tracing the indo-europeans through linguistic palaeontology (ii)

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Tracing the Indo-Europeansthrough Linguistic Palaeontology(II)

Adam HyllestedRoots of EuropeUniversity of [email protected]



Why reconstruct the past?

Obviously:To understand the pastTo understand the relations between the different points in time (involving the present or not)

But also:To find (the simplest possible)explanations for present-day phenomena, e.g. anomalies (in language, culture …) which otherwise cannot be found

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Linguistic palaeontology

Or:Linguistic prehistoryLinguistic archaeologyPalaeolinguistics (ambiguous term)Cultural reconstruction= Using (historical, contemporary, dialectal) linguistic findings for historical inferences and the study of the human past:

Homelands (geography)Material cultureSpiritual cultureSocial organizationInteraction with natureMigrationsPopulation splitsContacts / trade routes

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What can be the subject of reconstruction?

Prehistoric societies andnotions:

organisationway of lifematerial culturecustomsreligion/ideologyconcepts

Human populations,interaction and conditions

migrationshomelandspeoplingcontactspopulation mixturelanguage shiftgeography, climatediseases

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Just as it is the case with language …

For prehistoric societies, notions, populations, interaction and conditions we can reconstruct

a) synchronic stagesb) Change between differentstages (some of which may be documented)

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Written sources

We do not always have themMany scholars define history as the past documented (in parts) by written sourcesPrehistory is the past without written sources

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Linguistic use of the term ‘prehistoric’

Also used if the history is somewhat documented, but the language is not, e.g.

“The prehistory of the Albanian language” – not ambiguous = from A The emergence of the the Albanian subgroup of Indo-European (before written sources) B the earliest written sources (1412, Old Albanian)

“The history …” is ambiguous= from A to the present day (Modern Albanian), or= from B to the present day

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But does ”no written sources” mean:

- That we cannot reconstruct prehistoric language?- That we cannot use language in our prehistoric reconstruction?

On the contrary!

That is exactly what reconstruction is about:

We use early and modern attestations to recreate the otherwise undocumented past

Language is often a more reliable source than material findings because linguistic data are inherently interconnected

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How do we reconstruct the past

Pekka Sammallahti:

Cultural differences between human societies are reflected in the lexical resources of their langauage:

Some have 20,000 conceptsSome have millions

A single individual in a complex society masters only a fraction – many word stems (up to 20,000 in extreme cases)

In simple cultures all concepts are common property = the number of basic word stems do not vary as much (3000+)

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Concepts

= Ideas of the entities, properties, situation and processes in their physical, cultural, societal and psychological environment

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How do we reconstruct the past? Distribution

1) The geographical distribution of language familiesLack of complexitytypically reflects (relatively)recent expansions,typically connected toinventions and cultural orpolitical power

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Phonetic properties of languages compared

Yeniseiyan languages in Siberia must be newcomers to the area because they do not sound like their neighbors (Michael Fortescue)

Conversely, Basque and Spanish have been neighbors on the Iberian Peninsula for long because they sound alike

Turkish – Armenian – Farsi

Maltese – Italian

Finnish – Finnish-Swedish

German – Danish

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Vocabulary

a) Existence: we can reconstruct a word for ‘hammer’b) Semantic fields: we can reconctruct a lot of words pertaining

to hammeringc) Word-formation: The word for hammer is formed by the word

for ‘stone’d) Language contact: The word for hammer is borrowed from

Fennice) Semantic anomalies: The word for hammer also means ‘sky’

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Semantic anomalies

‘Weasel’ and ‘young woman’:Italian donnolaPortuguese doninhaHungarian hölgyDanish brudRomany borí ‘Weasel’ and ‘burbot’Greek nyfítsaetc. etc. Latin mustēla

Ancient Greek galéēHungarian menyhalLithuanian menkė

‘burbot’ ‘mink’

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Fenno-Ugric ethnonyms

Ethnonym Meaning covered by Germanic *finōn- ‘fin, patch, scale, pimple’

Finn fin, Swedish finne ‘pimple’Estonian Baltic *aistra- ‘pimple’Lapp Swedish lapp ‘patch’Suomi Finnish suomu ‘fish scale’Vote Baltic *vadja- ‘fin, patch’Veps Saami *vepse- ‘fin’Sambi Fennic *sampe- ‘back fin’Magyar Czech dial. mad’ar ‘pimple’Ugrian Russian ugor’ ‘pimple’

