Righteous Queen of Blades’ Neighborhood

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post on a possible 'causative' Indo-European stem extension *p. I'm currently quite interested in the function of these stem-extensions and the phonetic alternations they seem to have. Soon I'll be writing more about 'gradation' that seems to occur in some of these extensions, but for now I would just like to point out a new group of words that I found.

In English, you have the words to tell, to hear and to steal.  Besides these words, you have a group of verbs based of these roots with a derived meaning, namely: to talk, to hark and to stalk. Semantically it is difficult to say anything useful, such a general term like 'intensive' could be used, but this is so wide that it doesn't help us much. What is consistent though, is the formation.

The formation is simply formed by taking the root of the original verb, putting it in the Germanic *a-grade (or PIE *o-grade) and adding the Germanic stem-extension *-k (PIE *-g or *-ǵ).

What is perplexing about this formation is that it seems almost completely unique to English. Frisian  has talken 'to talk', but besides that I cannot think of any other formations like this in West-Germanic, or Germanic in general. It is important to know that dutch tolk 'translator' has nothing at all to do with this word, it, in fact, comes from Old Russian tolk 'id.'.

I do not understand why a formation that looks so incredibly Indo-European can only occur in English. There is no proper internal motivation in English for such a formation to arise, which makes one think automatically of an older historical source, but with no comparative evidence, this becomes very difficult.

Can any of the people that read this think of any other languages (Germanic or not) that have *√e ~ *√o-g/ǵ alternation? I will look through LIV and see if it has any nice examples.

[EDIT]

One convincing example is *ieu- 'to bind' besides *ieu-g- 'to yoke, to bind'. The first one is found in Vedic Sanskrit yuváti 'he binds'. The second word is an extremely well attested root which gave rise to the PIE word for 'yoke' *iu-g-om.

Another example, but already more difficult is *leu-g- 'to make loose, to break' besides *leuH- 'to make lose, to cut'. *leu-g- is only found in Sanskrit rujati. The absence of the Laryngeal can be explained by Lubotsky's law: *H disappears before voiced non-aspirated consonant followed by another consonant. One has to assume that there were forms where a consonant directly followed the root, and that this formation then got extended to the rest of the paradigm. This is definitely possible, as we find a root aorist in Sanskrit.

*leuH- is the basis for the textbook example of a thematic verb when learning Greek (at least in Dutch text books): λύω 'to make loose'. So, by the evidence we have we should probably interpret this as a pair *leuH-g- besides *leuH-

After discussing Tibeto-Burman prefixes, and touching upon the *s- prefix in Tibeto-Burman, I sort of ran into the Indo-European s-mobile again.

For those unknown to the s-mobile, it is a unexplained element *s that seems to optionally appear in front of words. There are several words even in English today that form an s-mobile pair. For example melt besides smelt with some differentiation in meaning but not much.

I have been pondering about the origin of this s-mobile for some time now, it is something that will occasionally bug the mind of any Indo-Europeanist, only to leave them confused and dissatisfied without a proper answer. I too, do not have a proper answer, but I have a little theory that I'd like to explore.

Several ideas have been explorer in the past. Some say it is simply an irregular shift of *s/_C > ø. I don't like irregular shifts that are as wide-spread as this shift is, since it is found in every single branch of Indo-European. If there was a shift that never became particularly popular, I'd at least like to see one of the branches that got rid of it completely.

Another explanation that has been explored by some, is that it might be the s-prefix as found in Semitic languages, which often has a causative meaning. This explanation would be very nice if all s-prefixed verbs could be explained as Semitic loanwords. The problem with this theory is though, that the s-mobile seems to appear in front of nouns as well.

As an example we find the Dutch stier 'bull' and Old English stêor OHG stior. In Old Norse we find the s-less form þjôrra. It won't come as a surprise to anyone that this word is related to Lat. taurus and Gr. ταῦρος. This seems to be a very early loan from Semitic. Arabic has ṯawr. It can't have gone in the other direction because Semitic had access to a t so there would be no reason to replace Indo-European *t with *ṯ. It should be noted that this s-mobile appears in Indo-European, but is absolutely impossible to find in Semitic. This fact led me to think that it must have been some sort of productive suffix in Indo-European.

If I were trying to connect Indo-European with Sino-Tibetan I wouldn't have hesitated to say that the PIE *s  is the animal prefix in PST *s. But since such a claim would make me look like a maniac, I will not even go into that, but the resemblance is just a funny coincidence which I wanted to mention.

