Indo-European Languages: An Intro. (37 Min.)
16th Sept. 2020 | Jackson Crawford
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UQnSmEzxMI
First part of the video include arguments for PIE unity:
3:39 The real phonetic relationship can however occur also between languages with vocabulary related by loans, especially if the loans are some way back.
The Arabic loans in Persian have arguably undergone sound changes different in Persian to in Arabic since c. 900 AD.
The shared vocabulary in Arabic and Persian exceeds that between English and Russian.
How does this relate to IE relations?
Let's take "he was a good man" German and Latin:
Er war ein guter Mann = etym. **Is vora(t) unus fadus mannus. (fadus or hadus)
Is erat bonus vir = etym. **Er ere(t) ein zwin Wer.
Between Germanic and Italo-Celtic there are other differences than sound correspondences!
The t ending in parenthesis ... if IE -t would have been recycled after vowel to form **eret for erat, then the war would correspond to **vora, if not, it could correspond to **vorat.
5:11 What IE langs have a complete set of:
* pater / father
* mater / meter / mother
* suns / son
* thugater / daughter
* frater / brother
* soror / sister
To my best knowledge, the complete set is Germanic only. Slavic, Baltic, Gothic and Brythonic don't have "pater", in Lithuanian "moteris" is woman and "motine" is mother, in Slavic you don't have "mat-er, but mat-ka" in Celtic and Italic son and daughter get replaced, in Greek frater is nearly and soror totally missing like in Spanish (the tenants of PIE against Trubetskoy could obviously say "for the same reason") ... in Indic, you don't have a "shunush" you have a "putra" ....
And in case you think loans of kinship words don't happen, look at the word "cousin" outside French.
Even Anatolian lacks the "pater" gloss, as father is attas in Nesili.
6:01 You can perhaps predict the form of words in English, but not in Greek.
Zugon and hos are both from PIE reconstructed initial yod : yugom, yos (cognate with Latin is, German er)
7:02 And from eleven to ninetynine, except twenty, you have dissimilarity across the board, as for thousand.
If a trade language or cult language (sacrificial or for auguries) imposed its numerals, it would make sense that certain numerals got more imposed than others.
The pronouns for "me" and "thee" seem to be related in Finnish, as well as verb endings sg and pl 1st and 2nd persons ... you could say Nostratic (even more incompatible with Biblical post-Flood chronology than PIE), you could say Finnish was a hybrid or you can say IE langs are hybrids between them (and in some cases between them and Finnish) = Sprachbund / areal features = theory of Trubetskoy.
7:50 Greater similarity in older stages = how about closer to time of mutual (or common) influence?
French is more Germanic in 1200 than now. It does not have a common ancestor with Francic after PIE.
7:54 Bulgarian and Romanian look more like each other than Old Slavonic and Latin do. I suppose.
8:11 What are your PIE glosses for "hand" and "head"? Is "arm" identic with "hand" or with "shoulder" or distinct from both? Teeth and tongue, are they 1) in the "mouth" 2) in "ore" / "w usty" (if I got Polish declinsion right) 3) en to "stomati" 4) "burnoje"? Is "neck" originally the "hals" / "collum" gloss (Italo-Celtic and Germanic) or another one?
- Leonardo7772012
- @Leonardo7772012
- In dutch, neck can be nek or hals.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @Leonardo7772012 Did you watch the video? Do you know anything about comparative linguistics?
The video is about reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, not about reconstructing Proto-Germanic.
For Germanic, I have no doubts it's a language family. It nearly certainly had "hals" for either throat or all of the neck and a word like "neck" for (based on German and Scandinavian) the back of the neck.
I just looked up a branch of which I have NO indication that it had the gloss "hals" ... Indo-Iranian, easy example on google translate (non ideal, he preferred Sanskrit), Hindi.
I see "garadan", "gala" (no, it's not cognate with "hals" or "collum" -- that should start with ç, like "çakra", same root meaning "turning", since wheels turn below a cart and in Germanic, Italic and Celtic, necks turn the heads around), "greeva", "kanth", "garebaan", "kalaar" (a loan from "collar" and means shirtneck, not the neck on the body), "tontee", "gale milana", "sthal-damaroomadhy", "kanth". Only "collar" / "kalaar" is a cognate of "hals", and that from Latin, not from indigenous Indic material.
The question is not about learning Dutch, it's about learning ABOUT proofs or lack of such for Proto-Indo-European.
Second part of video is about different branches, much less to argue about, sometimes just asking for curiosity. Or reinforcing my points on previous.
12:26 Are you bringing up the Mitanni or are you saying Vedic is older than Mycenaean?
[later] Ah, Mitanni!
Do they have descriptions of riding?
- Indrajit Gupta
- @Hans-Georg Lundahl What do you mean? Was that sarcastic?
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @Indrajit Gupta It wasn't.
I only knew that Mycenaean Greek was older than anything in India written down for us, and that Mitanni had a language "Aryan" - but was not sure whether it was closest to Vedic or to Avestic.
So, my first reaction is "no" and then I think "ah, Mitanni" and after that I get Mitanni confirmed.
The horse breeding manual in Mitanni is from c. 1300 BC, I recall, but I only know of the chariot use of horses for sure, so I would want to know if it contained descriptions of riding as well.
15:37 Is Tsakonian really a true and pure descendant of Spartan / Laconian? Or are there areal features with Modern Greek that could not be predicted from ancient Laconic?
24:42 And in some of the Eastern Uniate rites of Roman Catholicism, mainly Ukrainean pronunciation.
25:54 My professor in Greek, knowledgeable in IE studies and playing a "Devil's advocate" about PIE (or a Trubetskoy advocate, which is less diabolic to me) used to say : for any gloss that is preserved BOTH in Lithuanian AND in Old Greek, you can know exactly how it looked in PIE.
This is obviously not the case for all glosses in either of these and those that do exist in both do not necessarily exist in all other ones.
28:42 Phrygian also has a Grimm's law approximation ... how likely or unlikely is it purely linguistically that Germanic is modern Phrygian?
The gloss "phrug" in Greek would be "brug" in Phrygian ... we see a word known from Swedish, Danish and German.
What is "phrygian" was an approximate perceived endonym meaning "usual" before being exonym?
33:33 My exact reason (or one of them) to doubt the existence of PIE and favour Trubetskoy : PIE is supposed to be as old as Noah's Flood, while arguably after Babel (ending 101, 401 or 529 after the Flood, depending on text version) Magog, Madai, Iavan, Lud, Gomer would have led tribes speaking different languages, and except possibly Magog, all of them IE ones (Gomer = Anatolian and Celtic, perhaps even Italy-Celtic, perhaps even extending to Germanic).
Hence my Trubetskoy hunch, they were more unlike each other right after Babel than they became in the time of Abraham - which btw is carbon dated c. 5000 years ago, Genesis 14 = 1935 BC (Abraham between 75 and 86, so probably 80) = carbon dated 3500 BC.
- BD
- @user-kb5py3hm2e
- Absolutely unlikely. Sound changes are not unique to only one language.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @user-kb5py3hm2e I'm sorry, but over languages, the multiple sound changes like Grimm's law are actually unlikely.
The to me known instances are:
- Germanic
- Hungarian (but not Finnic)
- Phrygian.
Do you have some example from indigenous languages of Africa or from America or Oceania?
Because, if not, it would be likelier there is at least contact between the three groups. The Hungarian part of it can be fixed if Rhaetic and Etruscan is considered as an old version of Hungarian.
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