How We Know Languages like Proto-Indo-European Existed
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- čas přidán 2. 09. 2023
- In this video, I delve into the reasons that historical linguists reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, and more generally, why they're so confident that proto-languages existed.
World of Antiquity's video on how cuneiform was deciphered: • How was CUNEIFORM deci...
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I've never gotten why some people seem to perceive a conflict between describing PIE as a single language and describing it as a group of dialects. A group of dialects together IS a single language, and shortly before that, it even WAS a single dialect. Even if you switch to calling them a set of distinct languages instead of dialects, they'd need to be closely related languages, which means they had been a single language shortly earlier. It's like pointing at a rock and saying "that's not a rock; it's a stone".
But it would be weird to assume that PIE at some point in history was some kind of standardized lingua franca that everyone spoke. Just like the "mytochondrial Eve" that we all trace back to did not exist in isolation there must have been a spectrum of languages of which most did not survive until today, many absorbed just like the Neanderthals were absorbed by Homo Sapiens much earlier. PIE did not exist in a vacuum and I do not agree that it is a necessity to assume PIE was a single language or dialect. We can assume that we Indo-Europeans can all trace back to a small group of people that spoke the same language at some point in history, but the village or tribe next door probably spoke a variant that was a bit different. What I want to express is that our languages have always been part of a spectrum. There were always different dialects and other languages around and there was no point in time when only PIE was spoken.
@@Schmogel92literally nobody says "only PIE was spoken", thats a strawman
@@Schmogel92 It is a necessity to assume that PIE was a single language. They had to have been part of the same linguistic community that shared the same words for things and the same grammatical structures for modifying those words and making sentences out of them. That is the only way to explain the commonalities we see. They certainly had different dialects, all languages do, but speakers of different dialects were capable of communicating with each other, and there logically must have been some point at which all the dialects ancestral to recorded IE languages were mutually intelligible with each other.
In the Stone and Bronze ages, much smaller distances between communities would have sufficed for dialects to diverge to the point of mutual unintelligibility. That would seem to imply, among other things, that the "break-up" of PIE must have followed hot on the heels of any spread of PIE speaking populations across the Eurasian continent.
Forces that counteract such divergence would have been the simple need to communicate with neighbouring tribes and people encountered along trade roots (the same way that today a Spanish speaker and Portuguese speaker, or again a Dutch and Afrikaans speaker, quickly establish their linguistic common ground) and of course conquest and empire, since going up in the world (or at any rate keeping your head) would require speaking the emperor's tongue.
In our day and age, mass communication constitutes a strong additional homogenising force: network English, internet slang.
@@Schmogel92 The comparison between PIE (as reconstructed at least) and mitochondrial eve seems alluring, but I think it fails on the details. Also, always write _Homo sapiens_ with a lower-case s.
The astounding thing to me is how much language changes during one life time. I suppose most people get to observe 5 generations on average: their grandparents, parents, their contemporaries, their children, and grandchildren. At times, I have trouble understanding the exact meaning of my native tongue as spoken by my grandchildren. And, they sometime laugh at my “quaint” expressions. Ha! - they have numerous abbreviations which they use texting each other.
I literally know people here in western Sweden who don't know things like 'lelle' being dialect for 'lille', 'little'; 'small', or ridicule the pronunciation 'körka' ('church' and sounds similar to the English word) instead of standard Swedish 'kyrka'. To my father born in the 1940s this is still perfectly normal.
I’m Swedish, born in 1968, and the sh/ch sounds are changing within my lifetime.
I used to be a slavist so I compare our sounds now to the late 1980s
@@francisdec1615That would be people moving into your dialect area.
I’m from a way different Swedish dialect area, and If you ran those past me I’d judge you as a farmhand or with oral deformities
@@katarinawikholm5873 De flesta i Västsverige hade det uttalet för bara några decennier sedan, iaf när de talade privat med någon som också var från Västsverige. Även bildade människor i Svealand sa för övrigt 'körka' och 'böxer' fram till slutet av 1800-talet, även om vokalsänkningen y->ö mest förekommer i götamål. Strindberg brukade göra sig lustig över folk som talade som man skrev. Det ansågs från början uppstyltat. Lägg märke till att i 'mörda' har man fortfarande ö, medan det på fornsvenska hette 'myrda'. Här är det precis som i 'church' närmare det engelska uttalet i 'murder'.
I can pick out the minor differences between GA across generations
I just moved from my hometown to a big city and I’m in the midst of those “everything is different and I don’t know what to do” feelings so when I opened CZcams and was greeted with this thumbnail I uttered an audible sigh of relief. Thanks for giving me a 40-odd minute island of comfort and contemplation.
I hope you settle in soon!
I’m back in the big city after just two months away in a peaceful country village. Crikey, it’s confusing. So many choices, so many people, so much noise…
All the best. You’ll settle soon.
Just moved to a new city for college and I’m using this for the exact same thing lmao
Culture shock.
We talked about this a bit in religious studies classes - extrapolating the likelihood of a proto-IE sky-father deity given the similar root of Jupiter, Zeus Pater, Dyaus-pitar. Religious ideas evolving alongside linguistic evolutions. It's all really interesting.
I’m much more skeptical of how we can be so sure about PIE religion and mythology. Yeah there’s the obvious linguistic connection, but how can we know so much about a culture?
However, I do know that PIEuropeans were very concerned with farts. They have TWO words for it!
@@ferretyluvYeah. Some pretty big claims are made about how we can do the same thing with comparative mythology as we do with comparative linguistics. It definitely seems more tenuous/less scientific though. I’d like to see some scholarly critique of it…
There's a scientifically developed hypothesis called "The theory of the basic myth" by Toporov and Ivanov. It reconstructs the plot of snake fighting, the opposition of two antagonists - the anthropomorphic deity-Thunderer and his opponent - the chthonic Serpent. All the other contrasts correlate with this opposition - light-dark, top-bottom, etc. I don't know, if it's available in English, but it has many points, comparing many mythological plots of Indo-European peoples
@@user-vn2on9tz9g Oh yeah, that’s been around for over a century. It’s what The Golden Bough was all about, laying the foundation for not just comparative religion, but modern anthropology. And while that thesis I can accept, going back even further to PIE myth, I’m still super skeptical on.
@@ferretyluv These are only approximate reconstructions of what could have been, we don't know exactly what the PIE mythology was like, but we have solid grounds to accept certain elements.
Basically, through deductions based on phylogenetics, we can trace the "migration routes" of some myths and legends.
I recommend David Anthony, J.P. Mallory and Jaan Puhvel.
My language at school was Latin, which means that although I don’t stand any hope of carrying on a conversation in a Romance language, I can generally work out the gist of text in Romance languages. Surprisingly useful for a dead language.
Works the same if you're sufficiently fluent in any of the romance languages. I think Spanish in particular.
@@rashid8646It works better as Romance languages are more similar to each other than they are to Latin.
@@rashid8646I am fluent in French and Latin, with conversational Spanish. I find Spanish amazingly similar to Latin, certainly more so than French, Portuguese, Romanian and even Italian. The Real Academia seems to have imposed a most impressive Latin-based regularity. The initial F to H substitution in Spanish is an exception, plus Arabic vocabulary. derivatives.
Really? It's my understanding that Latin and a given Romance language only have about 50% lexical similarity.
50% similarity can be enough to work out loosely what a text is talking about, although it obviously will miss details
I wasn't even aware PIE deniers was a (somewhat common?) thing. Weird.
Great educational video though.
Wonder if they are also round earth deniers?
It's generally due to blind nationalism and willful ignorance
@@sarahrosen4985 They are probably also climate change deniers, covid deniers, relativity deniers, evolution deniers, plate tectonics deniers, and "I am a denier" deniers.
On a completely separate topic, could someone define the political Right for me.
@@aloysiusdevadanderabercrombie8 ahhhh, always forget about the blind nationalism. What a great peg to hang science on.
As a person of Indian descent, I can't tell you how many times I've heard Indian nationalists claim that PIE is just a hoax to further western supremacy, and that Sanskrit is the true origin of the Indo-European languages (with the rest of the world refusing to acknowledge it because of a systematic bias against India)
Quite well done. You explain it all without being over technical which is why this channel is so popular.
I always feel so conflicted, because my linguist heart always wants him to go into more detail, but in some ways he’s already gone into so much detail and more might start to alienate people.
Thank you :) I'm glad it seemed well-balanced!
PIE *r was almost certainly some sort of tap or trill sound in my estimation, since you can find that pronunciation in every surviving branch of IE, as well as almost all of the individual languages (even languages with a different rhotic typically have some dialects using a tap or trill). It would also help to explain sound changes in Germanic and Italic where */r/ must have sounded similar to */z̠/, as in English "was" vs. "were", Latin "ōs" (mouth) vs. "ōrālis" (oral).
The genitive sg. of "os" is "oris" and the nominative pl. is "ora".