Now then, we have the strange situation of an element *s that can appear both before verbs and nouns. I asked myself what kind of element can appear before verbs and nouns in Indo-European. And then I realised, that, although only very productive in Graeco-Aryan, Indo-European has a lot of prefixes that can be place before verbs and nouns. Elements such as Skt. pra-, su-, a-, apa- etc. which all have direct reflexes in Greek as well.

So what *s is a prefix like this as well? The s-mobile sometimes seems to give a somewhat intensifying meaning to verbs (although I should really once look into the semantics of that, but this is what is often claimed).

I was wondering if maybe, the *s is a strongly reduced form of the prefix *h₁su- which yields su- in Sanskrit and  εὐ- in Greek. Semantically it would make sense. smelting is then 'well-melting'. And a stier would be a 'good-bull'. If this reduced form really does come from a reduced form of *h₁su- it would explain why this prefix is not found in any other languages but Graeco-Aryan languages, since the *s would be that form. Why both forms occurs in Graeco-Aryan though, remains unexplained.

Although the idea is pretty nifty, I'm still very hesitant about this hypothesis. Can pretonic *u really reduce to schwa and then disappear completely? Do we have precedent of this? And then there's the laryngeal. Although the reflex of it wont be commonly found in languages, you would expect indirect evidence of lengthened vowels before an s-mobile in Vedic Sanskrit. As far as I am aware, this does not exist, but it is definitely worth looking into. If I can indeed find indirect evidence in Vedic, I'll be a lot more confident about this hypothesis.

I've been reading up on Proto-Tibeto-Burman/Sino-Tibetan lately. I've run into a problem with the aspirated consonants which I have not yet been able to solve.

In Proto-Tibeto-Burman we reconstruct two series of stops: Voiceless and Voiced. Tibetan though, has a series of three stops: Voiceless, Voiceless Aspirated and Voiced.

Voiceless and Voiceless aspirated consonants can be accounted for as being distributed complementary for all of the cases where these consonants are non-word-initial. Many other cases the voiceless aspirated consonants can also simply be explained as allophones, as is accurately done by Nathan Hill's article Aspirated and Unaspirated Voiceless Consonants in Old Tibetan .

One, to me, blatant omission in his article though, is that he only looks at the phonetic distribution of these consonants. But one could argue that there is a phonemic contrast that isn't immediately obvious from the outside form. Stephan Beyer addresses this in his book 'The Classical Tibetan Language' when discussing the results of the combination of stops with the verbal prefixes on page 174. I have taken the liberty to copy this table on this blog.

ROOT INITIAL	N-	B-	G-	Ø-
K	Nkh	bk	dk	kh
KH	Nkh	kh	kh	kh
G	Ng	bk	dg	kh
T	Nth	bt	gt	th
TH	Nth	th	th	th
D	Nd	bt	gd	th
P	Nb	ph	db	ph
PH	Nph	ph	db	ph
B	Nb	b	db	b
C	Nch	bś	gś	ś
CH	Nch	bc	gc	ch
J	Nj	bź	gź	ź
	Nj	bc	gź	ch
TS	Ntsh	bs	gs	s
TSH	Ntsh	bts	gts	tsh
DZ	Ndz	bz	gz	z
	Ndz	bts	gz	tsh

As you can see, Beyer needs two types of voiceless stops to account for the distribution of consonants. Beyer's aim is to accurately describe Tibetan rather than give proto-Tibetan forms so the voiceless aspirates might not be etymological voiceless aspirated stops, but then I don't get the distribution.

For example we have the verb 'to wash' Root: KRU-D Conjugation: Class I
Present Nkhrud-pa Perfect bkrus Future bkru Imperative khrus

This root has an etymology I could find as PTB *krəw 'to wash'
Written Burmese khyûi, Dimasa gru < *krəw
Jingpho krùt < *krəw-t
(Examples cited from Matisoff's Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman)

And a contrasticve example would be the verb 'to carry, bring' Root: KHYER Conjugation: Class I
Present Nkhyer-pa Perfect khyer Future khyer Imperative khyer

If k and kh are truly from one phoneme *k why is there this asymmetry? I fail to understand this, and Hill fails to give an answer to this.

Other more obvious examples of this Class I verbs are the following:

Nchiṅ-pa P bciṅs F bciṅ I chiṅs ‘to bind’

Nchad-pa P bśad F bśad I śod ‘to say’

These two are readily understood. In the second form ś (<*sy-) is the orginal form, which is turned into an affricate by the stop-feature of the prefix *N-. While the first example is a true consonant c (<*ty-).