Siberian ethonyms areoften derived from trading objects, in some cases ‘money’Derived from a word for ‘fish scale’

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Wörter und Sachen (I)

Basic principle:A language bears a close relationship to the culture of the people who speak it = The vocabulary (and, perhaps, other parts) of a language can tell us something about the culture and living conditions of the people speaking that language

When we apply this to reconstructed language stages as a way of determining the content of a earlier cultures, weare using the Wörter und Sachen technique

The methods were developed in the early 1900’s by Rudolf Meringer, Hugo Schuchardt and Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke

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Case: Austronesian

Proto-Austronesian

*kaka: ‘elder same-sex sibling’*huaji: ‘younger same-sex sibling’

*bubu: fish trap*tulaNi: ‘bamboo nose flute’

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Correlation of information (I)

*babui ‘wild pig’*beγek ‘domesticated pig’

In the Oceanic subgroup, onlythe latter survived

Archaeology tells us that Austronesians brought domesticated pigs with them to Oceania in their canoes –originally there were no pigs there, and the wild pigs stayed

behind

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Geology, climatography, oceanography (I)

The dry Black Sea (Ryan & Pitman)Flooding around 5600 BCNew evidence from the ASSEMBLAGE project 1998-2005 Bering strait; ice-age barriers and corridors

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Geology, climatography, oceanography (II)

Doggerland In the Mesolithic, 8000 BCRelevance for North-West European substrata

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Correlation of information

Linguistic results can be cross-referenced with knowledge from

Archaeology and historyEthnohistory

Oral historyTraditionEthnobotanyEthnomedicine

MythologyAnthropologyPopulation geneticsGeologyClimatologyZoogeographyTypology of traditional cultures

(rituals, kinsip systems, cosmology, domestication etc.)

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Primitive = traditional?

Different today? Globalization

Note wanderwörter do not emerge anymoreInstead we have got a new kind of culture-words,

internationalisms

Cultural and chronological distance to the “modern civilization” are supposed to coincide somewhat

“Primitive societies” = “Traditional” societiesNomadic, hunter-gatherer, scattered populations, small groups, endo- vs. exogamy, language transition and convergence, hard to distinguish religion from practice

Vs. urban, concentration, fast-scale transport, distribution of knowledge and goals, language standardization and contact, religion becomes easier to isolate

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The nature of reconstruction

Claim: ”Reconstructed languages are not real languages -Reconstructed societies are not real societies”

Think of it this way:

A detective and the police reconstructs a crime”It is not a real crime that we are reconstructing”

- Of course not, but that is inherent in the word ‘reconstruction’

- If you believe the real crime happened in a different way, you would reconstruct that instead

- Reconstruction is striving – a nearer and nearer approximation to the past

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The Indo-Europeans: Three questions

Where (and when)? Fixing the homeland in time and space

Who? Identifying the speakers and their culture

Whither (and when, how, why)? Tracing the (linguistic) migrations, their characteristics, their

causes, and their influence on new populations

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In search of speakers and cultures (I)

Frederik Kortlandt (“The Spread of the Indo-Europeans”):

“It is a methodologically legitimate activity to look for archaeological traces of a linguistic group, but the converse does not hold. Speculations about the linguistic affinity of a prehistoric culture are futile because it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of prehistoric linguistic groups have vanished without leaving a trace”

“It is certainly attractive to assign the ancestors of the speakers of Proto-Tocharian to the Afanasievo culture … but we must never forget that the very existence of the Tocharian texts which have survived is a purely accidental fact of history, due to a number of factors which happened to concur thousands of years after the eastward migrations of the Indo-Europeans”

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In search of speakers and cultures (II)

However:Placing a protolanguage in time and space is not the same as identifying it with a known archaeological cultures

Two steps:a) Fixing a protolanguage (tentatively) in time and spaceb) Identification with one or more archaeological cultures

(overlapping)

We should:a) Try to create the most plausible scenariob) Revise the scenario whenever new knowledge is available

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Comparative linguistics: Tasks and prospects

Comparative linguistics is at this time one of thevery few branches of science which can supply information about the preliterate history of man. There have been several attempts to combine linguistic data with archeological and genetic evidence, some of which have given very promising results. Surely, if we could extend linguistic evidence to dates earlier than the 4th-5th millennium, this could be very useful for the whole field of human history.

