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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 82.139.82.82 (talk) at 16:29, 23 February 2016 (→‎There is no criticism section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Pretty hard to understand

It's a pity that this article with its rather fascinating (for language freaks) content should be so hard to understand in parts, especially starting from "Whatever caused a short vowel to disappear". This may be because it's late in the evening and I'm too tired for reading that kind of stuff, but still, I feel this is too hard to understand even for someone who, having an M.A. in (English and French) language and literature, has done some linguistics before. I would be very grateful if you could rephrase / explicate your ideas to make them more easily understandable. Robin.r (talk) 22:06, 3 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

you are right, the article contains much valid material, but it needs to be edited for clarity and structure. --dab (𒁳) 07:04, 9 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

if this is a start class them i am in deep trouble. it's another article that requires that you fully understand the subject in order to read and understand the subject, usually writtn by bright minds that can no longer relate at any level other than his/hers, or an academic who is trying to impress other academics. i only hope the author does not write textbooks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lndench (talkcontribs) 04:22, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion of reflexes

I would appreciate it if there were a more detailed discussion of specific reflexes. How does and Indo-Europeanist know when to reconstruct a laryngeal. Tibetologist (talk)

There are a number of reasons for inferring a laryngeal: Roots are believed to contain one ablauted vowel preceded and followed by at least one consonant. So a laryngeal is reconstructed for a root that begins with a vowel like *es- (<*h1es- 'be'), *ag- (<*h2eg- 'lead'), *orn- (<*h3ern- 'eagle'); or ends with a vowel like *dʰē- (<*dʰeh1- put), *stā- (<*steh2- stand), *- (<*deh3- give); or for roots with a prosthetic vowel in Greek like *(e)rewdʰ- (<*h1reudʰ- 'red'), *(a)ster- (<*h2ster- 'star') or for a disyllabic root like *ḱera- (<*ḱerh2- 'mix').
A laryngeal is also reconstructed for a long vowel where lengthened-grade is not expected like *bʰū- (*bʰuh2- 'become'); or for an *a or an *o where o-grade is not expected (examples above)
I have heard that laryngeals can also be inferred from metric anomalies in Vedic text. —teb728 t c 23:33, 10 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
That's true. There are places in the Rig Veda where ā seems to want to be two syllables; in these places, people infer that that it was earlier *aHa < *eH{e/o} or *āHa < *oH{e/o}. Another place you can infer a laryngeal is where Sanskrit has i corresponding to Greek e, a, or o, such as pitā(r) "father" = Greek patēr < *ph2tēr. But I suspect Tibetologist meant we should add this discussion (with sources) to the text, rather than inform him here on the talk page. +Angr 05:11, 11 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Another type of evidence from Vedic are compounds with an unexpected long vowel preceding an element starting in a consonant, which suggests that the element originally started with a laryngeal before the initial consonant that is directly attested (schematically: -Vː+C- < -V+HC-), but perhaps that's a bit too advanced for an introduction to the subject. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:44, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Neuter plural

In the article, it says "the nom.sg. is probably in origin a neuter plural." Isn't this backwards, esp. as in Greek (and some other languages?), the neuter plural takes a singular verb (as the article states)? It would seem to be more correct to say "these neuter plurals were probably originally (abstract) singulars". Comments? Jpaulm (talk) 15:23, 1 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think what it is talking about there is that the feminine singular is derived from the neuter plural. There is another theory (not really expressed in the article) that both were at origin collectives, and that collectives were extended to feminines because female animals were kept for breeding and/or milk while the males were slaughtered for meat. —teb728 t c 21:24, 1 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree that is what it is saying - I just think the derivation went the other way: that the neuter plural is derived from a feminine singular. However, I have always thought this was because feminine singulars were used for collectives, and the neuter plural could be thought of as collective, e.g. particles of neuter sand becoming the collective 'sand'... I hadn't heard about the breeding/milk theory, though. Do you have a reference? Jpaulm (talk) 01:13, 2 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have a reference for your feminine-first theory? I don’t need a reference because I don’t want to change the article: I was just explaining to you. (If you go on a farm today, you see many hens but few roosters and many cows but few if any bulls.) —teb728 t c 08:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Well, no! It just seems to make more sense, also given that in Greek neuter plurals take a singular verb, which I take to be a holdover from an earlier usage. If it had gone the other way, I would expect to see feminine singular nouns take a plural verb! Jpaulm (talk) 14:17, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that only points to the fact that in PIE neuter plurals were collective nouns (i.e. grammatically singulars - inflected as singulars, but semantically plurals) which agreed with the verb in singular (and which has been preserved in Ancient Greek, Avestan and Hittite, e.g. in the famous dictum of Heraclitus πάντα ῥεῖ, where you see nom. pl. binding 3PS). However, Hittite neuter nominoaccusative plural ending -a is also regularly derivable from PIE *-(e)h₂, and Hittite didn't have the feminine gender at all, so the derivation (if there is a derivation of the post-Anatolian feminine-gender marker from the neuter nominative plural marker at all? It's more like reinterpretation of the old collectives as feminines once the feminine gender became morphologized..) must be in the way the article currently states..
My favorite theory on the origin of feminine gender is that arose "by accident", because the PIE noun for woman *gʷen(e)h₂-" ended in *-h₂, which caused old collectives in *-eh₂ and old nominalized adjectives in *-ih₂ to become reinterpreted as "feminine" singulars by agreeing with their ending, e.g. *so wesus gʷenh₂ > *seh₂ weswih₂ gʷenh₂. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:37, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
That makes a lot of sense! Maybe someone could clarify that item in the article... Jpaulm (talk) 14:19, 5 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Encyclopedic style?