 Another word is the following:

Nbyin-pa P byiṅ F dbyuṅ I phyuṅs 'to send forth'

Matisoff does not mention this Tibetan form, but it seems to me that it is related to *pyiŋ- 'release, send forth' Written Burman: phyâñ. Though I think the form implies a variant of this root with an *u as *pyuŋ-

And then there's:

Nphral-ba P phral F dbral I phrol 'to separate, to part' which is the active counterpart to Nbral-ba 'to be separated'.

Usually an active counterpart to an intransitive verb is made with the s- prefix, but *Nsbr- would not yield *Nphr-s but rather *sbr- as can be seen from

sbrud-pa P sbrus F sbru I sbrus 'to stir' from an earlier paradigm

*N/g-sbru-d, *b-sbru-s F *b/g-sbru I *sbru-s. It is not 100% certain that the cluster *sbr- is not a result of *g-sbr.

The etymology for Nphral-ba and Nbral-ba seem to be the reconstructed TB form *p/bral 'leave/depart, seperate' which is sadly only reconstructed for TB because it seems to have a Old Chinese cognate.

Another, and probably the most solid etymology I could find for *Np reflected as *Nph is the following:

Nphur P phur 'to fly' from TB *pur Tankhul Naga puy, Magar bhur-ke, Thakali pyuhr-wa among others.

As you can see these different inflections prove to be problematic. It is a shame that I couldn't find any of these "voiceless" and "voiceless aspirate" pairs that both had a unambiguous etymology. Nevertheless, I can see no conditioning based on the examples I've cited. I too, would very much like to reconstruct only an opposition between voiceless and voiced stops, but I am currently not sure how to account for the reflexes that Beyer called the voiceless aspirates.

For kh and th one could imagine that it was simply a loss of prefix one way or the other, But for p/ph this does not seem to be an option since you find the curious relfex Nph beside Nb.

I might be missing something, Tibeto-Burman is pretty new to me, but I can't find any conditioning. Any suggestions? Or a nudge to someone who wrote an article figuring it all out?

First, we're happy to announce that the team has identified and fixed the issue with the YouTube conduit; you can now find and add videos from YouTube to your library and posts. As always, thanks for your patience!

The other news we have today is about a new addition to the Six Apart family: TypePad Micro, a new free level of TypePad that is streamlined for microblogging. We see a new form of blogging emerging that lives between the quick status updates of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form posts of "classic" blogging; TypePad Micro is designed to meet that need. You can read more about TypePad Micro in Chris Alden's post on the Everything TypePad blog.

A lot of the new capabilities we've added to TypePad this year were actually inspired by some of the best things about Vox: favoriting, member profiles, a dashboard to follow other bloggers, and easy ways to post content from other social media sites. But the things that make Vox different from TypePad are still there: Vox has always been -- and still is -- the best place for "friends and family" blogging, where you're in control over who sees what. TypePad, on the other hand, is built for the blogger who wants, no, craves, attention.

Do you have a passion or interest you want to share with people beyond your Vox neighborhood? If so, we'd love it if you tried out TypePad Micro. Maybe you've always wanted to start that obsessive blog that's just about waffle restaurants. Or want a place to share videos of your favorite band (Jonas Brothers, anyone? Anyone? ...). TypePad Micro's great for those topic-specific blogs. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

On the Vox front, our designers are working on some cool new themes (coming soon!). We'd also love to hear your thoughts about where we should take Vox in the coming year. What are the key things you'd like to see for Vox? If you've had a chance to use TypePad this year, what are the features there that we should bring over to Vox? And, if you're thinking big thoughts, how could we connect the Vox and TypePad communities in order to bring together bloggers and their shared passions? Your feedback is really important to us, so please leave a comment here, or shoot me a message.

And again, thanks for your patience as we found and fixed the YouTube bug!

~ daisy

 

As many of you have noticed, the YouTube Conduit is not working. I am so sorry about this; I know how frustrating it is.

The team is looking into how to get this fixed and I will update you as soon as I hear something. In the meantime, not all is lost... There is a work-around for posting videos.

When you're in the Compose Screen, just click on "embed." Ignore the fact that it says "Widget" before everything because you can definitely use this to embed videos as well. You'll just need to input the embed code from the video, enter a title (if you want) and hit OK.

It might not show up perfectly in your compose screen, but when you hit "Save," your video should appear just the way you wanted it to.

Hopefully this will allow you to keep posting videos while we figure out what's happening on our end.

As always, thanks for your patience.

~daisy

Tibeto-Burman (and also Sino-Tibetan) are language that lean rather strongly on their prefixes. There exist some suffixes (most  commonly -s) but most things are encoded in the prefix.

