The precursors of Indo-European: The Indo-Hittite and Indo-Uralic hypotheses

32 Pages·2016·0.97 MB·English

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE
SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY, JENA

THE PRECURSORS OF PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN:
THE INDO-HITTITE AND INDO-URALIC HYPOTHESES

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

Leiden University, 9-11 July 2015
This workshop is financially supported by:

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena

Stichting VIET

Research project ‘Splitting the Mother Tongue: The Position of Anatolian in
the Dispersal of the Indo-European Language Family’ (funded by NWO)
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Gilles AUTHIER (Paris)

Reconstructible typological features of Proto-East Caucasian

The forty-or-so East Caucasian languages, distributed across at least eight
different branches, share enough common basic vocabulary, grammatical
morphemes, structural features and irregular morphology to make possible
the reconstruction of many aspects of a proto-language, which was probably
related to Proto-North-West Caucasian. A massive typological drift in the
latter, which has become polysynthetic, head-marking, and morphologically
regular and homogeneous, has obscured its genetic links with East Caucasian
and the probability of their relatedness is based almost only on lexical
evidence.
On the other hand, Proto-East Caucasian and Proto-Indo-European (or Proto-
Indo-Hittite) are clearly not related – their basic vocabulary show almost no
coincidences –, but both proto-languages are believed to have been spoken
directly to the north or south of the Caucasus, at a time in which exchanges,
including across the Caucasus, involving advances in agriculture and
metallurgy, were exploding. It is thus not unlegitimate to investigate the
question of contact and mutual influence.
If only a couple of isolated, non-basic lexical items can be shown to be shared
between both proto-languages, and no structural features at all, they were
probably spoken far apart, and that would be a strong argument to place the
homeland in which Proto-Indo-European developped it characteristic
features farther north, or west, or east. But if some relevant typological
features are in fact shared between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-East
Caucasian (and they have to be typologically rare or ‘recessive’ enough to
preclude mere chance and be counted as evidence of contact) then some sort
of contact zone or linguistic area can be assumed, and it will (then) make
sense to look for additional lexicon possibly shared by both families.
We will show that the most salient features of Proto-East Caucasian (few
vowells, a rich consonant inventory including ejective and labialized stops as
well as a series of « intensives », a full-fledged gender system, ergative case
marking (but no single marker is reconstructible and one of the origins of
ergative case markers may have been in the gender-marking system),
agreement of genitives and adjectives with their head, verbal aspect marked
by root reduplication and introflexion, as well as apophony in nominal
inflexion) are indeed, as a whole, significant enough, in particular because
they do not show up in the Uralic family, and are in fact rare cross-
linguistically, to substantiate a scenario of extended, maybe intensive contact
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between Proto-Indo-European and East Caucasian. The apparent lack of
shared basic vocabulary, explainable by time-depth, identity-preserving
cultural factors like endogamy, will be briefly reassessed.

Stefan BAUHAUS (Berlin)

PIE *-r as a locative case marker

The purpose of this lecture is to reconstruct a PIE morpheme *-r as a locative
case marker. This element is shown to appear in a lot of different kinds of
adverbs throughout the IE languages, most prominently in the interrogative
locative pronoun *kwor “where”, which is reflected in Lat. cūr < quōr , Ved.
kar-hi and ultimately Goth. ƕar and Du. waar. Although already described by
Brugmann, and others, it has so far attracted little attention among IE
scholars.
My attempt is to consider its very origin and position within the realm of IE
particles. Where else does it appear besides locative adverbs? What about its
productivity as a morpheme? I assume a paradigmatic opposition between
locative *-r and directive *-o at an early stage of PIE, the latter being
conserved in Hittite.
Furthermore, with regard to the IU topic of this symposium, its reflexes of an
even older IU morpheme are to be detected. In this I follow Kortlandt (2001),
who himself quotes Greenberg (2000). Kortlandt takes into account an
element *-ru in IU, which in my view is a possible predecessor of PIE -*r and
which according to Greenberg (2000) can be found in other language families
such as Altaic as well.

