Re: [tied] Grammar structure of the various stages of IE

From: Andy Howey
Message: 21572
Date: 2003-05-06

Thanks a lot for your explanation, Glen.  That helps.

Glen Gordon <glengordon01@...> wrote:

Andy:
>You keep referring to various stages of IE, such as Pre-IE
>(IndoTyrrhenian?), Early PIE, Middle PIE, early Late IE, Late PIE.  Forgive
>me if you've done this already a long time ago, but I was wondering if you
>could provide grammar overviews
>for Early, Middle, and Late PIE as you did for Proto-Steppe and
> >IndoTyrrhenian.

If I have it would be on my site... but I haven't because of my
own time constraints. However, I'll answer that here in this
post. This is what I think as of today. I hope this covers most
of it but something tells me I'll still need to explain myself:

------------------------------------------------------------------
First of all, I define "pre-IE" as _any_ stage before IE, whether
it be IndoTyrrhenian (9000-7000 BCE), Old IE (7000-6000), Mid IE
(6000-5000) or Late IE (5000-4000).

Old, Mid and Late IE are meant to be three thousand-year periods
of pre-IE development. I define these stages in order to better
date various chronological layers of the language that other
Nostraticists often lump together in a confusing jumble.

IndoTyrrhenian
--------------
IndoT is the ancestral stage of both Tyrrhenian (Etruscan, Lemnian,
Rhaetic) and IndoEuropean. It had a regular tonal accent on the
initial syllable. The default word order was SOV.

Early on, the verb contained two distinct sets of endings
inherited from ProtoSteppe: the m-set and the x-set. Originally,
these endings were to distinguish transitive and intransitive verbs
respectively, however IT innovated on the system by adding *-e
(3ps obj) to all intransitive endings and the function of these
endings shifted at this point to mark active-stative contrasts
instead. By the end of the IT period, both Tyrrhenian and IE should
have inherited an active-stative system, although Tyrrhenian opted
towards the analytic and mostly discarded its original conjugational
system causing difficulties for people like me.

Any modal suffixes in IT were placed between the verb root and the
pronominal ending, if any. Because it was largely an agglutinative
language, endingless verbs could be made freely into nouns without
further marking.

Aside from the inherited accusative *-m, added noun cases developed
in IT by affixing postpositions to nominal stems with an intervening
vowel. As such, the IE and Tyrrhenian case systems and that of
Uralic are related but largely uninherited. Two genders, animate
and inanimate, were distinguished mostly by syntactic means and were
not explicitly marked as one or the other. (However there is the
matter of seperate animate and inanimate interrogative pronouns
in both *m- and *kW- that exist in Uralic and that may have
initially survived in IndoT.)


Old IE
------
I haven't fully worked out this stage yet but it appears that
there would have been less vowel constraints -- unstressed *e
(schwa) and *a could both exist and did not yet merge to schwa.
The stress accent started out on the initial syllable but it
soon switched to a regular accent on the penultimate syllable.

There doesn't seem to be many grammatical changes in this stage,
perhaps because I haven't thought deeply enough on it. However,
Semitoid loans enter the language at this stage and whatever
numerals had existed for "six" and "seven" before this were
supplanted by *swekse and *septem. Due to this foreign influence
from the south, a large number of foreign verbs also entered the
language at this time, sometimes both with and without *s- (the
causitive prefix in Semitic languages). The resultant *es- in Old
IE however never gained a grammatical function but may still have
been acknowledged as a special prefix nonetheless in some native
grammatical processes such as reduplication (eg: es-ter-e >
te-s-ter-e) -- This almost reminds me of Hattic. The verb "to be"
is a loan from this Semitoid language as well and was originally
not needed to express an equation or state since verbless sentences
did just well for this task for thousands of years before this.

Verbs could be either imperfect or perfect. The aorist did not
yet exist but would largely spring out of a mixture of imperfect
and perfect while containing imperfect endings. The mediopassive
also didn't yet exist. The imperfect at this time described an
incomplete or ongoing action while the perfect described a
completed one. The imperfect also described permanent states while
the perfect described resultative states, arrived at by the doing
of an action. Tense was completely unmarked and understood by
context. Mood and aspect were more of the morphological concern.
Reduplication was originally used to express perfect verbs and
not for creating imperfect verbs (as we see with later *didehWeti
"he is giving"). Thus a verb *beremes "we are carrying" becomes
*bebarwe in the perfect and *dehWte "yous are giving" likewise
becomes *dedahW. Verbs that were inheirantly perfect were made
imperfect merely with the e-grade.

Nouns distinguished between two genders: animate and inanimate.
The plural was unmarked except in the nominative and accusative
by means of the suffix *-es. There was animate accusative *-m,
genitive *-(a)se and ablative *-(a)ta. Possibly also another
case ending in *-(a)la whose exact function needs to be determined.