For example the prefix *s- is a typical and well attested prefix that makes an intransitive verb transitive. For example in Tibetan:
'-grub pa 'to be made ready, to be finished, accomplished' besides s-grub pa 'to complete, to finish'. These are the famous a-chung / s- transitive-intransitive pairs, it is an extremely productive pattern well attested, also in other languages (though often less clearly since a-chung and s- have a tendency to merge).

An s- is also commonly found in body parts/animal names for example s-tag 'tiger' and s-ñiṅ 'heart'. It has been proposed, and I happen to find this convincing, that this prefix is a reduction of the word *sya 'animal, body, flesh' as found in Tibetan śa 'flesh, meat'.

It is lovely when a prefix seems to work so beautifully. It is less lovely when it doesn't work so well. Especially the *m-prefix of TB is very difficult. Matisoff in his Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman {1} wants to reconstruct one prefix *m-  that could both function as prenasalisation and as a sesquisyllabic *mǝ- this would be great if languages really displayed some free variation between these suffixes. But as it happens it seems that, at least in Tibetan that prenasalisation (written with a-chung < ' > from here on written as <N> for ease of writing) and prefix m- never alternate with each other.

[EDIT] When I started writing this article, I had not yet written the previous post (Back to the Future eat your heart out!). At the time I ran into some problems which motivated me to write the previous post. At the time I was under the impression that N- and m- never showed any free variation. Some words would have N and some would have m-, but while searching through Jäschke's dictionary for good examples for my previous post, I actually did find several words that show variation between N- and m-.

Several examples follow:

• Nthug-pa / mthug-pa 'thick'
• Nthud-pa / mthud-pa 'make longer'
• mthol-ba / Nthol-ba 'to confess'
• mkhar-ba / Nkhar-ba 'staff'
  

And there must be many more. Far from all words display this free variation though, so it must be fossilized. I wonder if there is some kind of conditioning to be found, but I doubt it. It'd be nice if we could find some system in metrical texts. But all metrical texts consider both N- and m- nonsyllabic.

Nevertheless, the original free-variation seems undeniable now, though it might be worthwhile to have a look if there's certain consonants that do not show this optional variation. As you can see, I have only been able to find it with aspirates stops so far, which doesn't mean that it doesn't occur before others, but Jäschke isn't very systematic in showing these variations, so I would have to look over every single entry in the dictionary, something I'm not particularly looking forward to.

{1} There used to be a PDF version of this on STEDT it seems like they removed it. If anyone can find it back on that website in a legal manner, it would be great, it is a nice book.

[EDIT: Oops, I forgot to make this blog public, so it's a bit late. With 'previous post' I refer to Thibetan Aspirates]

Go forth and fill your libraries with media.

Seriously, thanks to everyone for being so amazing and patient. You are the reason I love Vox.

~daisy

I was just told that the Amazon Conduit will be fixed by tomorrow. I will post here as soon as I get word that it's back up and running.

I know this has been frustrating and I am sorry there wasn't more I could do to make it less so. I really appreciate your patience though.

Cheers,

daisy

One of the typologically puzzling things about Arabic, and Semitic languages in general, is that /i/ and /u/ very often contrast with /a/, but hardly ever with each other. This is usually an indication that these are allophones, but this explanation can not be held if these vowels can't freely interchange, and are perceived as separate vowels.

Although this issue is an issue in the whole of Semitic, as far as I am aware, I am most familiar with Arabic, so I'll stick to using examples from this language.

Of course, there is one extremely productive pattern of 'minimal pairs' of vowels in the form of case endings.
Nom. rajul-un
Gen. rajul-in
Acc. rajul-an

So, sure they seem quite phonemic in that context. But what I find puzzling is that in stem formations we can't find u   and i to contrast normally.

To further research this I have made a table of the distribution of Arabic vowels in CVCVC roots. The table looks as follows:

V1 \ V2	a	i	u	ā	ī	ū
a	+	+	+	+	+	+
i	+	-	-	+	-	-
u	+	-	+	+	-	+
ā	-	+	-	-	-	-
ī	-	-	-	-	-	-
ū	-	-	-	-	-	-

Several notes can be made about this table. I shaded the entry CaCiC, since it is difficult. The only word I can think of is malik 'king' (although doubtlessly there are more). Some people will probably know that this word is related to Hebrew mĕlĕḵ which paradoxically points to a CVCC root. Is malik perhaps from *malk with an epenthetic vowel? It is very reminiscent of dutch melk 'milk' which by many people is in fact pronounced [ˈmɛ.lǝk] rather than [ˈmɛlk].

Another thing that is strange is that, of the long vowels, only ā can occur in V1 position, and exclusively if it is followed by the vowel i. Could it perhaps be that the CaCiC is indeed from *CaCC, and that CāCiC represents the orignal *CaCiC?

