20

I'm probably not the first to notice that a large number of features of reconstruct Proto-Indo-European are typological irregularities. The most famous of these probably being the voiceless/voiced/voiced aspirated distinction found among the stops, which is of course the stated motivation for the glottalic theory (though I must admit, I don't really see how it helps). Another thing which, to my eye at least, looks extremely odd is the vowel system: /i/ and /u/ basically pattern with the nasals/liquids, and apparent /a ā/ can be entirely explained as actually originating from /eh2/ or /h2e/, so the only vowels which are actually necessary to reconstruct are /e ē o ō/. To put it bluntly, that's just weird. Beyond that, many of the proposals for the phonetic value of the laryngeals seem strange as well. What kind of fricative inventory is /s ɣʷ χ h/ or /s ʕ ʕʷ/? The syllable structure seems very strange as well: why can /h2/ be syllabic but not /s/, for example? Apologies for the flippancy, but some of these claims have always felt a bit unbelievable to me.

I'm not actually trying to cast doubt on the validity of the reconstruction, I understand that many aspects of it are very well substantiated, I'm just trying to get a better grasp on how I'm meant to conceptualize the reconstruction of PIE within the framework of modern typological knowledge. Have these oddities been addressed by any Indo-Europeanists or language typologists? Is there a proposed explanation? Or am I just wrong about what is and isn't a "reasonable" feature for a language to have?

Omar and Lorraine
  • 4,647
  • 16
  • 35
M. Sperling
  • 301
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
    The glottalic theory helps because /t t' d/ (or /t t' tʰ/ etc) is more typologically reasonable than /t d dʰ/, mostly. We see that sort of three-way contrast in e.g. Georgian, while I can't think of any living language that contrasts voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated stops. – Draconis Sep 15 '20 at 05:26
  • 3
    You may find this article by Martin Kümmel interesting. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 15 '20 at 08:08
  • 2
    The scarcity of vowels is not very much typologically unusual. Kabardian can well be analysed as having just a single vowel phoneme despite that phonetically all the 5 cardinal vowels are present, most of them are reflexes of the single vowel influenced by the articulatory features of the nearby consonants. For example, [u] is found only near the labial or labialized consonants. – Yellow Sky Sep 15 '20 at 09:22
  • 1
    @YellowSky especially just North of the Caucasus, which happens to be pretty much exactly the area most commonly accepted as the PIE Urheimat – Tristan Sep 15 '20 at 10:43
  • Take a look at this https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1398/445 – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 12:52
  • 3
    Besides the perennial problem of how to apply the findings of typological statistics to historical linguistics, there’s another undesirable assumption, PIE was a stable language that never changed? Very unlikely of course. – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 13:00
  • @YellowSky The scarcity of vowels itself is not necessarily weird, but the distribution is rather unusual. In languages that have two vowel phonemes, they are rarely both mid vowels. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 15 '20 at 14:54
  • re "why can /h2/ be syllabic but not /s/" : I thought h2 was syllabic when it vocalized, right? and s being a strident (=fricative) is typically unusual (if not impossible) for being the syllable nucleus, no? – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 15:20
  • also https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1239/445 – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 15:51
  • @AlexB. There’s nothing unusual about syllabic fricatives (/s/ is syllabic in the word pssst used to attract someone’s attention discreetly in English), but the point is that *h2 and *s are both generally presumed to be fricatives (in non-glottalic terms). Within fricatives, it’s more common for sibilants to have syllabic variants than for non-sibilants, so it’s true the PIE distribution (which is the reverse) is typologically unusual. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 15 '20 at 16:36
  • 1
    @JanusBahsJacquet "There’s nothing unusual about syllabic fricatives (/s/ is syllabic in the word pssst used to attract someone’s attention discreetly in English)" - can you give me more examples of syllabic s which are not onomatopoeic words please? – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 17:54
  • 1
    @JanusBahsJacquet to me the laryngeals (and, broader, all PIE phonetics are essentially algebraic symbols, nothing else.) – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 18:04
  • 1
    @JanusBahsJacquet "There’s nothing unusual about syllabic fricatives" - I'm afraid it's not quite true. While we have documented some languages where even fricatives can be syllabic, it's pretty uncommon, for a number of reasons (see any intro book on acoustic phonetics or linguistic typology). – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 18:11
  • 1
    @AlexB. Not in English, no, but in various other languages, yes. Ryukyu pštu ‘person’, Mandarin si, zi, ci (for many speakers), Hungarian s /ʃ/ ‘and’, Nuxálk sxs ‘seal blubber’, etc. When I said “nothing unusual”, I didn’t mean it was common, just that it is a well-known phenomenon, not some bizarre idea. It’s typologically uncommon, yes, but by no means impossible. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 15 '20 at 18:11
  • @JanusBahsJacquet thanks for the clarification. – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 18:15
  • 1
    @AlexB. Also, if you consider all PIE phones purely algebraic symbols, what do you mean that *h2 was a fricative? Algebraic symbols do not have phonetic realities and as such, that statement would make no sense. They are algebraic in the sense that they represent actual phonemes whose precise qualities we do not know for sure; not in the sense that they have no phonetic reality. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 15 '20 at 18:15
  • @JanusBahsJacquet "what do you mean that *h2 was a fricative" - sorry but I never said this. I wrote "and s being a strident (=fricative)" My position re the PIE laryngeals is agnosticism :) – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 18:16
  • 1
    @AlexB. Sorry, you’re right about that – you only said *h2 could be syllabic, not fricative. But in most non-glottalic contexts (and I think even in some glottalic proposals as well), it is assumed to be a fricative (whose place of articulation is not precisely known) and also to have a syllabic variant used between consonants. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 15 '20 at 18:20
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Naturally all the PIE phonemes (through their allophones) were physical entities but I consider all our attempts so far at finding out more about their their phonetic reality is like us playing the Glass Bead Game. – Alex B. Sep 15 '20 at 18:23
  • And how exactly does one determine what constitutes a typological irregularity in the first place ? By examining the languages of today, along with a handful of extinct ones ? Does this seem like a meaningful way for determining the characteristics of most languages from the distant past ? – Lucian Sep 22 '20 at 04:59