Given the subject, the fact that this article is "written like an essay" with "no sufficient inline citations" is perhaps more a quality that a defect.

The article is fine the way it is, I thoroughly enjoyed the detail! William Vroman 04:23, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

The article would probably be extremely difficult to read (and to write!) if each individual point would have to be argued pro and contra.

More in-depth discussion can be found in the works quoted in the bibliography, where most of the important works are referred to. One may wish to add Mayrhofer's 1986 Lauthlehre and Meier-Brügger's Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft, and a couple of other important books or papers on the reflexes in daughter languages, but right now I am in a hurry.

On the other hand, the part "Evidence in Uralic" should more appropriately be titled "Possible reflexes in Uralic loans" and be kept shorter here (it could be devoted a separate article), since these Uralic words do not contribute to proving the existence of PIE laryngeals (as the word "evidence" would suggest); rather, the laryngeal theory offers a possibly of explaining these Uralic words as IE loans (IMHO this is often more a mere possibility; this may be a personal opinion, but after all the whole section on Uralic reflects Koivulehto's individual work more than a general consensus). The question is certainly interesting, but the answers are not ascertained enough to make up about 15 % of an introductory exposition of the laryngeal theory, that's why I've suggested a separate article. --Zxly (talk) 17:05, 2 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think I wrote most of this article several years ago, and it hasn't been trashed too badly in the meantime. The second paragraph, though, is an incoherent mess, and I will try to rewrite it to make sense.Alsihler (talk) 18:16, 10 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Too much info on ablaut

The section "Explanation of Ablaut ..." includes a lot of text simply describing the normal ablaut phenomenon in PIE. I'm aware that Saussure's discovery was crucially based on examining ablaut patterns and figuring out how to fit the non-standard patterns into the standard pattern, but still, there is way too much text here. It would be better to move some of the text here to Indo-European ablaut and link to that article, rather than describing ablaut in detail. In other words, just mention the fact that ablaut is usually of the e/o/nothing variety, with a link to the appropriate article, and then discuss how to fit the exceptional patterns into this variety. Benwing (talk) 01:46, 31 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There is no criticism section

--77.37.199.19 (talk) 17:08, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If you have any reliable sources that criticise the laryngeal theory you're free to add them. I'm sorry I don't though. CodeCat (talk) 17:12, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
German-speaking scholars have tended to resist the laryngeal theory for a long time, but nowadays (also thanks to the appearance of Evidence for Laryngeals in 1965) it's the consensus and all the younger scholars work with it as a matter of course. The current handbooks (i. e., those which are younger than Szemerényi's introduction, whose first edition was in 1970) present the laryngeal theory as established lore. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:13, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note that the two sceptical scholars named in the article belong to the older generation, too. Bonfante was born in 1904 – and is no longer with us, as he died in 2005 (sic!) – and Mańczak was born in 1924. Which makes me wonder if we should only name living sceptics, and note year of birth. Seriously, I can't think of any Indo-Europeanist born after (say) WWII who doesn't work with laryngeals. It's the classic case of a theory gaining acceptance because its critics are either converted or disappear. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:33, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I just went ahead and rid the article of Bonfante. The Moscow School does seem to treat laryngeals as an afterthought, but I don't know if any of its members has ever explicitly argued against the idea – Illich-Svitych accepted them and proposed they were [xʲ x xʷ], possibly for the first time. David Marjanović (talk) 14:35, 7 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
If you're interested in fresher criticism, we have in Helsinki one J. Pyysalo who in his PhD thesis argues for only a single laryngeal /h ~ ɦ/, as well as all sorts of other wacky reinterpretations (there was no laryngeal lengthening, voiced aspirates come from voiced stop + /ɦ/, there was only one series of velars, etc.) I'd wait though until he manages to distill his criticism into a couple of peer-reviewed articles… condensing 500 pages into a couple paragraphs of coherent key points of criticism sounds difficult. --Trɔpʏliʊmblah 17:05, 7 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'll outline you some most critical failures of the theory (for the rest, consult https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/41760) and begin to write the criticism when with little extra time for that: 1. De Saussure's compensatory lengthening rule is overstated. When postulating this rule Saussure compared the traditional ablaut schemata *eA : A to that of sonorants (e.g. *ei : i, en : n, etc.), but this scenario is erroneous: The PIE ablaut of the latter has three quantities *ēi : ei : i, and so has the correct schemata for A viz. *ēA : *eA : *A the correct equivalent of Neogrammarian *ā : *a : ǝ. 2. The laryngeals (h1 h3) are not postulated on the basis of the data, but by an auxiliary hypothesis of Möller, a Semitic linguistist, who believed that the Indo-European and Semitic languages were genetically related. Due to this the languages had to had a common root structure of 2-3 consonants C1C2·(C3) on the basis of which "laryngeals" are added to the roots displaying only a single consonant to make the roots 3. The usual number of laryngeals is three (3), but in Anatolian (the oldest of languages) there is only one, which can always be identified with h2. This is the reason why the main article does not contain any examples of h1 and h3 with Anatolian data.Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 11:39, 16 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen a lot of criticism sections on Wikipedia and they mostly turn out to be cesspits. I think it's better to weigh the pros and contras in the main text as you encounter them.