Greenberg, Joseph H. (2000): Indo-European and its closest relatives: The Eurasiatic
language family. Stanford UP.
Kortlandt, Frederik (2001): “The Indo-Uralic verb”.
http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art203e.pdf

Harald BICHLMEIER (Erlangen)

On the history of the question of the existence of a
Pre-Indo-European subtratum in Germanic

In the course of research on every (Old-)IE language it became clear soon that
besides the larger parts of the lexicon inherited from PIE we also find certain
parts of the lexicon that cannot be explained as inherited. These parts of the
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lexicon are usually to be explained as loans, either from another IE language
or from a Non-IE language.
These ‘foreign’ lexical items usually denote things, situations or institutions
(in the widest sense) for which (at least at the beginning) no words exist in
one’s own language. Usually these words are taken over together with the
things, institutions etc. they denote. Generally it is assumed that on average
some 2% – 4% of a language’s lexicon are of subtratum origin.
In the history of research done on the Germanic languages it was postulated
quite early that in this language group we find a rather big portion of the
lexicon, which is not of IE descent. Into this class mainly belong words
concerning seafaring, fauna and flora, but also from other semantic areas.
These words show up primarily in the North-Sea-Germanic languages, i.e. the
languages of those Germanic peoples who had to do most with the open sea,
seafaring etc. The portion of lexicon of Non-IE descent in (Proto-)Germanic
was from the beginning (around 1900) said to hover at about 30-33%,
although for decades no lists of such words were published that would
contain more than 40, 50 presumed subtratum-words.
As can be shown, the high number of presumed subtratum-words is the
product of a wrong, i.e. methodologically faulty interpretation of some in
themselves correct statistics. The 30% + X then became a common feature in
introductions to and handbooks on the history of the Germanic languages,
which was hardly ever questioned.
Besides this mainly German tradition of research, which actually came to an
end in the 1990ies, when for almost all of those 40-50 presumed subtratum-
words IE etymologies had been proposed, two new lines of research came up,
which will be shortly commented on: One is the Vennemann way of research,
which is based mainly on unproven claims about prehistoric movements of
peoples and thus languages, proposing that Germanic came into being as an
IE supertratum on a Vasconic subtratum that was then influenced by an
Atlantic/Semitidic supertratum.
The other more promising way of research came up mainly among scholars
from Leiden: They are primarily looking into the structure of words (e.g.
synonymous pairs of nasalized vs. not-nasalized roots, where the nasalized
forms show the nasal at the ‘wrong’ place etc.), claiming that nonconformity
with the rules of PIE word- or root-structure points to substratum origin of a
certain form.
The opposite approach can be found in the Althochdeutsches etymologisches
Wörterbuch, where such forms are usually explained by analogic processes
etc.

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Václav BLAŽEK (Brno)

Indo-European dendronyms in perspective of external comparison

Tree-names represent an important source of information to application of
linguistic archaeology. Their etymological analysis in wider perspective of
neighboring dendronymical systems offer extraordinarily valuable results
usable to confirm or exclude the internal influence of substratal languages,
external influence of adstratal languages or the role of hypothetical distantly
related languages, leading to determination of homeland of the given
language entity. The following examples may illustrate various scenarios: A.
Substratum; B. Borrowing: non-IE > IE; C. Borrowing: IE branch > non-IE; D.
Common heritage. Finally, the problematic examples are discussed in the
section E.

A. Substratum
IE forms are derivable with difficulties from the only protoform, which has
been more or less deviant from the standard pattern. There are similar
parallels in neighboring non-IE languages which could be related to the
hypothetical substratum preceding the IE protolanguage or its branch in
some territory.

1. IE *H er- “nut” (Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic; Hittite (GIŠ)harau n.
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“poplar / Populus euphratica” probably stands aside). The forms agree in
the root and semantics, the suffixal extensions are more or less different.
The identified cognates are limited only to Europe. It is tempting to
compare it with the common Basque-North Caucasian designation of “nut”
of various trees:
Proto-Basque *hur̄ “hazelnut” (Bengtson) ||| Proto-North Caucasian
*ʔwǟrƛ̣_V ( ~ -ō-, -Ł-) “nut, walnut” (NCED 229).

B. Borrowing: non-IE > IE
IE forms are derivable with difficulties from the only protoform, which has
been more or less deviant from the standard IE pattern. There are similar
parallels in neighboring non-IE languages which cannot be the substratum
with respect to known historical & geographical facts, but may represent the
donor-languages with regard to their geographical position and cultural role.

2. IE *H eblu- “apple” versus Semitic *ʔabul- or *ʔubal- ‘various kinds of
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fruits and cultural trees or plants’. The semantic difference has analogy
e.g. in Akkadian šerkum “a string of (dried) fruit, normally figs, less often
apples” (Markey 1988, 54).

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3. IE *H u̯r̥b- “willow” versus Semitic *γurab- “willow” (Militarev 1984,
3/2
16: Semitic + Egyptian) || Egyptian (Pyramid Texts) ʕɜb “a kind of a tree”
(Wb. I, 167).