I’m really struggling to get any traction with your suggestion that “r” and “z” had similar properties in PIE by basing your supposition on verbal inflection in Modern English and then noun declension in Latin. Chiefly because it does not account very well at all for languages that have always had both sounds, eg: Every Slavic language. Nor the fact that “r” losing its trill in English is a relatively modern development (last 150 years) and that fact that “r” in Modern German is not a sound shared by many other Indo-European languages. I’m really struggling to see the connection that you see here.
Disclaimer: I’m not a PIE person, I’m a Classicist.
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos, what do you mean by classicist?
@@TBD98 Someone who studies the discipline of "Classics", ie: Latin and Ancient Greek.
Whilst tap or trill is by far the most likely option (they're far and away the most common rhotics in general, also the most widely found in modern IE languages, fit descriptions we have of the sound in ancient IE languages, etc), I don't think this is a good argument
z (retracted or no) is phonetically and phonologically much closer to ɹ than to r or ɾ. The fact we see this rhotacism of z > r in Germanic & Latin is one of the biggest criticisms of the identification of PIE *r with z!
I don't think it's insumountable though, we just need an extra step e.g. z > ɹ > r, rather than z > r directly, and even with that extra step it still better accounts for how widespread and ancient the pronunciation as ɾ or r is
One thing worth adding to support what you said about science frequently inferring things that they can't directly observe is that the hypothesizes are testable. There have been many forms that linguists have posited must have existed at some point but without evidence, only decades or centuries later to discover a fragment in an archaic language with that form. A good example was the genitive case ending -isio which linguists predicted the common ancestor of the italic languages must have had, and that Latin must have had early in its development. Lo and behold a fragment was found decades later from the 6th century BCE with that form expressing the genitive exactly how linguists said it would. It is the predictive power of sound change rules that prove their validity, and over and over again the sound change rules are shown to have predictive power. In a sense, its no different than the discovery of the planet Neptune. Astronmers inferred based on the movements of other planets that there must be another large planet and they guessed where it would be, and once telescopes were powerful enough to see it, there it was. Linguists develop sound change laws based on existing patterns and then suggest that based on these laws an unattested intermediate (or predecessor) form must have existed, and then when archeologists make new finds, there it is.
That's a very good point! Testability and predictive power are a big part of what makes something scientific. I couldn't have put it better myself.
Astronomers also predicted the existence of a large rocky planet inside the orbit of Mercury and had to make do with not having a correct theory of gravity for a full century when it wasn’t there. Because they were so sure that a single specific object had to be the cause of a universal effect that they couldn’t back up and find the error in their entire approach to the topic.
@@dashiellgillingham4579 What are you referring to on this one? What is the answer for why there is no planet there?
@@spaghettiking653 I will address your question, and also correct some of @dashiellgillingham4579 's allegations and dispute what they seem to be implying about the evolution of scientific theories. Keeping it as short as I can: if you watch the planets' orbits carefully enough and for long enough, you'll find that they change in regular ways over time. This happens because they aren't just affected by the gravity of the sun, but by the gravity of each other. Newton's theory of gravity adequately explains it for most planets on human time scales, but Mercury's orbit changes just a tiny bit faster than can be explained by the influence of the other known planets. One explanation would be an undiscovered planet (named Vulcan, no joke), which they searched for but could never find. The true explanation came from Einstein: the sun's mass warps space-time just enough to account for the difference, no new planet needed. The effect is actually there for all the planets, but Mercury is the only planet close enough to the sun's mass for it to make a noticeable difference. Here's where I have issues with what dg4579 said: 1) Vulcan's actual existence and orbit were proposed in 1859 and finally dismissed from possibility in 1908. That's 49 years, not a "full century". 2) The person who proposed the idea admitted it was unlikely to be there because people had been peering towards the sun for ages to see if there was another planet and had never found one. He also proposed a group of near-sun asteroids as an alternative hypothesis, because it was easier to explain why they hadn't been previously observed. Neither he nor the scientific community were sure at all sure it was a "single specific object." 3) By 1915, nearly a thousand asteroids and other bodies had been discovered and their orbits calculated. Mercury's orbit was the only one where Newtonian physics wasn't accurate enough to explain everything they observed. That seems far from "making do". 4) Most important: there is a difference between a scientific theory being incomplete and being wrong. Within constraints Newton's results are indistinguishable from Einstein's, and scientists and engineers use Newtonian physics to this day for orbital mechanics. We might need Einstein to make our GPS satellites work properly, but we still use Newton to put them into orbit.
@@josephatthecoopgreat explanation. Thanks!
Good examples of French words in English showing the older prononciation of French:
Venison (venaison in mod. Fr.)
Pork (porc with a silent c in mod. Fr.)
Honor (honneur)
Agincourt (Azincourt)
Paris (Paris with silent s)
Francis (François)
Edit:
Honest - honnête
Deuce - deux (pronounced without a final consonant, final x was pronounced like s)
Discover - découvrir
In English it's spelt honour, which is even closer to French, honor is American-English
And of course "hostel" and "hotel", borrowed twice, once before and once after the sound change in French.
@@aliasofanalias7448My American brain wants to pronounce it “hon-hour” when there’s a u.
That reminds me of how English often uses Germanic words for live animals but uses Romance words for their meat.
“cow” vs. “beef”, “pig” vs. “pork”, “sheep” vs. “mutton”, “deer” vs. “venison”, etc.
@@RandomNonsense1985 Lol even the aplhabet isn't safe from American independence. English is a language full of flaws and contradictions, I imagine it's annoying to learn when it's not someone's first language
OH GOODY! NEW SIMON ROPER!!!
What sealed the deal to me was when I was trying to further my german level by learning and immersing myself in other dialects, and I stumbled upon a swiss dialect that switched "K" sounds for "CH" sounds ("Katze" became "Chatzi" for example). At first it sounded weird and then it began to click, because I remebered that words like "Hound" in english and "Cão" in portugese, both came from the same origin and I got my answer on how Kwon became Hwon that became Hond that became Hound.
Then I was also trying to further my norwegian by learning dialects and I learned that northern norwegians don't use the typical "Hv" sounds from standard norwegian and instead they say it like "kv" or "k"
Hvem (who) becomes Kem and Kem sounds IDENTICAL to the portuguese Quem (Who).
When I heard a norwegian say "Kem e du?" I thought I was going crazy because it is almost the same in portuguese "Quem é(s) tu?" (Who are you?).
*kuntos/kwntos >*hundaz> hund> > hound.
How many languages do you speak?
@@superhond1733 I speak native brazilian portuguese, fluent english, advanced norwegian, dutch and german and I have scattered knowledge in french, icelandic, polish, russian, old english, old norse and latin.
My take on the PIE laryngeals, having read a lot of the debate about their articulation, is that *h₁ was likely /h/, while *h₂ and *h₃ were initially uvular sounds /χ/ and /χʷ/ that became pharyngealized when PIE lost its uvular set of consonants (I think it also had uvular stops at an early stage which merged into the velars, and different types of uvular-velar mergers created the centum/satem split). This shift would have occurred after the Anatolian languages split off. Late PIE would have had /ħ/ for *h₂ and /ħʷ/ for *h₃. It's easy enough to pronounce /χ/ and /χʷ/ as a syllabic nucleus, as in [pχ̩ˈteːr] but if you pharyngealize that sound to [pħ̩ˈteːr], at that point you basically have a voiceless vowel: [pḁˈteːr]. Voiceless vowels being typologically uncommon, it would have been very natural for these to become voiced vowels like we see in the daughter languages.
this sounds very interesting. can you go into more detail about the uvular-velar mergers?
With *h1, it's essentialy impossible to distinguish between h & ʔ. Both would be expected to have the same effect as *h1 (i.e. no laryngeal colouring, only lengthening of a preceding vowel), but these are pretty much the only plausible options
*h2 & *h3 are the difficult ones though, because it depends a lot on your interpretation of the vowels *a & *o (and also *e). People often take it for granted that *o was rounded (and therefore that *h3 was labialised), but actually the reflexes are split pretty evenly between rounded and unrounded. We can't use frequency of sound change as much of an argument here either as low back vowels spontaneously round about as often as they spontaneously unround
The suggestion you give is certainly very plausible, and seems likely if we accept a Latin-like interpretation of the PIE vowel system, but it's also possible to interpet the vowel system in a way more similar to that of many Northwest Caucasian languages, with the ablauting *e & *o forming a vertical vowel system of high *e & low *o, in which case *h3's primary effect is lowering, and not rounding or backing, and *h2's would be lowering, possibly with some fronting
The fact Brugmann's law in Indo-Iranian possibly implies a distinction between underlying *o and *o from laryngeal colouring also complicates things further
Ultimately, I doubt we'll ever be able to be confident in the pronunciation of *h2 or *h3, although when speaking aloud I would tend to pronounce them roughly as you give here
@@sillysillyme8150 PIE is traditionally reconstructed as having a set of "palatal-velars" and "velars", but the "palatal-velars" are much more common than the "velars". It's not typologically common for a stop system to work that way, nor is it common for palatal sounds to turn into velar sounds as would be necessary to explain the centum languages from that framework. It makes a lot more typological sense for the "palatal-velars" to just be plain velars and the "velars" to be uvulars. Centum languages merge the "velar" series with the "palatal-velar" series, while satem languages merge the "velar" series with the "labiovelar". That can be explained if uvulars were fronted to velars; centum languages simply merged them into the velars, while satem languages pushed the original velars further forward into palatal sounds.