Mid IE
------
Mid IE appears to have been still a little less synthetic than PIE.
It had some of the same case endings as we later find. It had an
animate accusative marked in *-m, a genitive *-(a)se (> *-os), and
a partitive *-(a)te (> *-od). There may have also been a case
ending in *-(a)le but I'm still having trouble determining its
existence and function -- If *sal- "salt" is to be reconstructed as
*sxal- instead, from *sex- "to dry out", then I need to know what
the remaining *-el- is marking here. An inanimate agent? The dative,
locative and vocative were unmarked and the animate nominative was
marked with a postposition *se. Two genders were distinguished:
animate and inanimate. Plural was unmarked except in the nominative
and accusative. The default word order was subject-object-verb.

Inanimates could not be the subject of an action in an accusative
sentence so they were always unmarked in these instances. Animate
objects were marked as usual with *-m. However in ergative sentences,
inanimates could be the agent of an action marked in the genitive
and accompanied by an unmarked patient. In these sentences, the verb
was understood as passive without explicit marking. There were also
some special verbs that normally took a partitive object with a
nominative subject, particularly those of a sensory nature like
"to hear" or "to see", rather than an accusative one. The verb "to
go" is also another interesting verb, able to take both an unmarked
inanimate object (implying "going to") AND an accusative one
(implying "going in the direction of"). Other such case nuances
exist with other verbs and I don't know about you but this makes
me dizzy.

While the default word order was SOV, word order had a grammatical
function to create focus or to de-emphasize any particular word
or phrase. Indefinite subjects or objects thus could be placed after
the verb (deemphasis). With intransitive verbs, the marking of the
animate nominative with a postposition *se became vital, regardless
of word order, since without this particle, an animate subject
would be misunderstood as an unmarked inanimate object with
unspecified subject.


Late IE
-------
In Late IE, during the last thousand years before PIE proper, we
see the development of the aorist out of the hazy gray between
imperfect and perfect. The aorist is given imperfect endings and
describes a non-abrupt but momentaneous action, in opposition
to the imperfect which now describes a continuous ongoing action,
and the perfect which describes an abrupt momentaneous action.
Its late date of creation is why the aorist doesn't seem fully
grammatically seperated from the imperfect. The mediopassive
develops largely out of the synthesis of the perfect endings and
a particle *r (here conveying "via"). The plural endings
show a special enclitic particle *-dH& signifying "amongst
(oneselves)" (*-dHi "within") attached to the pre-existing 1pp
*-w&(s) and the endingless 2pp. The indicative *-i, from a
zero-graded *ei "here", is attached during the early half of this
period, evidently before the voicing of final stops as is evident
by the voiceless 3ps *-t(i) which should otherwise have become
**-d after the voicing of all final stops. For that matter, the
3ps becomes marked with *-t, originally a postfixed demonstrative.

We also see the beginnings of the later feminine with the creation
of *-&x (a thematized variant of inanimate collective *-x), being
used as an animate suffix marking a "human collective". The
thematization of inanimate suffixes to form animate ones becomes a
common and productive process within the Late IE period. After
the advent of the acrostatic accentuation, employed in order to
halt a confusing paradigmatic alternation of accent within a stem,
the thematic declension develops, affixing a particle *y&: "which"
(> *yo-s) to the preexisting unaccented genitive *-s to distinguish
it better from the nominative. This produces the unique thematic
genitive *-sy&: (> *-syo) which literally means "(that) which (is)
of X". By the same process that produced the s-aorist and the 3ps
imperfect *-t(i), the marked nominative *-s came into being by
the irregular reduction of a former postfixed demonstrative *s&:
(> *so). As with the s-aorist, the reduction caused compensatory
lengthening of the preceding vowel.

In general, the loss of most unstressed vowels that marks the
beginning of the Late IE period provoked large changes to not
only the phonetics of IE but to the accentuation, syllabics and
subsequently the entire grammar of the language. An originally
regular accent automatically became unpredictably "mobile",
causing a chain-reaction that caused urgent need to regularize
unpredictable ablaut and accent patterns. Thus, if it seems that
I blame Late IE for much of the language's idiosyncracies and
stubbornly refuse to blindly project much of the reconstructed
grammar of IE back to some outrageously ancient stage called
Nostratic, this is probably in a nutshell the reason why.


>I've seen many references on the web about PIE having gone through
>an ergative stage and possibly an active stage (in what order, active >
>ergative, or ergative > active?), but when would these
>have occurred?

Normally, we place an "ergative stage" before an "active stage"
(that of IE itself). However, I suppose it all depends on how
we define an ergative or an active language, doesn't it. So far,
it seems to me that this definition seems rather hazy and differs
depending on the author.


- gLeN


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