Week 3 Flashcards
Divergence
Change does not affect groups of speakers of the same language equally.
• South Britain: /a:m/, they are always complaining
• South West Britain: /a:rm/, they always be complaining
Dialects in language divergence
Dialects are mutually intelligible
Language in language divergence
Language is no longer mutually intelligible.
Cognates
Words related by derivation, borrowing or descent.
How can we establish the level of relatedness between languages?
Based on shared systematic changes (innovations) and cognates.
Which PIE language was the first to be found?
Hittite
What are branches that have died out in the PIE family?
- Old Prussian
- Tocharian
- Anatolian
- Phrygian
Who discovered the PIE?
Sir William Jones.
But there are some others who worked on the puzzle;
1. 1550s: Goropiuos Beccanus had an ego-centric view that all languages derived from Dutch.
2. 1600: Scaliger (Leiden) said that European languages consisted of 11 groups and that they all lead back to Biblical languages.
3. 1605: Marcus Boxhoorn (Leiden) said that morphology and words in Sanskrit suggest a common source.
4. 1900: Nazis or other nationalists tried to trace back PIE to their territory and/or ideology of what culture their people represented.
What is the first grouping of PIE?
The first grouping that separates families is the pronunciation of /k/. They change /k/ to either /s/ or /h/, but some language kept the /k/ sound. Nothing really changed in the Tocharic area.
Poetry
Comparative study of formulae and etymologically related phrases (oral tradition).
1. Immortal fame, great fame, good fame.
2. The wheel of the sun, he who spies upon the whole world.
3. To frame words together in a manner of carpentry.
The culture of the PIE speakers (material)
- Habitation: small settlements of wood
- Food: baking, fish, meat, apple
- Agriculture: field, plow, cows, pigs
- Pets: dogs and mice
- Clothing: wood, woven things
- Weapons: bow and arrow
- Transport: wagon, wheels, ox, horse
The culture of the PIE speakers (non-material)
- Father, mother, brother
- Wife lived with husband’s family and abandoned hers
- Zeus, twin brothers , horses
Anatolian Hypothesis (Renfrew)
- Indo-Europeans came from Anatolia (Turkey) c. 8500 years ago.
- Pastoral nomads who moved slowly away from there.
- No evidence for large scale migrations.
- Genetic studies: Yammaya derived from Anatolians.
The Anatolian hypothesis, which places the homeland roughly in present-day Turkey. The theory is that PIE spread through slow migration over thousands of years. DNA evidence seems to suggest this is possible, as many IE-speaking countries in Europe share the same DNA with Ancient Anatolians, but the PIE word stock does not match archaeological findings.
Kurgan Hypothesis (Gambutas)
- Expansion through conquest (c.6000 years ago).
- Archeological evidence matches PIE word stock.
- Yamnaya last phase of PIE unity (3600-2200 BC)
• Wheel, plow
• Burial sites; words for sky god (Zeus) and dawn-goddess (Eos -> Easter). - Genetic studies: Yamnaya DNA in majority of Europeans.
The Kurgan hypothesis places the homeland in the Pontic Steppes and proposes a much more rapid spread of PIE speakers across Europe and beyond.
The last PIE speaking unity was probably represented by the Yamnaya. They had horses and horse-drawn carriages that allowed them to move swiftly. The PlE word-stock seems to match archeological findings in this respect; there are many words to do with horses.
Archeological findings suggest that horses were first domesticated in the Pontic Steppes.
Where did PIE speakers originate (linguistic evidence and problems)?
Linguistic evidence:
1. Landscape: maintain, trees
2. Climate: snow, freezing
3. Absence of: cypress tree, donkey, camel, dates; so there was no southerly origin
4. Animals: bear, wolf, boar, horse
5. Traces of Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish) Fsmilies -> Eastern Europe
But there are some problems:
1. Inland lake or sea?
2. Salmon initially assumed to only have occurred in Northern Europe.
3. Are ‘elephant’ and ‘lion’ loanwords or PIE words?
4. Dairy terms, but no PIE word for ‘milk’
What are the most reliable cognates?
- Body parts
- Kinship terms
- Low numerals
- Basic geographical terms
- Pronouns
What are some issues with identifying cognates?
There may be accidental similarities: onomatopoeic or pure chance.
Mess (English), Mes (Mayan)
Sprachbund effects
Borrowing much across a large area of speakers (of languages and varieties) that are in contact over a long period of time.
Satem and kentum languages
-
Satem languages usually have /s ʃ z/ where PIE had a palatal /k/.
- Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic branches; SKT, Lithuanian, Latvian, Armenian.
-
Kentum languages kept PIE palatovelar sounds as velar or stop sounds; /k/ or /g/.
- Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Tocharian; Latin, French, English, Dutch, Swedish.
What’s the distinction between P and Q-Celtic based on? How do P and Q-Celtic differ in their treatment of PIE /kw/?
The distinction between P and Q-Celtic languages lies in how the Proto-Celtic sound /kw/ (labiovelar) was treated.
P-Celtic (Welsh, Breton, Cornish) lost /k/, bilabial /w/ left -> /p/.
Q-Celtic (Irish, Manx, Gaelic) -> /k/.
Example:
• Welsh map (son) -> ap rhys -> Price
• Scottish Gaelic mac (son) -> McDonald’s
P-Celtic
Welsh, Breton, Cornish
Q-Celtic
Irish, Manx, Gaelic
How do you distinguish between whether a word is cognate or borrowing?
Look at if both language come from Indo-European, then they must be cognates.
An example of borrowing is “baby”, borrowed by the Chinese from English.
What is the distinction between Centum and Satum languages based on (also say which languages these are)?
Based on how the PIE palatovelar (k, g, gh) evolved in different daughter languages.
Centum languages retain the ordinal velar pronunciation of PIE palatovelars as hard /k/ or /g/ sounds.
* Latin: centum
* Greek: hekaton
* OE: hund
The palatovelars in the Satem languages underwent a shift to become like /s/ or /sh/.
* Sanskrit: śatam
* Lithuanian: šimtas
* sto
All words here mean “hundred”.
Centum languages
Latin, Greek, Old English
Satem languages
Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Russian
