From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 292
Date: 1999-11-19
----- Original Message -----From: Alexander StolbovSent: Monday, November 15, 1999 9:07 AMSubject: [cybalist] Re: GermanicI'd like to know whether any phonetic or morphological innovations exist which are shared by Germanic+Celtic+Italic contrary to other IE groups. Or maybe Germanic+Celtic+Italic+Tocharian contrary to other?Alexander
Dear Alexander,In Tocharian, there were countless innovations specific to that branch; they obscured so much of the original structure of Tocharian that any specific connections linking it to the other branches of IE would be difficult to recover. I do not dare to speculate about its relation to Germanic. If anything can be demonstrated, it is the hardly surprising fact that Tocharian and the other non-Anatolian languages are more closely related to one another than any of them is to Anatolian.As for the putative Germanic+Celtic+Italic community, my scenario makes it a rather transient event. The expansion of the Western IEs all over northern and central Europe proceeded so fast that any unifying tendencies would soon be cancelled by centrifugal differentiation. Secondary convergence (affecting mainly the vocabulary of the three branches) would become possible at a later date, when the settlement pattern became relatively stable and the expansion had spent its initial impetus.It is easy to identify shared vocabulary items (such as *teuto- 'people, community' and numerous plant and animal names: 'snake', 'willow', 'elm', 'flower', etc.). Specifically Celtic loans in Germanic (such as *ri:ks 'king', *ambakto- 'servant', *isarno- 'iron') date back to quite recent times -- we can associate them with the Iron Age expansion of the Celts in Central Europe. However, there are ancient lexical connections shared by Italic and Germanic to the exclusion of Celtic (which seems to have innovated on its own): *pisk- 'fish', *atno- 'year', *ka(u)put- 'head', etc. Of course some Italic words are shared exclusively with Celtic (and there is a similar relationship between Germanic and Baltic). It seems as if Proto-Italic had once been spoken well to the north of the Alps, separating Proto-Celtic from Proto-Germanic.In the domain of morphology, a possible common innovation is the merger of the perfect with the aorist, producing a new preterite tense. Past-tense forms based on the inherited perfect show some characteristic developments, e.g. the replacement of the PIE zero grade in the plural by the lengthened grade.As for phonology, at least one non-trivial change deserves mention. The PIE pronunciation of underlying *t+t sequences (across a morphological boundary) was [ts t]. This pronunciation survived unchanged in Hittite and was in all likelihood continued to be used in Proto-Greek and the Satem group. It eventually underwent change to *st almost everywhere except in Indic, where it yielded *tt. In both cases we deal with a minimal modification of the initial affricate in the cluster -- a process so trivial that we can easily assume its parallel operation in different branches. But in the Western group the cluster changed to *ss -- a rather complex event, whose independent occurrence in three separate branches seems far less likely.One could also mention the tendency -- shared by Celtic, Germanic and Italic to emphasise the contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables by using strong expiratory stress. This was accompanied by the development of a strength distinction in the obstruent system, the tendency to lenite voiced aspirated stops into voiced fricatives, and to aspirate voiceless stops. Admittedly, these changes may be due to the influence of some unknown autochthonous language(s) of the area north of the Alps, but at least they show that the three branches were geographically close to one another early enough to be influenced by the same type of pre-IE substrate spoken in central Europe.Piotr