4. IE *H il̄̄̆- “holm-oak, ilex” versus Semitic *ʔaly-(ān-) “oak”; Canaanite >
x
Egyptian (New) in̓ rn “oak” (Wb. I, 98) || Egyptian (Middle Kingdom) iɜ̓ ɜ “a
nut-plant”, (late) iɜ̓ .t id., (Book of Died) iɜ̓ .t “a tree” (Wb. I, 17).

C. Borrowing: IE branch > non-IE
The non-Indo-European dendronyms resemble the tree-names recon-
structible in partial proto-languages of individual IE branches which
themselves are derivable from the IE protolanguage. In this case it is
probable to seek the sources of borrowing just in these partial
protolanguages, naturally with respect to the geographical and historical
circumstances.

5. IE *dóru-/*dreu̯- “wood, tree” > Indo-Iranian *dā̄́ru- id. > East Caucasian
*daro “tree; conifer” (NCED 399).

6. IE *bherH ĝ-/* bhr̥H ĝ- “birch” > Indo-Iranian: Vedic bhūrjá- “birch” |
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Nuristani: Waigali brūǰ id. | Iranian *barz- id. (Khotanese bruṃja-, Ossetic
bærz / bærzæ) > (1) East Caucasian *burVźV “a kind of foliage tree” (NCED
313); (2) Proto-Permic *beriʒ̄́- “linden” (Joki 1973, #20).
On the other hand, Basque *burki “birch” (Löpelmann 1968, 239; Trask
2008, 359), is probably borrowed from an unattested, but possible, Gothic
*burki or *burkja < *bhr̥H ĝiā̯ -, the zero-grade apophonic counterpart to
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Northwest Germanic *berkjō(n)- > Old English birce, Old High German
bircha, birihha (Kroonen 2013, 61).

D. Common heritage
The dendronyms reconstructible for the IE and some non-IE proto-languages
are compatible in both phonetics and semantics and borrowing of one from
another is excluded for geographical reasons. In this case a common,
Nostratic, heritage seems most probable.

7. IE *toko- “willow, branch”, *tokso- “yew, bow” ||| Turkic: Chaghatai taq
“name for a tree which burns for a long time” || Tungusic *taktï- “cedar,
yew” || Middle Korean tàk ‘paper mulberry / Broussonetia papyrifera’ ||
Old Japanese tuki ‘a tree of genus Zelkova’ ||| Kartvelian *ṭq̇e- “forest”.

E. Problematic cases with attempts to find new solutions

8. IE *bheH go- “beech/oak/chestnut/?hornbeam” versus Semitic *bak-ay-
a
“pistachio” || Egyptian bkj “terebinthe; big fruit” || Berber *bak-āH
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“jujubier” || Chadic *bak-aw- “fig-sycamore” ||| Dravidian *pākk-u “areca
nut” or *pakk-ay “Tamarix indica”.

9. Turkic *ab(ï)s(-ak) “aspen” or “poplar” < ?West Iranian.

10. Uralic *ośka “ash-tree” < ?Indo-Iranian.

11. Fenno-Ugric *śala (UEW 458-59; FUV 125) / *śil̮iw (Sammalahti) “elm”
versus IE *selH-/*solH-/*slH̥ - + *-ik- “willow”.

Allan BOMHARD (Charleston)

The Origins of Proto-Indo-European: The Caucasian Substrate
Hypothesis

There have been numerous attempts to find relatives of Proto-Indo-
European, not the least of which is the Indo-Uralic Hypothesis. According to
this hypothesis, Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic are alleged to descend
from a common ancestor. However, attempts to prove this hypothesis have
run into numerous difficulties. One difficulty concerns the inability to
reconstruct the ancestral morphological system in detail, and another
concerns the rather small shared vocabulary. This latter problem is further
complicated by the fact that many scholars think in terms of borrowing
rather than inheritance. Moreover, the lack of agreement in vocabulary
affects the ability to establish viable sound correspondences and rules of
combinability. This paper will attempt to show that these and other
difficulties are caused, at least in large part, by the question of the origins of
the Indo-European parent language. Evidence will be presented to
demonstrate that Proto-Indo-European is the result of the imposition of a
Eurasiatic language — to use Greenberg’s term — on a population speaking
one or more primordial Northwest Caucasian languages.