@@tristanholderness4223 I think there are reasons /h/ is more likely than /ʔ/ for *h₁. First of all, we see this laryngeal in syllable nuclei a lot, and a glottal stop doesn't work phonetically as a syllable nucleus. Positing /h/ makes more sense within my "voiceless vowels" interpretation. Also, at some point in Proto-Balto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-Iranian, we see evidence that all three laryngeals collapsed into a single phoneme. That to my mind means the three sounds probably ended up sounding pretty similar. If the sounds were /h/, /ħ/, and /ħʷ/, and those sounds were coloring adjacent vowels, it makes perfect sense that they would collapse into a single phoneme (probably /h/), phonemicizing the differences in their colored vowels.
*h₃ had to have been rounded. I don't see how you can explain the Greek data otherwise. Greek is unusual in preserving reflexes of *h₃ where other branches don't, and it comes out as /o/.
I think a Northwest-Caucasian-like two-vowel system is possible for some really early stage of PIE, but I lean towards late PIE having a phonemic *a sound (as in the *atta example from this video). And I don't think it's plausible for any of these proposed laryngeal sounds to have a fronting effect on a vowel. Both *h₂ and *h₃ were pronounced far back in the mouth and would have drawn the tongue back. I suggest checking out the Shuswap language of western Canada if you want to see a system in a living language sort of like this; it has pharyngeal /ʕ/ and /ʕʷ/ consonants that have /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ as vocalic allophones.
@@AtomikNY exactly what the "syllabic laryngeals" were is an open question in itself. It's not unusual for people to argue they were Hə instead
With the Greek evidence, this is perfectly accountable with the more vertical system. h3 lowered *e to *o [ɐ] or similar, which then rounded and raised to o by Greek, whilst h2 lowered it to *a [a] or similar, which backed in response to the movement of *o
Interesting stuff Simon. This is basically linguistic archeology. I am a Doctor John fan too, but I am 66, so I grew up with him.
The Sanskrit for father is here written as pita, 29:18, but the addressing form, and some other forms, too, contain the r- which makes "pitara:" and other forms closer to the English father and German vater.
Same for brother. Bhrata, (Bhratara: in addressing form), Bhrother in English, and Bruder in German.
Also- Mother/Matara:/Mutter.
[Addressing form- Sambadhan pada]
His explanation follows at 30:00 😉
ah, "adressing form", that's it, thanks, I was missing that
its sambodhan not sambandha.
sambhanda is genetive
also pitar bhratar and matar are base form
address forms are pita, bharata, mata
you often see that, and it's often best not to compare the nominative singular form of nouns or the verbal infinitives.... for instance a lot of romance nouns go back to the accusative forms in Latin, not the nominative ones.
I'd love to see you try to go back further than Proto-indo-european and talk about some commonalities between PIE and Proto-uralic and a few other families,... specifically -m accusatives. You could also go back to the genesis of verb and noun endings in PIE and talk about how they likely arose from the copula (verbs) and particles and postpositions in pre-PIE. There's like 0 content like this on CZcams, and considering the number of hits I got several years ago for some rambling, unedited, unprepared stream-of-consciousness vlog about PIE comparing the steppe and anatolian hypotheses, I think videos like this would do well, someone from someone as respected as yourself in the polyglot/language lover youtube space.
Outstanding video. Very well written (unless it was off the cuff) and great density of information. The progression through the concepts, each building on the last, worked really well.
Thank you, that's very kind :)
The stab wound analogy is really smart
I thought it was not perfect, since it suggests that languages get mutilated over time whereas in reality they just change
@@ikbintom Or possibly that’s something you’re inferring by taking a metaphor too literally.
Nice to see you here!
Around the 17 minute mark: is that the same guy who went around rural (now Hesse) villages to record fairy tales? I grew up in that region, but we never learned about that aspect of their work!
Liked the video, the arguments make sense (at least on the surface, and I have not dug deeper). Having learned languages that are derived from proto Germanic (English, Norwegian, German - high and swiss [basics, I can understand some dialects but don't speak it]) got me thinking about the same things. Just a few thousand years less history, but with easy to spot different (differently adapted) loan words. (I studied Latin in school, and some Spanish).
Thanks a bunch for your clear explanations!
It is the same Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm brothers that recorded the fairy tales and were important Germanic philologists!
Excellent video as ever 🙌🙌🙌💖💖💖 my Scottish grandparents had an "auld scots" accent that you would never hear anywhere anymore, because their parents were born in the late 1800s.. when i was a kid i sounded more like my mum (born in the 80s) who has a standard perthshire accent for her age group (born in the late 50s) though that's not how people sound anymore, and now my accent has become very americanised because I've lived overseas for so long that you would struggle to hear the auld scot in me at all haha
As a Czech native speaker, I would say your "Vrh" was quite good!
I agree
In explaining laryngeals you're missing a third option: PIE had several times as many vowels as we expect. The discovery that Hittite preserves an h-like sound where they're expected is why we can be pretty confident in ruling that out, but until that was deciphered it was a plausible notion.
As an interested non-expert, I've always wanted to know this! Thanks, Simon.
In high school and then in my undergrad I learned Spanish, but last year I started studying French (pls don’t come at me, it’s for work) and let me tell you my brain broke when I realized “place” = “plaza” and then suddenly I looked around and saw all the “places” and yeah so basically it hit me like a truck lmao anyways thanks for the video
oh cool, another Simon Roper video.
as a suggestion, what would Old English sound like if it went directly through the great vowel shift without transitioning into Middle English first?
i gotchu
Hwæt wī Geir-Dena in ġeir-dagum
þīod-cyninga þrym ġefraunon,
hau ðei æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Sċyld Sċīfing sċeaþena þratum
monegum mġþum meodo-setla oftīah;
eġsode Eorle, syððan rest wearð
fīasċeaft funden; hī þæs frūfre ġebeid:
wīox under wolcnum, weorð-myndum þeih,
oðþæt him ġhwylċ þeira ymb-sittendra
ofer hron-reide hairan sċolde,
gomban gyldan: þæt wæs gūd cyning!
Fire video Simon!
Random thought tho: I wonder what language came before PIE? just like Latin or old English, PIE had to have come from somewhere. Maybe we’ll never rly know
Edit: thanks for the riveting discussion in this thread. You’re all so knowledgeable and its great reading your thoughts 😊
As I understand it, which isn't well, mind you, PIE is as far back as we can construct a common parent language with the ones we know of that have a common ancestor. We can't go back farther without any certainty so the answer is we will probably never really know what language(s) sounded like from which PIE is a descendent.
I think it eventually becomes more of an anthropological question than a linguistic one. It’s equally as interesting, but we’re getting into territory best approached from a biological and anthropological perspective rather than a linguistic one
The closest connection is possibly proto Uralic, the case endings match quite well and the hypothetical homelands are close enough for it to be reasonable, but there isn't enough in the pattern to fully reconstruct regular sound correspondences so it's still controversial. Beyond that connections with any sort of scholarly backing get scarce, there are individual words that are generally accepted to show up among tons of proto languages like the Indo European roots for aqua, hound, mead, and seven but hound and mead are obvious loans due to the spread of domestication of dogs and bees respectively so it doesn't aid reconstruction. Deeper than that linguists tend not to speculate because the comparative method breaks down and the methods used by people to establish deeper links are weak or invalid. There are theories called Nostratic, Eurasiatic, and Borean to look at but it's necessary to preface that they are all flawed and/or too incomplete.
@@TiKevin83 As far as I have understood Uralic languages are much different than the indo-european ones. Hungarian has like 27 cases for words to indicate if something is coming from or going to or inside of or outside of, on top of, etc... Also PIE started showing up much further east than the Ural mountains. It's fairly possible these two language trees arrived nearly independently out of local trade groups once people had figured out how to make carts and have animals pull them. Am I wrong? I would love to learn more if I am.
@@omgbutterbee7978 some examples are the reconstructed case endings between proto ie and uralic: both *-m for first person singular, both *-me for first person plural, then *-s in IE for second person singular and *-t in Uralic and both *-se in second person plural and the singular in PIE is already understood as a word final assibilation of *-t. Both also use *-m as an accusative case and *-i as an oblique plural. The dual appears similar as IE has a laryngeal where Uralic has *-k. There are also cognates in the roots for many basic particles I, you, not, this, that, who, and what, and possibly in vocabulary in roots for water, name, fish, to give, to go, much, wash, and pot. However I'll be clear this is in no way conclusive of anything, it would be out of the ordinary for a language to have so much of its case system and particles replaced while retaining native vocabulary but it's not without parallels, the written grammatical structure of Korean and Japanese is strikingly similar possibly due to pressure from Chinese but they retain separate unrelated core vocabulary that hasn't been replaced by Chinese loans.
