Odp: PIE Grammar: changes through time.

----- Original Message -----

From: markodegard@...

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Thursday, November 11, 1999 5:18 PM

Subject: [cybalist] PIE Grammar: changes through time.

From what I've read, when compared to the other Indo-European languages, Hittte is a little on the strange side. The IE from which all other IE language groups are descended had three-genders (masc. fem, neut.) and three voices (active middle passive). With Hittite, there are only two cases (animate and inanimate) and two voices (active and mediopassive). There seems to be two schools of thought on this.

The first suggests that Hittite moved away from the main block of IE before the additional voice and gender were developed, which then would make Hittite extremely conservative. The second points to the extraordinary borrowings and losses Hittte underwent before the first written records testify to its form, and thus suggests Hittite actually lost the passive voice and feminine gender.

Loss of the feminine is perhaps explainable in that it seems to have originally developed as an easy way to make new words, perhaps analogous to the way a diminutive- or superlative-ending changes an existing word's semantic properties, and only later took on the characteristics we think of today. Hittite borrowed words from other languages at the wholesale level (rather like English does) and would not have needed an internal system for making new words. English loves the passive voice, and it's hard for me to imagine how any language could exist without it, though it seems the presence of a mediopassive makes up for most of what I would perceive as difficulties.

I don't know what the best scenario would be. Suggesting that Hittite is more conservative in this regard than are its sister languages is attractive in that it lets you imagine an earlier stage of PIE rather different from what it became.  Whatever its beginnings, it would seem that IE became progressively more inflected as time passed.

As I write this, I think the PIE stress-pattern probably applies here. I have to be careful about what I say as I don't know too much, and the reader should note that much of this is idle musing, i.e., I'm thinking out loud. I remember reading someplace that certain noun cases were distinguished principally by where the stress was placed (isn't this a feature of certain modern IE languages?), and of course, Germanic verb ablaut (strong verbs in English, e.g., ring/rang/rung) is said to be an artifact of PIE stress patterns. Grammatical information, then, was encoded by how a word was stressed, which would make PIE analogous in some degree to a tone language.  Every so often, I come across statements about early Classical Greek, and how the stress patterns have to be described as frankly tonal, to the point where I gather there were 'tonemes', where a minimal pair could be distinguished only by the tone (is this right?). The point of this semi-speculative paragraph is that Hittite may have lost the IE stress patterns, and consequently was forced to innovate to make up for lost grammatical information, or perhaps more likely, IE developed its stress patterns after Anatolian had broken away.

As I understand it, the original stress pattern was lost in greater and lesser degrees by all the daughter languages, and it is this very loss of stress that propelled many of the sound changes, which in turn propelled grammatical innovation to make up for ambiguities introduced by the loss of the earlier distinctions.

I think these ramblings are mostly directed to starting a discussion of the grammar of PIE, which explains the title of this post. The model I imagine for PIE ca 2500 BCE (the start of the Corded-Ware horizon) is something not too unlike a smoothed-out hybrid of Latin, Russian, Sanskrit and Lithuanian: a highly intonated (is that the right word?), highly inflected language that needs a very big grammar book to explain (as Russian or Latin do).

Mark Odegard. 
  

One could write hefty volumes on PIE and IE stress, pitch accent and the like (and a few such volumes have been written). I'll try to condense and organise what I know of these things and post it next week. It's a rather difficult subject, especially if you have to translate the professional jargon of linguists into generally comprehensible terms. I'll do my best, but I need some time. There will be something on the Anatolian problem, too.

Piotr