Week 4

Question 1

Anatolia (homeland of PIE)

Answer 1

1. Start divergence 8000-9500 years ago.
2. Contact through slow migration movements; first movement to Kurgan area.
3. Linguistic support scant (little).

Question 2

Homeland of PIE

Answer 2

Anatolia

Question 3

Pontic Steppes (Kurgan hypothesis, homeland of PIE)

Answer 3

1. Contact through conquest
2. Archeological evidence matches PIE word stock.
3. Kurgan: start divergence c. 6500 years ago.

Point is: they moved and took different dialects with them.

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.

Question 4

When did PIE stop being PIE? When was the last phase of PIE unity? What are the new PIE descendants that appeared?

Answer 4

Yamnaya (3500-2500 BC) was the last phase of PIE unity, so somewhere after 2500 BC.

Then new descendants appear:
1. First Anatolians
2. Second Hittites
3. Third Indo-Iranians

Question 5

What did the Romans say about the PIE people?

Answer 5

1. Barbarians; uncivilised people, worse than Celts.
2. Tacitus (98 AD).

“Bordering on the Suiones are the nations of the Sitones. They resemble them in all respects but one - woman is the ruling sex. This is the measure of their decline; I will not say below freedom, but even below decent slavery.”

Question 6

Moving away from PIE-land

Answer 6

1. Yamnaya; corded ware.
2. Horse-drawn chariots and large herds of cattle.
3. Influence in Northern Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Baltic states, Southern Scandinavia.

Question 7

Urheimat

Answer 7

The Urheimat or homeland of a protolanguage is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages.

Question 8

Steppe theory

Answer 8

Hypothesis that the Indo-European speakers were farmers of the grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and that their languages spread into Europe after the invention of wheeled vehicles.

Question 9

Proto-Germanic Urheimat

Answer 9

1. Homeland is modern day Sweden, Denmark, and the Jutland area, South of Norway.
2. There was still unity around 750 BC.
3. Migration waves: by 250 BC distinct Germanic dialects.
4. Contact with Uralic languages?
   * Substrate influence.
   * L1 -> L2.

Question 10

6 distinguishing features of Germanic

Answer 10

1. Grimm’s law (first sound-shifting).
2. Fixed initial stress on the root.
3. Two tense system.
4. Strong and weak verbs.
5. Strong and weak adjectives.
6. Vocabulary.

Question 11

One of the characteristics is initial stress on the root. What are the two stress systems?

Answer 11

1. Fixed: stress always falls on the same syllable of a word.
   
   • OE: stress is usually on the first syllable of the root. Except with some prefixes attached to nouns/adjectuves.
2. Variable: stress is usually less predictable.
   * PDE: complicated mess! -> catastrophe.

Question 12

On what did first syllable stress have major effects on?

Answer 12

Morphology and syntax of languages. In PIE, there’s an example:
• PIE: bheranan →
• OE: beran →
• ME: beren → bere → to bear

Question 13

Two tense system

Answer 13

Present: walks
Preterite: walked

Question 14

Strong and weak verbs

Answer 14

1. Weak: dental or alveolar suffix t/d
   • Holed, hoopte, vonaði
2. Strong: vowel changes
3. Mixed: buy-bought, bring-brought.

Question 15

Strong and weak adjective declensions

Answer 15

1. Definite:
   • Der grosse [weak] Hund liegt auf dem Bodem.
2. Indefinite:
   • Ein grosser [strong] Hund liegt auf dem Bodem.

Question 16

Vocabulary of Germania

Answer 16

1. Bone → been in Dutch.
2. Body → replaced by other words in most Germanic languages.
3. Wife: perhaps derived from weaver, see also peace weaver; friðuwebbe.

Question 17

Grimm’s Law (PIE stops)

Answer 17

Voiceless stops: p, t, k
Voiced stops: b, d, g
Voiced aspirate stops: bh, dh, gh

Question 18

Grimm’s Law: aspirated to unaspirated

Answer 18

PIE: bh, dh, gh
Germanic: b, d, g

Example of Sanskrit:
Bharami → Bear
Dhrsnoti → Dare

Question 19

Grimm’s Law: stop to fricative

Answer 19

PIE: p, t, k
↓ ↓ ↓
Germanic: f, θ, x (h in OE)

Example:
Tres became three.

Question 20

Grimm’s Law: voiced to voiceless

Answer 20

PIE: b, d, g
↓ ↓ ↓
Germanic: p, t, k

Duo became two.

Question 21

Verner’s Law

Answer 21

This law describes a historical sound change in Proto-Germanic where consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, hʷ, following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives *β, *ð, *z, *ɣ, *ɣʷ.

Question 22

Sound correspondences between English and Frisian

Answer 22

1. Palatalisation: ‘cheese’ → /k/ in most other Germanic languages.
2. Both have SVO word order.
3. Similar words cheese and tsiis.
4. Pre-GVS vowels

Question 23

East-Germanic languages are all…

Answer 23

Extinct

Question 24

North-Germanic branch consists of…

Answer 24

1. East-Scandi:
   * Icelandic
   * Faroese
   * Norwegian
2. West-Scandi:
   * Swedish
   * Danish

Question 25

West-Germanic consists of…

Answer 25

1. Low Franconian/Low Saxon
   • Dutch, then Afrikaans
   • Low Saxon
2. Anglo-Frisian:
   • English
   • Scots
   • Frisian
3. High German:
   • German, then Yiddish

Question 26

How do new languages emerge? Why did Proto-Germanic branch off from PIE?

Answer 26

Divergence
1. Geographical isolation from homeland:
• (Slow incremental) changes take hold and become new group norms.
• Some structures internal to language might more easily break down.
• New cultures, new practises and new language associated with them.
2. Contact with other languages
• Substrate influence due to transfer and Interlanguage phenomena.
• Loan words.

Convergence
1. Speakers of a language might take on features of other languages.

Shorter answer: geographical separation, cultural changes and migration patterns, which led to language divergence.

Question 27

Vowel changes in stressed syllables

Answer 27

1. PIE short o became short a
2. PIE long a became long o

Question 28

PIE ablaut/gradation (grades)

Answer 28

E-grade (sengwh), o-grade (songwh), and zero grade (*sngwh).

Germanic:
1. e raised to i due to -ng cluster: sing
2. Short o became a: sang
3. PIE syllable n, m, l, r → un, um, ul, ur → sngwh → sung

Question 29

Non-Germanic/non-IE words

Answer 29

Proto-Germanic speakers borrowed words from speech communities that they must have come in close contact with, like Celtic and Latin.
• Celts: metallurgy (iron, led)
• Romans: good with infrastructure, politically and culturally dominant; street, wall, tile, chalk.

Question 30

Substrate

Answer 30

A language influenced by an intrusive language, which may or may not ultimately change it to become a new language

Question 31

New Hypothesis

Answer 31

More recently, studies suggest that the homeland was probably in PD Armenia, from which the first groups migrated to Anatolia and later the Pontic Steppes. The Anatolians remained more isolated and did not migrate as massively as the PIE speakers in the Pontic Steppes did.
Regardless of which theory is most likely, as groups split off and moved away from the homeland, they may have become isolated from their homeland and diverged from PIE in different ways, e.g. they came into contact with other languages, developed their own language norms, slow incremental changes were introduced etc.