34:35 but these rules themselves do sometimes have more or less random exceptions. E.g. Dutch generally didn't lose the nasal in words like goose, us, mouth (Dutch has gans, ons, mond) but did lose this nasal in the word for south (zuid). Of course this can often still be explained (e.g. by lexical diffusion, analogy or conflation with similar words), but it does make the rules of sound change less black and white. The old idea/theorem of Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze is not obsolete, but it does lack nuance.
This is true! I think I had a couple of footnotes where I mentioned odd exceptions, but I think I should certainly have been clearer about it - especially as there are good examples of it from relatively recently.
Amazing video, Simon. I learned some things I didn't know about the correspondences you described. Very informative. Thank you very much!
Thank you, Simon. Great presentation.
That’s a great video. Very informative ☺️
Excellent and interesting material as always. Thank you Simon
Thanks, Simon. Love the work you put in for us.
Wonderful video, thank you Simon. So clear that the info from various language families and the changes in certain time periods can be pinned down to quite an extent, certainly back to reconstructing protogerman when it comes to modern english and german and dutch. PIE is probably a little more diffiicult but the main lines stand imho.
Thank you for breaking all this done so well. Really helps me understand not only PIE but language in general. Had a few eureka moments.😊
That was such a good piece. Thank you so much, Simon!
Thoroughly enjoyed this one, thank you!
I'd love to see a video similar to this one explaining the difficulties of reconstructing languages past a certain point due to exessive acumulation of changes, I recently came across a biologist who looked at linguistics in a weird way for "not trying to go back all the way in common ancestors" and while this perspective is by no means widespread (at least not for many decades) i would still find a video like that important to clarify misconceptions and make that more abundantly clear
what's his name
@@Syfoll He's someone i met in real life and i dont think he's a particularly public figure as far as im aware so i wont say it due to privacy concerns
@@MitordyADR oh
french "place" is "PIAZZA" in italian! "plaza" is spanish!! great video as always.
Was going to say that. And even in that case, the Spanish word "plaza" isn't a good candidate word for comparison, because it's a semi-learned word copied from literary Latin ("platea"). The few Spanish words beginning with "pl" are borrowings, because Latin "pl-" regularly became Spanish "ll-" (e.g. "planum" > "llano", "clavem" > "llave").
This seems to be the video I've been looking for a year ago. Thanks for the topic. The methodology is what matters to me.
Great video! I rarely get to see the detail discussed here
Simon I think you're a really swell fella and I love your videos.
Really interesting video! Do you think you could make a video about the various types of sound changes at some point?
great work! this is very informative, well-done and digestible, i don't know much about linguistics but this was an amazing watch !
loved this, i enjoy when you go through axioms for a particular theory
Thanks so much for this video. It was super interesting, especially since im German, the videos about proto languages are a bit more relatable to me, than videos about English etymology and dialects. Id love to see more videos about proto germanic or PIE.
I love your use of the phrase "You lot" for plural "you."
its pretty standard british english
@@pkarrk6893 I know that. I'm Canadian, so don't hear it all the time. He also could have easily have indicated plural with a (p) or something, so I'm sharing my appreciation for the choice.
I go to sleep with his videos running in my background. Thank you for the wonderful work. Super informative and also very soothing.
So calm and informative
Props for Dr. John
📍one of my favorite PIE linguistic origins, morphology, affiliations, etc. is the PIE word dheiə. Eastwards it became Zen and westwards became sēma in Attic Greek. Understanding Semantics is very zen.
You are very humble. You say many things with perfect clarity, and things that no one can question but a total pedant, and yet you still ask for corrections and refinements. Thanks so much for your explanation.
You are the first guy who doesn't act like he knows everything and his audience is stupid. No i can listen to you and not look for mistakes. Thank you.
Regarding the regularity of sound change (i.e. the Neogrammarian hypothesis), whilst it does generally hold, we do have plenty of well-documented instances of it not being the case
Most of these are due to dialect mixing, something that is obviously quite unusual historically as throughout history, most people living in an area grew up fairly near that area, and their children will also continue to live in a fairly similar location. When you do have large scale movements of populations, these often involve a single group from a small area who already have fairly homogeneous speech migrating together, rather than a melting pot
The most clear-cut example is in Beijing Mandarin (and actually even moreso in Northeastern Mandarin). The tone of syllables with the Middle Chinese entering tone cannot be reliably predicted after a voiceless onset (or a voiced onset either in Northeastern Mandarin). There are some tendencies (e.g. colloquial readings tend to use first or third tone, whilst literary readings tend to use second or fourth tone), but these still just reduce the possibility space and also have exceptions
In this case the cause is clear
Beijing became the capital in the Ming dynasty, and remained so ever since. The Imperial bureaucracy brought large numbers of migrants from across the country to the city all speaking their own dialects creating the sort of melting pot that can easily lead to irregular correspondences
Nearer to home, many words, mostly classical in origin, use TRAP in SSBE where RP used BATH (e.g. plastic, transfer, Kraken). This shift isn't predictable phonologically. You could try to exclude these because they're loans, but many of these words seem fully nativised, and it's not like most SSBE speakers know enough Latin or Greek to have independently borrowed them again
Relatedly, in a highly literate society (like we have today), we also have the possibility of spelling pronunciations. Consider the days of the week. A few decades ago, RP had these all ending in -di, and many speakers would consider -dej an error, but today in SSBE -dej is fully standard, and -di has largely been relegated to more conservative regional dialects. This change ofc did not affect all words ending in -di, as words like hardy are unaffected
As spelling tends to be conservative, this will typically have the effect of undoing regular sound changes (in this case a form of vowel reduction) for certain words, but given the amount of meddling with our spelling people trying to latinise it have done in the past that need not always be the case
The Neogrammarian hypothesis definitely holds more often than not, and we should definitely be suspicious of irregular correspondences, but at the same time, at this point, it's hard to justify it as always true (excepting analogy) the way it was originally proposed
deep time linguistics involves prestate and pre-literate societies. those languages should follow change patterns more closely. I think linguistics has a big blind spot, though, in the rate of change. We don't know what population densities were like, or how often groups with divergent languages met and mingled. All of those things speed language change, while isolation slows it. So if pre-state humans were largely isolated bands who didn't interact, language change would have been extraordinarily slow before literate states. OTOH if prestate societies were interconnected with trade and marriage across huge chunks of the earth, then you might have instances of rapid language change.
@@Hawaiian_Shirt_guy you are correct, that this sort of dialect mixing would be much less likely in a pre-state society
As for rate of change it's not as variable as people often think
Icelandic and Lithuanian are often pointed to as if they were living fossils, but a lot of the apparent archaism isn't really there. In the case of Icelandic, whilst written Old Norse is similar, this is largely due to Icelandic having an archaic spelling system as it's phonology has veered way off into the weeds, and also that most Old Norse editions today have their spelling normalised closer to Icelandic norms
With Lithuanian, whilst some elements of its morphology are very conservative, other aspects of the language (such as it's phonology) are very innovative
Languages may sometimes change a little faster, or a little slower, but they never stop changing, and case studies like the Polynesian languages (which are extremely easy to track because they were settling previously uninhabited islands for the most part and so genetics and archaeology line up well with linguistics) show that that was true even in pre-modern societies
I also don't think any linguist would say genetics and language are unconnected, just that they don't *necessarily* go together, and so we shouldn't assume that genetic identity corresponds to linguistic identity
Dialect mixing can be extremely common in "primitive" societies actually! A lot of societies that live in small groups are systematically exogamous. So they'll only marry people from another tribe/village/whatever. The family then moves in together, with the result that the speech community is a mix of dialects, and children are raised by parents who speak different dialects.
@@tristanholderness4223 I have no idea what you mean about BATH for plastic, transfer, or Kraken. These all use the TRAP phoneme in RP, and all British English dialects. Do you mean, these used to formerly be long 'front a' in an earlier stage of English, and are no longer?
@@therat1117 BATH and TRAP are lexical sets, and refer to the vowels used in the word's bath and trap. I used those terms rather than /æ/ or /ɑː/ because the lexical set description holds across dialects in a way explicit phonemes doesn't (seeing as Northern & Midlands English lacks the TRAP-BATH split, pronouncing both as /æ/)
Older RP had /plɑːstɪk/ /tɹɑːnzfɜː/ & /kɹɑːkən/, with the same vowel as in BATH, but this is now very old-fashioned, and modern Standard Southern British English has the vowel in TRAP. This happened without a general merger of BATH & TRAP, so violates the neogrammarian hypothesis
I know very little about linguistics but I am a biology major and it’s interesting how many of the same strategies and problems are the same in the studies of the evolution of life and the evolution of language. It’s especially similar to bacterial and viral evolution, because they experience significant amounts of horizontal gene transfer, where genes go from one organism to another non reproductively, similar to how words and other linguistic features are traded between languages.
