Week 4 Flashcards
Anatolia (homeland of PIE)
- Start divergence 8000-9500 years ago.
- Contact through slow migration movements; first movement to Kurgan area.
- Linguistic support scant (little).
Homeland of PIE
Anatolia
Pontic Steppes (Kurgan hypothesis, homeland of PIE)
- Contact through conquest
- Archeological evidence matches PIE word stock.
- 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.
When did PIE stop being PIE? When was the last phase of PIE unity? What are the new PIE descendants that appeared?
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
What did the Romans say about the PIE people?
- Barbarians; uncivilised people, worse than Celts.
- 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.”
Moving away from PIE-land
- Yamnaya; corded ware.
- Horse-drawn chariots and large herds of cattle.
- Influence in Northern Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Baltic states, Southern Scandinavia.
Urheimat
The Urheimat or homeland of a protolanguage is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages.
Steppe theory
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.
Proto-Germanic Urheimat
- Homeland is modern day Sweden, Denmark, and the Jutland area, South of Norway.
- There was still unity around 750 BC.
- Migration waves: by 250 BC distinct Germanic dialects.
- Contact with Uralic languages?
* Substrate influence.
* L1 -> L2.
6 distinguishing features of Germanic
- Grimm’s law (first sound-shifting).
- Fixed initial stress on the root.
- Two tense system.
- Strong and weak verbs.
- Strong and weak adjectives.
- Vocabulary.
One of the characteristics is initial stress on the root. What are the two stress systems?
-
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.
-
Variable: stress is usually less predictable.
* PDE: complicated mess! -> catastrophe.
On what did first syllable stress have major effects on?
Morphology and syntax of languages. In PIE, there’s an example:
• PIE: bheranan →
• OE: beran →
• ME: beren → bere → to bear
Two tense system
Present: walks
Preterite: walked
Strong and weak verbs
-
Weak: dental or alveolar suffix t/d
• Holed, hoopte, vonaði - Strong: vowel changes
- Mixed: buy-bought, bring-brought.
Strong and weak adjective declensions
-
Definite:
• Der grosse [weak] Hund liegt auf dem Bodem. -
Indefinite:
• Ein grosser [strong] Hund liegt auf dem Bodem.
Vocabulary of Germania
- Bone → been in Dutch.
- Body → replaced by other words in most Germanic languages.
- Wife: perhaps derived from weaver, see also peace weaver; friðuwebbe.
Grimm’s Law (PIE stops)
Voiceless stops: p, t, k
Voiced stops: b, d, g
Voiced aspirate stops: bh, dh, gh
Grimm’s Law: aspirated to unaspirated
PIE: bh, dh, gh
Germanic: b, d, g
Example of Sanskrit:
Bharami → Bear
Dhrsnoti → Dare
Grimm’s Law: stop to fricative
PIE: p, t, k
↓ ↓ ↓
Germanic: f, θ, x (h in OE)
Example:
Tres became three.
Grimm’s Law: voiced to voiceless
PIE: b, d, g
↓ ↓ ↓
Germanic: p, t, k
Duo became two.
Verner’s Law
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.
Sound correspondences between English and Frisian
- Palatalisation: ‘cheese’ → /k/ in most other Germanic languages.
- Both have SVO word order.
- Similar words cheese and tsiis.
- Pre-GVS vowels
East-Germanic languages are all…
Extinct
North-Germanic branch consists of…
-
East-Scandi:
* Icelandic
* Faroese
* Norwegian -
West-Scandi:
* Swedish
* Danish
West-Germanic consists of…
-
Low Franconian/Low Saxon
• Dutch, then Afrikaans
• Low Saxon -
Anglo-Frisian:
• English
• Scots
• Frisian -
High German:
• German, then Yiddish
How do new languages emerge? Why did Proto-Germanic branch off from PIE?
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.
Vowel changes in stressed syllables
- PIE short o became short a
- PIE long a became long o
PIE ablaut/gradation (grades)
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
Non-Germanic/non-IE words
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.
Substrate
A language influenced by an intrusive language, which may or may not ultimately change it to become a new language
New Hypothesis
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.