H4

The article as it currently stands states that "h4 differs from *h2 only in not being reflected as Anatolian ḫ. Accordingly, except when discussing Hittite evidence, the theoretical existence of an *h4 contributes little." This is untrue. h2 and h4 develop differently in other stocks. H4, but not H2, appears as /h/ in Albanian when word-initial before an originally accented vowel. (E.g. PIE *h4órǵʰii̯eh2 —"testicle" and Alb. herdhe "testicle" but PIE *h₂ŕ̥tkos "bear -> Alb. ari "bear") In Armenian, h2 sometimes turns up as /h/ (e.g. *h2euh2os "grandfather" -> Arm. haw "grandfather") whereas h4 never does (incidentally *h4órǵʰii̯eh2 "testicle" -> Arm. orjik "scrotum".) Szfski (talk) 17:46, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I have edited the article appropriately. Szfski (talk) 17:46, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The idea that h- in Armenian and Albanian has any kind of etymological significance is not widely believed, at least by experts in Armenian and Albanian historical grammar. Usually, it's simply considered prosthetic, as far as I'm aware. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:09, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Root *ǵen, *ǵon, *ǵṇn-/*ǵṇ̄

Is the form *ǵṇn- correct? If yes, how is it explained? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.57.100.32 (talk) 22:24, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really get that form either, it should be just *ǵn- (with a circle). It seems like it's based on the idea that laryngeals lengthen vowels, but they only lengthen sonorants in some languages so it's not a general PIE thing. CodeCat (talk) 23:18, 9 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Epiglottal consonants

are not an option for at least *h₂ and *h₃: rather than drawing vowels towards [ɑ] as pharyngeals and uvulars do, they draw vowels towards [æ] – which must, incidentally, be where the Akkadian e comes from. Examples with sound: 1, 2

While I am at it, surely it must have occurred to someone that the Anatolian cuneiform usage of signs with , which is mostly [χ] in Semitic languages today, is evidence that the Anatolian reflex of *h₂ and *h₃ was [χ] (and [χː]) as well, which in turn would be evidence that *h₂ and *h₃ were uvular – presumably [χ] and [ʁ], with the voice contrast lost in Anatolian together with the voice contrast between plosives? Cuneiform didn't allow for direct, unambiguous notation of velar or pharyngeal fricatives, but surely the most parsimonious hypothesis is to take literally? I haven't written that into the article because I'm not aware of any references I could cite, but surely I can't be the first one to notice this?

David Marjanović (talk) 14:57, 7 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There's no competing prediction on what we'd expect to see if Anatolian had had [x] instead. Both [x] and [χ] would have been equally likely to have been written as . Similarly: not even Semitologists with a conservative view on PS phonology think that Anatolian š was actually [ʃ] and not [s].
As for laryngeal coloring, it needs to be accounted for that it is an internally reconstructed change. The fact that late PIE has a synchronic phonological alternation //e// + /h₂/ > /ah₂/ does not imply that the original sound change was exactly [e] > [a] / _h₂ — much like e.g. the synchronic Finnish alternation between orpo 'orphan' : orvot 'orphans' does not imply that there ever existed a sound change [p] > [ʋ]. Laryngeal coloring might well have been something like [e] > [æ] or [ə] > [ɜ] or whatever when it first came into being, followed by a degree of later drift in the vowel system. --Trɔpʏliʊmblah 16:48, 7 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Full names at first appearance...

...just as in real life. For instance wouldn't "Müller and Cuny" actually refer to Hermann Müller and Albert Cuny?- These aren't household names like Beethoven Dante and Einstein. -Wetman (talk) 12:28, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Voyles

Joseph B. Voyles seems to have been born in about 1940.