There are so many! Like how functional genes are much more likely to be lost than gained and appear more from other functional genes is similar to how consonants act in language evolution. Using Occam’s razor to backtrack evolution, identifying whether something is homologous (arisen through common ancestry) or analogous (arisen through chance), and so many more
I'd thought a little about this before, but (not being a biologist) I never thought about the fact that horizontal gene transfer is possible! That makes it an even better analogy than I thought. Thank you for pointing this out :)
@@simonroper9218If you look at the official definition of the so-called Indo-European languages, which area does this definition represent?
Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India. A synonym is Indo-Germanic ( Idg. or IdG. ), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. - wikipedia
According to the official historiography, which people ruled this area, defined by the Indo-European definition?
The Greek historian Herodotus' Histories ( ca. 430 BCE ) refers to the European Scythians as Scythians and the eastern ones as Σακαι / Sakai ( Persian: Sakâ; Sanskrit: Śāka, Latin: Sacae ) [...] Later, the Scythians were sometimes called Getae, Massagetae ( may mean "strong Getae" ) and Cimmerians. - Scythians In The Ancient World By N. S. Gill, February 13, 2019
According to the official historiography, how long has the above-mentioned ethnic group ruled the Indo-European language areas?
Several ancient authors, including Herodotus ( ca. 484 BCE - 425 BCE ), call the Scythians ( *ca. 5100 BCE - 453 CE ) the oldest people in the world. - wikipedia
And which is the oldest Indo-European language-speaking people according to the official academic view?
Hittite ( ca. 1700 BCE - 1200 BCE ). This is the earliest-recorded of all Indo-European languages [...] The history of the Hittite civilization is known mostly from cuneiform texts found in their former territories, and from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in the various archives of Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt and the broader Middle East; the decipherment of these texts was a key event in the history of Indo-European studies. - wikipedia
What names, terms, expressions are found on these clay tablets that essentially prove the existence of the Indo-European language family?
The Sun god of Heaven ( Hittite: nepišaš Ištanu ) was a Hittite solar deity. He was the second-most worshipped solar deity of the Hittites, after the Sun goddess of Arinna. - wikipedia
Perhaps these 'Hittite' terms can also be found in other languages that are still alive and existing today? As an example:
- nepišaš Ištanu / népi-sas istenű "folk-eagle god" in Hungarian ( see: Turul bird ), or népi-s[z]ás[z] is[z]tanú "folk Saxon drink witness", because the marking on the Hittite letter Š may refer to the long-toned pronunciation of the letter, which in Hungarian is the letter SZ.
- Arinna / Ár-inna is an other Hungárian word composition from Ár "price, flood, coast" + inna ~ "he / she would like to drink".
For the interpretation of these Hittite terms in Hungarian ... Is there any evidence in the official history pages of modern times?
The Turul is a mythological bird of prey, mostly depicted as a falcon ( *or eagle ), in Hungarian tradition and Turkic tradition, and a national symbol of Hungarians. The image of a bird of prey was extremely popular in Saka-Scythian culture. - wikipedia
According to the Scythian-Hungarian traditions, the monarchs were earthly images of the heavenly powers and the sun god, and they ruled in their name and as their governors. - wikipedia
The blood oath ( Hungarian: vérszerződés, literally "blood contract" ) was, according to tradition, a pact among the leaders of the seven Hungarian tribes, traditionally held to be the first, unwritten constitution of the Hungarian nation. - wikipedia
According to contemporary sources, similar blood oaths were common among Nomadic peoples that were similar to the Hungarians, like the Scythians ( *Szekler / Szék[h]ely "Seat-place" ). - wikipedia
Herodotus described a Scythian ritual [...] the covenantors would allow their blood to drip into a cup; the blood was subsequently mixed with wine and drunk by both participants. - wikipedia
The first heraldic representations of Erdély ( Transylvania ) date from the 16th century. The Diet of 1659 codified the representation of the Union of the Three Nations in Transylvania's coat of arms. - wikipedia
It depicted a black eagle, a Turul on a blue background, representing the Magyars ( Hungarians ), the Sun and the Moon representing the Székelys ( Szeklers ), and seven red towers on a yellow background representing the seven fortified cities of the Erdélyi Szászok ( Transylvanian Saxons ). - wikipedia
Which real and actually existing language and its family can the term Indo-European language family actually cover?
Elichmann ( 1601 / 1602 - 1639 ), a doctor from Silesia who settled in Leiden, considered the language of the Scythians to be the mother of all languages. He based his idea primarily on the similarity between the Persian and Germanic languages. His early death prevented him from publishing his results. - wikipedia
Medieval chronicles associated the Székelys ( Szeklers ) with the Huns, also claiming that both the Huns and the Hungarians were descended from the Scythians. - wikipedia
And why?
Thank you so much for taking the time to learn this stuff and then explain it in a way I can understand. I was mesmerized when i first learned from wikipedia that all these languages apparently shared a common ancestor language at one time. While I didn't doubt linguists, i was very curious about how they could be so certain and have such strong consensus, when things so far back in the past are generally percieved to be totally shrouded in mystery.
Thanks for this video and the previous one. Now I can understand the structure of PIE words and even try to read them
I didn't realize, til this video, that linguistic negationists could exist. That is very weird 😅
This type of discourse exists in most types of a academia tbf. Sometimes a counter-argument exists for the sake of it, other times it’s as compelling. And at other times it’s people who purport things like anti-Darwinism.
What is a “linguistic negationist“?
Glad you answered my question before I had a chance to ask it. Always wondered why it couldn't have been a small group of very similar languages / dialects than one monolithic language.
First of all, Simon, thank you for this amazing video. Even though I wasn't a "doubter" in the first place, your approach of explaining step by step the coherent and stringent reasoning behind the scientific reconstruction of proto-languages really taught me a lot.
Now a few somewhat unrelated questions and requests:
1) Have you made a video about the general subject of sound systems, sets _and their symmetry_ which you mention at about 38:52, and if not, could you make one?
2) If sound changes in languages usually follow a direction of "more difficult to articulate" to "easier to articulate" (i. e. governed by the "laziness" of every day speech), how then did these more hard to pronounce patterns come about in the first place? (I.e. I am not asking about -grammatical but phonetic complexity.- EDIT: ...grammatical complexity but about phonetic "difficulty".)
3) Would you say that the "dot matrix tree" (as one commenter calls it) which you use at about 4:33 in your video "Thinking About Human Evolution" would also be a better depiction of the tree of evolution of languages and their manifold dialects? If not, why not?
4) Since this possibly touches on your topics of interest, a completely unrelated and hopefully not too brazen request: It seems to me that the necessarily (? - maybe there would be a different way?) anthropocentric/-morphic language we use to describe the theory of evolution (i.e. "selection", "success", possibly others) leads in society to an emotionaly biased and unscientific way of thinking about evolution, i.e. that we assign to nature our human values and criteria (which ironically themselves have been shaped by evolution). Would you be interested in making a video on that subject? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Wow. Thanks a lot, Simon, great explanation. In my next life I'd love to become a historical linguist. It's fascinating like real history, but without the bloodshed and the more grisly aspects 🙂
I think all of that very much did play a key role in the background. But you can try to look at it purely linguistically.
Why can't you do it in this life?
@@PlatinumAltaria Well, I'm already 60 years old and near the end of my career as a librarian. I can make it a hobby of course, but it's not quite the same. 😏
@@VolkerGerman It's only too late to try something new when they throw the first handful of dirt. Follow your dreams!
@@PlatinumAltariaoh come on, he already said he's 60, he's almost dead (Machnurspass), or at least retired, and that he's gonna do it in his next life, so, soon.
Rasmus Rask is such a wonderful name.
'Rask' means 'healthy', 'vigorous', 'fast'
hale
Indeed, it sounds very characterful.
Rasch in German also means fast.
Great video as always. As others have said, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on Heggarty's recent article about the the hybrid origin model of PIE
Thank you - very clear and helpful.
I recently realized that my first issue with Biblical literalism was when my mother told me that all languages must have originated from the Tower of Babel, and that no languages have been created since then. Your research on proto languages has implications in fields beyond linguistics and history. Thank you for the fantastic video.
The existence of PIE actually proves not all languages come from a single one...
@@flaviospadavecchia5126 Exactly.
@@flaviospadavecchia5126I mean, technically humans evolved into possessing the same phonetic inventory. So, tbh, all languages do come from the same neurological source lol
The funny thing about any sort of scriptural literalism is that all scriptures across tradition acknowledge their own use of metaphors. And its proponents also don't extend the literalism to all aspects of their liturgical scripture!