1 Answers1

6

There are three reasons for that unusualness.

The first one is artefacts from the reconstruction method. Our knowledge of PIE is based solely on what the child languages preserved, so there's a lot of missing info. We're likely losing whole phonemes, and conjecturing phonemes that never existed. The "laryngeals" are a good example of that - was *h₃ really a single consonant? Maybe two or ten? Maybe something else, like a sequence of phonemes?

The second reason is that no language is uniform; and yet we need to pretend otherwise if we want to describe it. PIE changed over time, and it had multiple dialects, spoken by different groups; it was not a single thing. What we're doing with it is roughly like trying to reconstruct English as spoken by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and that random guy in NZ" as a single thing.

A third reason is that we're always contrasting PIE with the modern Indo-European languages, and we call "unusual" the features that we don't find in those languages - even when they're attested elsewhere. A good example of that would be the way that PIE handles *i *u - sure, it might look weird if you speak Sanskrit or Latin, but it's remarkably similar to how Ubyx did it - you don't get /i/ or /u/, and all instances of [i u] are surface realisations of either /ə/+semivowel or a nearby palatalised/labialised consonant.

lvxferre
  • 195
  • 1
  • 6
  • Regarding 「A good example of that would be the way that PIE handles *i *u - sure, it might look weird if you speak Sanskrit or Latin」: Alternations [i̯] ~ [i] and [u̯] ~ [u] would not look very weird for Latin speakers, since they partially survived in Latin. Examples: between vowels is pronounced as [i̯ː] (e.g. illīus with [iː] versus cuius with [i̯ː], those are unrelated words with the same suffix (genitive of pronominal declension)), duo versus du̯is (→ classical bis), se- + luō → solu̯ō – Arfrever Sep 02 '23 at 20:29