song. Outof the maze of linguistics, philology rises once again!

Bibliography

Primary Sources (Cited in Text):

Arlotto, Anthony. Introduction to Historical Linguistics. Boston: Houghton MifflinCompany, 1972.

Baldi, Philip. An Introduction to Indo-European Languages. Carbondale andEdwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.


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Byron, Theodora. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.

Georgiev, Vladimir Ivanov. Introduction to the History of Indo-European. (3rd Edition.)Sofia: Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1981.

Mallory, J. P. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology, and Myth.London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1989.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Calvert Watkins, editorand revisor. Marion Severnyse, editor/etymologist. Boston: Houghton MifflinCompany, 1985.

Secondary Sources (Mentioned in Text or Cited in Endnotes):

Anttila, Raimo. Historical and Comparative Linguistics (2nd Revised Edition).Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989.

Guar, Albertine. A History of Writing. New York: Charles Schribners Sons, 1984.

Lehmann, Winfred P., ed. and trans. A Reader in Nineteenth-Century HistoricalLinguistics. Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1967.

Matasovi_, Ranko. A Theory of Textual Reconstruction in Indo-European Linguistics.Frankfort-am-Main: Peter Lang, 1996.

Sen, Subhadra Kuma, ed. "Proto-Indo-European: A Multiangular View." In TheJournal of Indo-European Studies 22, no. 1&2 (Spring/Summer, 1994): 67-90.

Vennemann, Theo, ed. The New Sound of Indo-European: Essays in PhonologicalResearch. Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1989.

Watkins, Calvert. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. NewYork; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.

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The Student’s Guide to Indo-European.pdf