@@neeleneeleambarpar2151 well, we're all humans. There's only so many phonemes we can have.
@@flaviospadavecchia5126 I was just being cheeky, I am not a creationist of any stripe :)
Simon- Dr. John’s pronunciation was something akin to “Dis Dat an’ Duh-Udda.” ( I think he exaggerated the sound frequently. His off stage accent was still straight-up New Orleans.)
Excellent video!
Thanks for this; I think you've explained it remarkably well. I think it's probably difficult for people who haven't studied this subject in depth to grok these relationships. From my own experience and that of other students of linguistics I know, it's clear that the deeper you delve into all these relationships, systems, consistencies, and inconsistencies, one can only deduce descendancy from a common ancestor language, in this case the reconstructed language we call PIE. And of course we see the same kinds of patterns and relationships unfolding through other linguistic groups as well. Love your videos, cheers!
A very good explanation! Having studied some linguistics (and history) I have never doubted Indo-European theory, though I am pretty sceptical about inferring much about I-E culture or the original speakers' ethnicity as I have seen some attempt
It’s a good point, people do like to prescribe some pretty disturbing narratives about PIE. Especially when they forget that it was a theoretical language essentially discovered/created in the 19th century.
I agree! Especially as most aspects of culture and religion are next-to-impossible to reconstruct systematically, I think we should be very cautious about trying to reconstruct details of Proto-Indo-European culture (and I think some of the things I've heard, even from people in academia, have been a bit overzealous).
@@simonroper9218 Very curteous of you to respond, I definitely agree!
Very clear argument
Wonderful treatment not just of PIE but of historical linguistics. A good introduction.
Hi Simon, I appreciate your lecture about PIE very much. It explains a lot about the similarities and differences in modern languages. Well done and thank you👍👍. You mentioned in the 2nd half that PIE could have been spoken in a certain region, but I am in favor of the idea that PIE is the greatest common part of dialects in a certain region. The people/tribes/groups in these period became somehow dominant and spread over Europe and Asia. And their dialects evolved with them. So for me PIE is not a spoken language at some moment, but the (spoken) part shared by a cluster of dialects. And neighboring areas/dialects had more in common than disconnected areas/dialects.
I don't really think it's so mysterious as to why Indo-European languages survived so well - their speakers simply extinguished other languages as the Indo-European-speaking peoples themselves migrated/spread, conquered, and dominated. In some locations, the spread of Indo-European is associated with a good deal of Western Steppe Herder genetic admixture, and with large-scale replacement of male lineages: your father was very likely speaking Indo-European, and the men of the society at large likely would have been enforcing it. After all, it's not just the languages of the Indo-European world which are related: the cultures & religions are, as well. The societies, which were enforcing their norms, mores, and taboos, were inherently Indo-European ones.
Also, when there is social pressure to learn a language, you're more likely to learn it. Children born in the Anglosphere to people for whom English is not a first language still learn English, and tend not to have extremely thick accents, to give a modern example of such social pressure. Moreover, if you don't even have any other options, well, you're going to learn what's available. You have to communicate. Look at the spread of Arabic in the Middle East for what I feel is a good parallel example: other languages in the region were snuffed or pressured out. Some survived, but many have simply been extinguished, or have been greatly reduced, including Indo-European ones. It's not necessarily the easiest for a Copt to learn Coptic nowadays, and Greek has essentially been expunged from the Near East. Getting back to Indo-European examples, it's also possible for people in power to enforce language changes without large-scale migration. It's looking like Celtic made it to Britain through a sort of elite dominance model, as whichever non-Celtic IE subfamily was spoken there was displaced through a small & steady trickle of migration (or something like that; my memory on the specifics is foggy). I don't believe there was much migration from Italy itself to deposit the ancestral forms of Spanish, Portuguese or Romanian in those places; the Spanish & Portuguese Empires were also able to spread and enforce their languages through political power. Of course, many Latin Americans have Iberian admixture, but most communities which are essentially purely Amerindian also speak Spanish or Portuguese. Sardinians, with almost no WSH admixture, speak a conservative Romance language, and have spoken it as direct fallout from the Roman political system. French and English are spoken in Africa as a result of governmental power. So, when you take the fact that political power and dominance certainly _can_ work to establish & entrench some languages to the detriment of others, then couple that with the fact that IE languages are associated with the spread of blood & certain lineages, I think it's obvious why IE languages have not gone extinct. In a line: no-one can learn the language the Neolithic Britons were speaking, for example, because the Beaker Folk expunged it.
For what it's worth, I also think that as the IE migrations were under way, with regional dialects probably still largely mutually intelligible, the use of IE would have been further reinforced as a trade language (it's my understanding that during the Bronze Age, many Corded Ware & Bell Beaker societies would still have been speaking mutually-intelligible dialects, or have formed dialect continuums) between communities; politically dominated by IEs, perhaps, but also perhaps with knowledge of the old Farmer languages still kicking around. IE as a sort of _lingua franca_ .
Also: not all Indo-European languages did survive very well: some are barely attested at all, and in some places with what appears to have been an IE political or religious elite, said elite were unable to dislodge the speech of the common people. The examples that come to mind are the Mitanni in the Levant, the Kassites in Mesopotamia, the spread of Hinduism to Indonesia, or the spread of Buddhism across East Asia.
The elite imposing a language or language norm is called a superstratum effect; the peasants bringing elements from their own resident language into the general language is called a substratum effect. One may think here of loan translation and transposition of idiomatic or syntactic constructs. (E.g. if you idiomatically say "here" to express the affirmative, then do the same in the conquerer's tongue even though it handles the affirmative quite differently.)
Romance languages are interesting because we first get Latin with a Celtic substratum, and that hybrid then gets modified often by a germanic or sometimes slavic superstratum.
This isn't what we see, there's no evidence of any replacement, just admixture. The idea of an Indo-European elite ruling over non-IE speakers has been rejected by modern scholars due to a total lack of evidence.
With the first vowel in *ph2tḗr, it's actually not necessary to invoke the laryngeals here
Prior to the vindication of the laryngeal theory with the decipherment of Hittite, this word was reconstructed as *pətḗr with a Schwa Indogermanicum (or Schwa Primum). This was held to be a sixth vowel (versus the 3 phonemic vowels required by alaryngealism - e, a, & o, together with the 2 high vowels corresponding to syllabic glides - i & u) that producedi in Indo-Iranian; was lost in Balto-Slavic; had irregular reflexes as any of e, a, or o in Greek; and gave a in all other branches
This explains the forms here just fine (albeit with the discomfort around the irregular outcome in Greek, which could likely be hand-waved as due to dialect mixing, something we know can produce similar irregular correspondences, cf the Beijing & Northeastern Mandarin reflexes of the Middle Chinese entering tone after voiceless onsets)
In hindsight of course, now that we know that the laryngeal hypothesis is correct, we recognise that the Schwa Indogermanicum is in fact the three syllabic laryngeals, which do in fact have regular outcomes in Greek, one per laryngeal (the famous triple reflex), but this is not actually necessary to explain the data here, and is not the sort of problem the laryngeal hypothesis was developed to explain which was instead due to strange behaviours in the ablaut system
Most roots exhibit Ø, e, o, & ē grades, but some roots exhibit ə, e, o, ē grades; ə, a, o, ā grades; ə, o, o, ō grades; ə, ē, ō, ē grades; ə, ā, ō, ā grades; or ə ō, ō, ō grades. The former also seemed to only appear in roots with no onset consonant and the latter in roots with no coda consonant. Additionally, there did not appear to be any roots lacking an onset or coda consonant that had the usual ablaut grades. All these problems were resolved by the laryngeals, which explain the unusual ablaut grades (due to vowel colouring), and the distribution of the unusual ablaut patterns (due to the phonotactic requirement that each root have an onset and coda, and the restrictions on the location of the laryngeal within a root)
In fact, something that often goes unsaid in the literature, is that laryngeal colouring occurs in all branches of PIE, including Anatolian! That means that we ought to assume it was present in PIE before the departure of Anatolian, even if it was likely still an active allophonic process that was only later phonologised by the loss and/or merger of laryngeals
I have seen PIE reconstructions with i, a, and u.
@@ferretyluv *i & *u are universally reconstructed. They don't participate in ablaut though, are almost always just syllabic allophones of the glides *y & *w, and also don't seem to have occurred as long vowels (at least prior to the loss of laryngeals), so have a different status from the primary vowels *e & *o
*a is trickier. There are a very small number of lexical items (notably *atta cited in the video) that do seem to have an *a without an *h2. Most of these are likely loanwords or nursery words, both categories that might not be expected to fully adhere to normal PIE phonology (e.g. by using a conditioned allophone as if it was an independent phoneme). Once we remove the *a produced by laryngeal colouring, the few remaining *a do not participate in ablaut and probably only occurred short. Together with their infrequency, they clearly had a much lesser status than the primary ablauting vowels *e & *o, or even the high vowels *i & *u
*a was likely a marginal phoneme
It's also possible you're looking at old material from before the laryngeal hypothesis was fully accepted. If this is the case then *a will appear frequently, and participate in ablaut but, for the reasons outlined in my original comment, laryngeals are a better explanation
is there a theory that laryngeals only actually existed BEFORE the departure of the Anatolian branch?
this would probably result in the same (or at least similar) outcomes in all branches where these sounds originally stood. one could perhaps see the schwa occurring where h2 stood by itself, and *a where there was a *eh2 sequence.
or alternatively, is there at least a counterargument to this you could think of?