If this were true, the table of vowel distribution would look a lot more elegant.

V1 \ V2	a	i	u	ā	ī	ū
a	+	+	+	+	+	+
i	+	-	-	+	-	-
u	+	-	+	+	-	+

There is an enormous problem with this reductionist approach though. The Vowel pattern CāCiC is associated with a meaning of nomen agentis. It is quite productive, from the word kataba 'to write' we can form kātib 'writer'. That would be fine, if it wasn't that Hebrew has this exact same pattern. Hebrew has the verb ṣāfăr 'to count' besides ṣôfēr 'scribe, writer (litt. 'counter')' (ô < *ā, ē < *i). If we assume that CāCiC is from *CaCiC this must have been a common shift for Arabic, Hebrew and I've been told, also Aramaic. Could someone with knowledge of Akkadian/Ethiopian Languages let me know whether this pattern exists and whether it has CāCiC or CaCiC?

So, after the discussion on CaCiC, let's continue regarding this vowel table. Maybe not completely surprising, but for allowed vowel distributions, Arabic disregards vowel length. CiCiC isn't allowed, whether the second i is long or not. Same goes for the other disallowed vowel combinations. I wonder what this implies. I have no experience with languages that have long vowels and limitations on their distribution, so I'm not sure what scenario is typologically plausible.

It is good that I made this table, for it has shown me some stuff that I was previously unaware of. I was under the impression that the distribution of u and i was identical, but I have found absolutely no examples of words with CiCiC, while CuCuC is in fact quite a common plural formation. As I knew before writing this combinations with i and u in one root are impossible, which is mysterious. It almost looks like a sort of 'vowel disharmony' if I may coin that term.

I had written a large post of a proposal of a fourth proto-semitic vowel *ǝ , that would be affected by its surroundings, but often simply surface as a or i. But once I put the distribution into a table, I became uncertain if such a proposal would be feasible, and threw away most of this post.

It is true that i and also u sometimes have schwa-like properties, if malik indeed comes from *malk that's obviously an example, but there's even more readily available examples in the form of the 'alif al-waṣl. When a Arabic word starts with a CC cluster a vowel is placed in front of the first consonant to make the cluster pronounceable. For example *sm 'name' becomes (i)sm. When a vowel proceeds it, this vowel is lost again, it is purely epenthetic. When the root contains no vowels, or an a or i the value of the 'alif al-waṣli is i. But if the following vowel is an u the 'alif al-waṣl is also u as in *drus > (u)drus 'learn!'. This is in fact an example of vowel harmony. There are some nouns violate this rule though like (i)mru'' 'man'. Another strange thing is that the a in the definite article (a)l behaves just like 'alif al-waṣl except that it is always a in isolated pronunciation. Nevertheless it is quite obvious that this alif al-waṣl must have come from a subphonemic *ǝ.

Another example of a *ǝ is the i that is often used to break up clusters in a sentence especially the apocopate verb often needs an extra i places in between its final consonant and the following word.

If there was a *ǝ in the middle of words, would that help to explain the distribution of the vowels? It might, if we assume that all i were in fact *ǝ we would understand which CiCuC and CuCiC do not occur, since the u would have affected the *ǝ to become an u. But it still does not explain why CiCiC and CiCīC unless we assume that *ǝ and *ī turned a preceeding *ǝ into a. Such an explanation is entirely ad-hoc. Although it might be true, there is no indication that it was like that, and we would need comparative evidence to prove it.

So to conclude, Arabic gives quite strong indications that i was in fact rather a *ǝ than an *i that was heavily affected by its surroundings. This does not increase or decrease the amount of phonemic vowels, but it may help understanding the vocalic patterns in Arabic better.

There is no conclusive evidence though that i was *ǝ, one would have to look at deeper genetic relations (Afro-Asiatic? Maybe only Berbero-Semitic?). I do feel that one should probably position this *ǝ in proto-semitic times if it exists. Hebrew vowel distribution is as far as I can see it, quite similar to that of Arabic.

I hope to soon dive into correspondences between Arabic and Berber verbal morphology with this hypothesis that i should be interpretead as a *ǝ. But before that I should probably consider the Arabic verbal morphology first, since I've only considered nouns of the type CVCVC so far. The vowel distribution in the verbal morphology becomes quite a bit more difficult though.

Bad news. As many of you have probably noticed, the Amazon Conduit was not fixed in the last week's release. Unfortunately, there was an undetected bug that is preventing the conduit from working.

We are working on this bug fix and hope to have the Conduit back up and running this week.

I will keep you posted.

Thank you for being so patient.

~daisy