Re: [tied] Doublets in PIE

On Wed, 24 Jan 2001 12:51:29 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>OK, why don't we look under the carpet and examine a few of these "doublets"? Perhaps we could find an explanation for their occurrence in PIE or at least speculate about it. I could imagine a few reasons why such root constellations exist.
>
>First possibility (already discussed ad nauseam): purely accidental homophony or near-homophony. Hardly exciting but common.

Yes.

>Second possibility: onomatopoeia, phonetic iconicity and synaesthesia. It has been argued that some articulatory gesture sequences may symbolise different kinds of movement. If P = labial, T = coronal and K = dorsal, then T-K is often associated with touching or pointing (Latin tango, digitus, French toucher < popular Latin *toccare, Polish tykac', Greek deiknumi, ... -- all historically unrelated but semantically close; cf. even that crazy Proto-World reconstruction *dik- 'finger', supported by lookalikes from many families); T-P has to do with tapping, stamping, etc.; and K-P with restraining or holding something (PIE *gHebH- [Latin "have", English "give"], *kap- [Latin "capture", English "have"], various kup-, kub- etc. roots for 'container'). A warning is in order here. Semantics is an extremely delicate business, and it's easy to get entrapped in circular argumentation. English keep could be used as a strikingly apt example of K-P, but its modern meaning is a recent affair. In
>OE and ME ce:pan/keepen meant more or less 'care, heed, notice'. The Modern English meaning has developed via 'observe, maintain' on the one hand, and 'seize, avail oneself (of sth desired)' on the other -- a wide range of meanings evolving simultaneously. Do we have a right to select only the one that fits our theory and dismiss the rest as "peripheral"?

Although "phonetic iconicity" cannot be discarded altogether, I tend
to be rather sceptical of it. T-K is a rather unmarked sequence of
"archiphonemes", and for any example of it having to do with "tick" or
"touch", one can probably produce another one where it means something
else altogether (Lat. tectus, tacere; Pol. tok; Grk. teko:, Eng. dick,
dog). Hard to distinguish rationally from possibility #1, mere
coincidence.

>Third possibility: borrowing into PIE from related but different non-IE sources at an early date. An attractive solution at times, but always hard to justify unless the source(s) can be identified with some confidence.

Indeed.

>Fourth possibility: "real" PIE was no doubt an ordinary messy language with a lot of dialectal variation and interdialectal diffusion. There are in any language and at any time irregular processes producing sporadic variation that cannot be captured in terms of sound laws. Nothing to worry about as long as we don't admit a greater amount of such irregularity than could be realistically expected. If there is too much of it, we should start suspecting that we're missing a hidden generalisation (like the laws of Grassmann and Verner).

Sporadic variation certainly exists. If it's strictly dialectal, it
should be possible to sort things out, but when there's much dialectal
diffusion, things become messy indeed. An example I brought up here
recently would be that of the root(s) *nem-, *jem-, *em- "to take".

>Fifth and last possibility -- the most exciting one, perhaps, from the point of view of the historical phonologist. (Some of?) the doublets can be related to each other via internal reconstruction. This would mean doing for PIE what Verner did for Proto-Germanic and Grassmann for Greek and Indic. Their job was made easier because they could verify their findings using data from the remaining IE branches (e.g. Vedic accent for Verner's Law). It isn't clear what, if any, external evidence is acceptable for PIE.

Agreed, this is the exciting one. At least regarding the stop system,
there are some clues readily available. The PIE root structure, which
doesn't allow the combinations DEG, DHEK and TEGH is one such clue.
One can suspect ancient dissimilations (DEG) and assimilations (DHEK,
TEGH), but forward or backward? An interesting possibility is the
effect of suprasegmental features. Falling tone is generally
associated with /h/ and aspiration, rising tone with /?/ and
glottalization. It is conceivable, to take the old habeo/haben
example, that a proto-form *káp > *k.ap. (> Sem. *qab-, Kartv. *k.b-,
PIE *kap-), while its falling tone variant *kàp > *khaph (> Sem.
*kap(p)-, PIE *ghebh-). Cf. Bomhard/Kerns #242, Illich-Svitych #190.

>So what about a few doublets to analyse, Miguel? do you happen to have a list?

It's been a while since I last looked at this. I don't have a list of
satisfying examples handy. I'll see what I can do.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...