@@votislav laryngeals (and not just the syllabic forms) must have still existed at least until Proto-Indo-Iranian & Proto-Balto-Slavic. In the latter they play an important role in the development of mobile accent paradigms from the PIE accent and ablaut paradigm. In Indo-Iranian they are the usual explanation for certain instances of two adjacent vowels not coalescing as would normally be expected in Old Avestan and Rigvedic Sanskrit. It's unclear if there was still a glottal stop between them at this stage, or if it was simple hiatus, but if it had been lost its loss was still recent enough that speakers were aware of where it used to be (compare the way speakers of non-rhotic dialects of English are still aware of which vowels were once followed by an r)
In all those cases, the (consonantal) laryngeals seem to have merged into a single phoneme by this stage (usually marked *ˀ in Proto-Balto-Slavic and *H in Proto-Indo-Iranian)
Only taking these retentions as given, we could have post-Anatolian PIE retaining a single laryngeal (but would need three schwas, and three copies of each syllabic resonant to explain the Greek triple reflex)
There are also some theories that some laryngeals may have survived into the attested non-Anatolian languages. The most common suggestion is an *h4 that is a-colouring like *h2, but lost in Anatolian and retained as h in Albanian. Cowgill also suggests (with good reason in my opinion) that *h3w (and possibly also *h2w, which has less support) > *kw in Germanic. There are suggestions of sporadic retention of initial *h2 in Western Iranian as h (these h's are otherwise variously described as "prothetic")
Obviously if we take any of these as valid we need to accept some laryngeals remaining distinct in PIE after the departure of Anatolian
There is another potential class of direct reflexes, but in principle this change could have been complete by the time Anatolian broke off (and later undone or remodelled by analogy), but are better explained by laryngeals being retained until after the modern branches became separate imo
This class is the Greek k-perfect & k-aorist and k-extended roots more generally. Willi provides a convincing argument that this developed through a similar process of geminate avoidance seen in *t-t clusters (which were broken up by inserting an *s), where a *H-H cluster (here *H is taken as referring to any laryngeal, and not necessarily the unified laryngeal of PII) was broken up by inserting a *k. These clusters occur in certain forms of the middle aorist and the perfect, and were then generalised to the entire aorist or perfect stem of laryngeal-final roots lacking a derivational suffix. In some branches like Italic, this analogy seems to have affected the entire root, hence faciō < *dʰeh1-, note that the passive of this verb is unrelated and comes from fīō < *bʰuH-, and so all forms of the *dʰeh1- root in this verb show k-extension
@@tristanholderness4223 thanks for the amazing response. does that mean they were only retained in anatolian and the satem branches? so perhaps the centum languages all came from a dialect of PIE with no laryngeals?
also, as for the english speakers remembering where an r originally stood - if only they did...
Thank You for this song! It is great!
Perfectly timed, because I've been wondering how to answer people's skepticism
If I have one criticism it's that, in the later parts on "father", you didn't address the possibility that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek could share a common ancestor that extruded a p in the very beginning of the word. (Also that fortition is more common at the beginning of the word.)
what are your thoughts on attempts to perform internal reconstruction within PIE?
I liked that you had to apply a language law the Jacob Grimm's name
You're the best!
Welsh and Breton are also a very interesting example. Welsh was brought to Brittany during the 5th-7th century and evolved into Breton over the centuries to become a complete different language.
Is it that different? My dad told me that a Breton onion-seller came to his house in the 30s and his father (native Welsh speaker) was able to converse with the Breton speaker.
@@kesgreen4639 Really, that's fascinating... I suppose the two languages must have maintained a certain level of intelligibility throughout the centuries. I don't speak any of these languages but it would be interesting to have the opinion of someone who is versed in any of these languages.
@@kesgreen4639there was a documentary (The Story of English, episode 1) in the 80s that said exactly the same.
not true Breton and Cymraeg are mutually intelligible though they may have developed some differnces with recently created words for technological items . But for basic chat we understand each other
@@lesfreresdelaquote1176 As a speaker of Irish, I can tell you that it is a popular and very common myth among Celtic language speakers to claim they understand each others' languages. Beware of any of these claims. That's not to say they are always untrue, but just a warning to be skeptical.
About the lost consonants and how that might sound preposterous to some ... consider German and English, and some of the consonants that were dropped consistently over in English. I'm thinking in particular of the nasalized "n" in words like "goose" or "soft" or "tooth". Oh wait, there's no nasalized "n" in any of them? Well that's the point, it dropped out. You can still see it in the German cognates though, like "Gans" and "sanft" and "Zahn", so it must have been there in an ancestor language. So my point is, we have a pretty clear record of certain consonants being dropped consistently; all that's required for these missing PIE consonants is that they dropped out far earlier in the game than the nasalized "n".
Side note, that nasalized "n" is real easy to lose. I know of someone who was speaking with tech support and the person on the other end said "N as in Nazi". Except more than likely, they said "N as in Nancy", but that second "n" was so nasalized that it eroded completely away.
Thank you very much for your elaboration. I was hoping to get information about how the pattern you showed for "pater" could be seen in other words too. And if this can be proven as a regular system to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European.
I was just wondering about that paper you mentioned near the end, that was published recently and talks about the origin of P.I.E.
Could you (or anyone else, if possible) point me towards this paper? I'd like to read it!
Great video in any regard, very much enjoyed it
23:45 slight correction that's a retroflex nasal in his name not a palatal one, though they really are way too similar in the IPA.
Wait are u on r/linguisticshumor
@@MottsusSapiensEst uh yeah I am, and r/Linguistics. This is what I get for having the same profile pic everywhere. I get recognized from discord too.
re: th-fronting - maybe this isn't how it works for everyone, but I (25 yo Londoner) have f for θ always, but ð is v *except* word-initially, where it is d. ven for then sounds very unusual to me.
I'm thr same from Staffordshire, although, /ð/ remains /ð/ word-initially. However, it does assimilate to thr previous consonant in some cases such as: _in there_ /ɨn nɛː/.
Somewhere, someone is discoreving the wonderfool world of the PIE theory because of your great work : ME OFC ! TY AND CONGRATS !
this video was so engaging that I checked to see how much was left, thinking I was about 10 minutes in, and I’m at 41 minutes lol
The Irish "athair" did used to be pronounced as something like [ˈaθɨrʲ] in Old Irish, but the "th" underwent further lenition to become what would describe as an English "h" sound. Similar happened to "dh" and I think "bh" as well.
'dh' and 'bh' didn't even exist in Old Irish, there was only 'b' and 'd'! That's how much lenition has occurred in Irish over the past 1000 years.
@@therat1117 Old Irish spelt them b & d, but it's usually thought that lenition had already taken place in Old Irish with those phonemes as ð & v. To lack those you need to go back to Primitive Irish
@@tristanholderness4223 It's usually thought based on a 100 year old grammar whose evidence for this occurring amounts to 'Old Irish is wack, dog'.
@@therat1117 that's an exaggeration. Whilst Thurneyson's grammar (which is the de facto standard description) is about that old, it's not gone unscrutinised since, and the English translation from 1947 in particular is pretty critical of places where his argumentation is poor and still agrees with that phonology
@@tristanholderness4223 I have a copy of the grammar. The evidence given for the occurrence of this phenomenon is, that there is no evidence given. It is just asserted. The real kicker is the line 'In doubtful cases their precise value may be ascertained from the modern pronunciation', which basically cops to the fact that the phonology of Old Irish was 'adjusted' to be more like Modern Irish, by literally copying it. This gives the impression that the grammarians couldn't work out things like 'Why is becc in MI beag, but macc is MI mac?' and came to the conclusion 'Old Irish monks must not know how to spell!'. It's nothing but an uncritical citation loop of a single grammar, which is wrong.
Now this is not something that I believe, but just posing a question here about the ‘father’ word examples that you have here: could it possible that pie had no p and t in its word for ‘father’ initially, and was just ‘aher’ or something like that in its proto form, and irish ended up splitting off first from pie, still preserving the original word. But then in this new proto language, this “aher” word develops into “pheter”or something along those lines adding on the ‘p’ and ‘t’ sounds, which eventually branch out into the other indo european languages counting the p/f and t sounds not found in irish?