Gerd CARLING (Lund)

Testing the Indo-Hittite-(Tocharian) hypothesis against various types of
data sets: sound change, basic vocabulary, cultural vocabulary, and
grammatical typology

Since the publication of the paper on computational cladistics by Ringe et al
(2002), there has been a rich literature on the classification of Indo-European
using computational methods. In general, the aims have been either to study
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how computational models relate to traditional models when it comes to sub-
branching of Indo-European (Ringe et al 2002, Grey & Atkinson 2003),
estimations of time-depths (see Chang et al to appear), or even the location of
the Proto-Indo-European homeland (Bouckaert et al 2012). An important
feature of computational studies (Ringe et al 2002, Grey & Atkinson 2003)
has been that most analyses apparently support the Indo-Hittite hypothesis,
with Anatolian first and Tocharian as the second to branch of in the
phylogenetic trees. However, most of these studies (except for Ringe et al
2002) have been based on a specific type of data set: basic vocabulary, more
precisely a Swadesh 100 or 200-list.
In the presentation, we will, using computational models, contrast four
different types of data sets against each other. The purpose is to test the
validity of the Indo-Hittite-(Tocharian) hypothesis. These data sets are:

1. a data set with basic vocabulary (Swadesh 100-lists)
2. a data set with cultural vocabulary, focusing on Indo-European
inherited/reconstructed cultural artifacts with low borrowability
3. a data set of critical innovations in sound change
4. a data set with grammatical typology data.

On these data sets, we will perform multivariate analyses, creating principal
component analysis scatterplots, as well as a hierarchical Bayesian inference
of phylogenetic trees, which uses the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for
estimating the posterior distribution of model parameters (a very frequent
method used in computational cladistics).
Preliminary results indicate that the data sets behave differently, not so much
when it comes to subgrouping, as to the specific position of Anatolian and
Tocharian.
The usage of various computational methods and models, as well as the
important issue of how various data types and various coding practices might
change the outcome of analyses, will be in focus in the presentation.

Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill , Alexander V.
Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond , Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard, Quentin D.
Atkinson 2012. Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language
Family. Science 337, 957-960.
Gerd Carling, Sandra Cronhamn, Niklas Johansson, Joost van de Weijer submitted.
Quantifying sound change for language classification: a case study on the Indo-
European and Tupí language families. Submitted to Laboratory Phonology.
Chang, Will, Hall, David, Cathcart, Chundra & Garrett, Andrew to appear. Ancestry-
constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. To
appear in Language.
Gray, R. D. & Atkinson, Q. D. 2003. Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian
theory of Indo-European origin. Nature, 426, 435-439.
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Ringe, D., Warnow, T. & Taylor, A. 2002. Indo-European and computational
cladistics. Transactions of the Philological Society 100, 59−129.

Dag HAUG (Oslo) & Andrej SIDELTSEV (Moscow)

Indo-Hittite Syntax?

A well-known feature of Hittite is the use of relative/interrogative pronouns
en lieu of indefinite pronouns in conditional clauses and, more seldom, after
negation marker:

MH/MS KUB 14.1+ rev. 45
nu=wa=mu mān idālu-n memia-n kui-š [mema-i]
“If anybody tells me a bad word”.

The use looks identical to that of other Indo-European languages:

Greek ἐάν τις περιπατῇ ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ “If anyone walks in the daytime,…”
(John 11.9).
Avestan kat ̰ mōi uruuā isē cahiiā auuaŋhō (Yasna 50.1) “Does my soul
command any help?”
Latin si quis “if anyone”
Gothic ni manna in analaugnein ƕa taujit (John 7.4).

It is attested in all the ancient languages of all the branches1 and is
reconstructed for narrow PIE as the use of relative/interrogative pronouns as
indefinite pronouns under specific licensing conditions.
However, Hittite attests this usage in post-OH period2. The oldest attested
Hittite texts3 have only indefinite pronouns in conditional clauses and after
negation markers.4 All the rest of Anatolian languages with relevant data
(Luwian, Lycian) pattern with OH/OS usage.5

1 Save Armenian and Tocharian.
2 (CHD L-N: 160).
3 OH/OS originals.
4 My count of OH/OS corpus revealed 62x mān kuiški/kuitki vs 0x *mān kuiš/kuit. The latter only
occurs in MS and NS texts and are likely to reflect MH/NH usage. As for negative pronouns, natta/UL
kuiš appears only once in the NH copy of the edict of Telipinu versus OH/OS natta/UL kuiški. The
statistics is impressive enough to be just a matter of coincidence.
5 I.e. they attest indefinite pronouns and not relative/interrogative ones in conditional clauses and
after negation markers (Melchert 1993; Melchert 2003; Melchert 2004). The only potentially
deviating case is Lycian tihe, formally genitive of the relative ti- (Melchert 2004: 66). In some contexts
it is employed with indefinite tike and thus is interpreted as relative/interrogative functioning as
indefinite (ibid).
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