NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/sci/lang/9002

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-27 | 4.4 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Rich Alderson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Tones in PIE?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 26 Jan 93 15:52:15 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>  <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
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Reply-To: [e-mail] (Rich Alderson)
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In article <[e-mail]>, connolly@memstvx1 writes:
>In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Rich Alderson) writes:

>>Maybe the pitch accent both show was a Central innovation, and ought not to
>>be reconstructed for the whole family?
>
>Sounds plausible, and I had considered that the pitch accent may have been
>confined to certain dialect areas; but I don't know how one could prove such a
>thing.

It is probably not susceptible of proof.  I wrote too telegraphically.  My
comment should be expanded to this:  *Even* if we believe that the accent we
reconstruct based on Sanskrit and Greek was a pitch accent, that form of the
accent may well be a Central innovation, with only limited relevance for the
rest of PIE, in so far as it would be necessary to examine the source of such
an innovation.

[discussion of other points deleted]

>I don't know what it is about laryngeals that make so many linguists ner-
>vous; but since the obvious reflexes in the attested dialects are so diverse
>and plainly language-specific, they absolutely *must* have survived through
>Indo-European into the earlier stages of a great many IE dialects.  Naturally,
>this does not mean that the full phonemic inventory of laryngeals survived
>unchanged in all positions everywhere.  Mergers and splits seem likely,
>loss in certain positions, etc. -- the usual sort of things that happen with
>any phoneme.  In Germanic, sequences such as VHj and VHw show varying
>developments, depending on the laryngeal and the Ablaut grade of the vowel.
>PIE oHj (any laryngeal) and /eAj/ [aAj], with a-coloring laryngeal, yield
>Germanic ajj, a process known as "Verschaerfung" ("sharpening") -- but
>eEj (non-coloring laryngeal) yields e:j.  This suggests that E after e
>dropped, causing compensatory lengthening, but not after PIE o (Gmc. a),
>where, since A yields the same reflex, E and A may have merged while
>still laryngeals (or after, for that matter).

What makes them nervous seems to be the treatment of them by Mo/ller and later
Cuny, for premature examination of the connection of PIE and Proto-Semitic (or
Proto-Hamito-Semitic), when the only evidence that had been adduced for them
was Saussure's internal reconstruction of two resonants ("coefficients sonan-
tiques") *A and *O.  After all, it wasn't until 1925 that Kurylowicz put forth
convincing evidence that Hittite h and PIE shwa were connected.

Even that was insufficient for most of his generation, and certainly for the
one before:  Indo-Hittite was a predictable result, along with comments such as
Meillet's in the 8th (1934) edition of his _Introduction_, where he stated that
Hittite had little to offer other than confirmation to the proto-language
reconstructed in the late 19th century.

>Too bad they gave you a hard time about this in grad school.  I had it easier:
>I was in Germanic philology, not Indo-European, and my advisor pretty much
>believed in laryngeals himself.

Oh, he believed in laryngeals, but in the Indo-Hittite time frame.

>>I don't have a firm enough grasp on the current literature on tonogenesis to
>>say for certain but isn't it (at least usually) the case that when a pitch
>>accent arises from a stress accent, this is in company with loss of syllables
>>usw.?  (I mind the Norwegian and Swedish contours, for example.)
>
>I don't know, but you can add the "Rheinische Schaerfung", a tonal distinction
>in North Rhine dialects of German triggered by loss of unstressed syllables,
>to your list.

Thanks for the pointer.
--
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
[e-mail]                              _The Lost Road_