Generally speaking unlikely. Crosslinguistically it's more common to lenite sounds than it is to add them spontaneously for no reason. We look out across multiple languages and see that sounds often weaken and drop off, but not nearly so much get readded, at least not out of the blue. There's usually a source for the consonant, like Icelandic prestopping LL into a TL sound, that T came from the L. No source means there's unlikely to be a readded consonant in other branches and more likely to be a sound that was simply lost or changed.
Thus when we see that initial P's often get dropped out word initially in Irish, it makes more sense logically to presume that the sound P is original and that Irish is dropping it, rather than all other Indo-European languages gaining a sound.
Similarly with T, though there you also have to note older forms of the Irish language. There's a reason Irish spells this word 'athair,' that TH wasn't always an /h/ sound and in Old Irish we know it was pronounced as a dental fricative /θ/, this is an etymological spelling.
that wouldn't match the evidence very well; for one thing, the Irish word is athair, which word was pronounced more like it is spelled at one point, so already within Irish itself we have a t-related sound disappearing into h, so as you go back in time, the Irish word starts to look /more/ like pater, and not less. it would also be very unlikely for a 'p' sound to just appear from from what had been just an 'a' sound, you generally need some kind of phonological influence that makes a sound change likely. we also know from the rest of the reconstructions and from archeological evidence that Celtic was not the first group of dialects to split from the core PIE group.
Ask yourself whether it's more likely for future English people to speak of "onjiz" for oranges, or more likely for them to say "borinjiz". Sounds are more easily lost than gained.
Based on one word that is possible, but then the other languages would have to show common changes that Irish does not share. We do not see that.
Actually, Simon considers this possibility in the video, and goes on explaining why this is very unlikely (from 27:25)
I haven't watched the video yet, just thought I would write my thoughts (as someone with absolutely zero expertise) on proto- languages before I see the argument to compare.
I can see how you can track back changes by comparing a great number of languages both today and historical texts to reconstruct some shared ancestor. I can see that that shared ancestor is likely to be quite accurate... but what I can't see is how it can be one language, rather than an average of a (potentially small) language group over a (potentially shortish) period of time. I can't imagine how it could be any closer than the differences between Frisian and Dutch, for example.
Thank you for the excellent video. Thinking of what we could call the "weak" form of the PIE hypothesis, that it is a tool useful in discussing Indo-European languages and not an actual spoken, prehistoric language (by some unspecified alternative mechanism) is anything actually lost in terms of the use of PIE in academia? If we were to think of PIE as a "convenient extrapolation" would this have a significant impact in some way I can't think of (eg archaeologically) in ways I can't quite imagine?
I'm not advocating this, it seems much more likely by Occam's razor, and a lack of a plausible alternative hypothesis, that it genuinely was a prehistoric language of some place; there's a risk of "god put the fossils in the rock" type arguments here. I'm just wondering if there is some kind of more direct refutation of the "as if a prehistoric language" argument? I can't imagine how such an argument would be constructed, but there are plenty of sounds arguments here which I didn't anticipate, too.
I'm definitely playing devil's advocate on the "as if" hypothesis, so there's no need to put too much effort into the refutation! 😀
Simon, your explanation is sound, logical, robust and easy-to-follow. But somehow it feels like you're trying to teach weather science to a climate change denier. There are PIE deniers on religious grounds (reason won't help there...) and then there are the nitpickers (a hopeless case too). I am very interested in "the general tendencies of language changes" you hinted at. Any recommended reading?
I should be working right now, god damn it!
I do believe the regularity of sound change, but I would appreciate it if you could reccomend or even make a video about the small-scale exceptions to sound changes. I recently did a small project trying my best to apply sequential sound changes similar to your videos going from Proto-Germanic to Modern English, although I did mine from _Proto-Indo-European_ to Modern English, and I focused on the words for the numbers one through ten. In my research I was surprised at how many changes weren't caused by regular sound changes; at least, none that I could find. I could find some possible explanations proposed for some of them, but not all.
For example: the PIE /kw/ --> PreG /p/ in 4, how the long vowel in 10 shortened around the Middle English period, how /fowər/ changed to /four/ and /nijən/ to /ni:n/, the seemingly random distribution of the roots /seks/ and /sweks/ as the word for 6 in the Indo-European branches, and how 9 and 7 changed to be more similar to 10 before the Proto-Germanic period:
/septm/-->/sepmt/ and /newn/-->/newnt/.
I ask because some of these changes really seem to come out of nowhere, and I couldn't imagine them happening in a modern language (especially the last one).
I like your channel, among other reasons, because you take the subject seriously rather than yourself.
How interesting - ata is also an old word for father in Turkish, although in modern Turkish it's mainly used to mean something like forefather (it's also in Ataturk - father of the Turks). I wonder if this is a loan word from Latin or just a coincidence. One must check this when one can be arsed.
Nope, ata is proto-Turkic. It's very common for the words for parents to share certain sounds between language families, so it's not a coincidence per se.
@@PlatinumAltaria makes sense!
@@ba8898the reason behind it is pretty funny in my opinion too, parents hear their babies making nonsense sounds and assume they're calling for them. So these kinds of parent names seem to just be baby talk.
The word for father in Basque is "aita" and it's an isolate language.
I think "ata" and "aita" are babble words, like "mama", "ama", etc. I think they are called "Lallwörter" too. Not very relevant for language history.
You are, you lot are ...
Y'all really made a mistake when *thou* was dropped. Losing the singular-plural distinction is confusing.
he/she/it/they -> they! 🙃
As an English teacher in my spare time, having “thou” would make my life so much easier in certain explanations. 😂😂
Interestingly, “thou” as far as I understand originally would have been a polite way of referring to a single person. Which may sound odd in the context of Modern English, but languages like Ukrainian still do this! Like they use the second person plural (vy) when speaking to someone they don’t know very well. Using (ty) is generally considered rude and people will think you’re being overly familiar with them if you use it too casually. A friend said it’s a bit like saying, “Hey, you!” to a stranger in English, you’d come across as a bit rude. Or maybe using, “mate” in any other English speaking country besides England.
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos In other languages like in German and Slavic languages it is the opposite. Thou is used to indicate closeness, higher position, or to denigrate. However in poetical and ritualistic speech "thou" indeed may mean highest respect. There exist complex rituals governing the choice and perpetual inconvenience especially when people differ in rank or age. E.g. for the same person you may use ты/du in private communications, but have to switch to вы/Sie in public. A teacher uses ты to the pupils, but they must answer with вы. It is no fun at all. No wonder that in modern colloquial German people tend to drop Sie in favor of du.
@@dmitrykazakov2829 I suppose in my Ukrainian example, I’m mostly referring to situations whereby people have the same standing. Whereas yes, children for example have to use the plural and an adult is free to use the singular because they are senior to the child. In Polish, there is a slightly different system of formal speech where one should use „Pan” and „Pani” (declined accordingly) and be using the third person version of the verb.
Being a foreigner means I get a lot of forgiveness from people for mixing up these forms or not finding it a natural thing to do. But tbf, in my native English, I grew up being extremely used to using “Sir” and “M’am” when speaking to adults I didn’t know. Thus, when I went to school in the UK for the first time, I was quite shocked that I could call my professors by their first names. 😮
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos First names, yes, this is another sore point. In Russian and Ukrainian you must use the first name followed by the patronymic name when you address formally or to a senior. Which sometimes turns comical when somebody spills the first name and then in horror realizes that he cannot remember the patronymic one. 😂 If you use the last name you must add Sir or Madam just like in Polish. Though it is considered rude if you know the person well. Addressing somebody by the full name: first - patronymic - last is extremely rude. In short it is a complicated mess...
Simon, if possible, may you delve into the laryngeal traces in the Rg Veda? To the best of my understanding, that is the only other attestation of the laryngeals apart from Hittite. Thanks!
Have trouble working out what the quality of bilabial p (i.e. a very front consonant and unvoiced) must be if it is followed by an unvoiced laryngeal (i.e. very back) (or a voiced one for that matter because unvoiced 'paired' with voiced is hard to model). If on top of that you have another stop t after the laryngeal, you effectively have a highly specialized tight grouped almost-one-unit phenomenon a bit like the Czech example you gave. Easier to imagine would be a p which is in fact a voiced bilabial fricative v-type sound articulated almost cotemporally with the laryngeal (voiced probably), the mouth forming a long unobstructed front to back cavity with the syllable closed by the more conventional closure of a dental or alveolar stop t.
23:45 mans was called पाणिनि (Pāṇini, first syllable long, second + third short), he was no Italian bread 😄
Edit: 30:15 the word stem of that word in Sanskrit is actually formed with the vowel ऋ (ṛ / ri [comparable with a strong "US american" r]) at the end, i.e. पितृ (pitṛ / pitri); in "classical" Sanskrit pretty much all stems ending in that sound form their nominative singular in a long ā sound. Maybe an older form would have been pitar ("ar" as a strengthened form of "ṛ") or pitār ("ār" as a further strengthened form of "ar") which later turned into a "simpler" long ā sound?