Sergej Starostin: ”Methodology of Long-Range Comparison”. – Historical Linguistics and Lexicostatistics. Melbourne 1999: 61-66

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Revising Wörter und Sachen

Single terms for topographic features are of little value (”too basic to be helpful”, Fortson 2004):

PIE *mor-i or *mar-i ’sea’ is no evidence of a homeland near the sea (as claimed by Hirt 1905-07)

The most famous figures connected with two human populations located in Central Asia, Mongolians and Tibetans, are

the Mongolian emperor Genghis Khan ’ruler of the sea’ ( OTurk. tengiz ’sea’)and the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama ’ocean – guru’ (Mongolian dalai ’sea’)

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Revising Wörter und Sachen (II)

Correspondingly, that we can reconstruct a common Indo-European noun

*snoi�gʰʷos ‘snow’

and a verbal root

*snei�gʰʷ- ‘to snow’

(PIE meaning confirmed by a study by Anna Helene Feulner 2004 [2009]), is not of much help

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Revising Wörter und Sachen (III)

All peoples of the northern hemisphere have words for ‘snow’, and earlier lowland populations without domestic snowfall must have known snow from mountains, neighbouring areas or hard winters (even Saudi-Arabia experiences snow once in a while).

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A principle in modern cultural reconstruction

More relevant:

a) complexity of terminologies pertaining to semantic fieldsb) shared specific semantics of identical formations

Proto-Uralic *wopV ‘bivouac in the snow’

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Semantic archaisms and cultural semantics

Brian Joseph, Copenhagen lectures, May 2010:

Words can mean more than lexical semantics

”Culturally sensitive semantics” and metaphors that can reveal an ”ideology” connected with particular words, the set of underlying assumptions that go along with how the meaning of a word or a phrase fits into the whole set of associations that it summons up

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Cultural semantics in etymology (Brian Joseph)

Similarly, we can see ”culture-in-semantics” in etymology, e.g. by a euphemistic usage that is tied to cultural belief, or a derivation that is quite revealing of cultural practices

a. Danish venstre ’left’, based on the root of ven ’friend’, a euphemism not unlike Greek aristerós, from the root for ’best’, where one can detect a taboo against being too overt in mention of the suspect and less normal left hand

b. Albanian darsmë ’wedding’ < *dorkʷ-i-mo-, cf. Greek epi-dórp-i-on ’second part of a symposion with dessert etc.’

c. Danish vindue, Eng. window Old Norse vindauga where vindr ’roof, attic’ (and auga ’eye’)

d. Danish væg ’wall’ < Germanic *wajjuz, from the root *weyH- ’to plait, to braid, to weave (branches)’

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A vindauga (‘roof eye’) = window

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Denotative and connotative meanings (B. Joseph)

Proto-Indo-European, being a normal language spoken by humans not all that different in many respects from us today, had its share of words that have meanings and connotations that go beyond the simple lexical denotation:

Greek benéō ’to fuck’ < *gʷen- ’woman’Greek álochos ’wife’ < *sm-loghos ’lying together with’

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Flora and fauna (I)

Evidence from flora and fauna terminology is more useful. Cf. the cultural / mythological significance of the oak among Balto-Fennic peoples (most common surname in Estonia: Tamm ’oak’) compared to the fact that the oak is not indigenous to the areas where Balto-Fennic languages are now spoken

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Flora and fauna (II)

But note curious lacunae like:

- ’elder’ and ’water elder’, both indigenous to all widely proposed IE homelands. Why no common IE terms?

- ’sturgeon’. If indigenous to the black sea and South Russian / Ukrainian rivers, why no common IE term?

Not an isolated problems: same case with e.g. a lot of mammals like badger, fox, polecat etc.

Why?

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Flora and fauna (II)

Zsolt Simon (2008): ”How to find the Proto-Indo-European Homeland”. Acta Ant. Hung. 48, 289-303:Terms for flora and fauna, too, can refer to species known by hearsay, from neighbouring or more remote populations; and ’salmon’ – what kind of salmon? We don’t know

However:In popular taxonomy, terms do not necessarily refer to exact

species in modern biological classfication. This makes it less of a goal to reconstruct words for certain species

Results become safer if plants and animals are grouped in semantic packages, certain groups that are more well-represented than others “a) complexity of terminologies pertaining to semantic fields”

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The elder

In popular taxonomy, the name of various Sambucus species and Viburnum ebulus ’Danewort’ – these plants are notvery alike, but the confusion seems to be of at least NW PIE age

Baltic *šeiva < PIE *k’eiH-uo- ’grey’ Slavic *buzъ Turkic buz ’grey’Fenno-Permian *šewV Baltic (Balto-Slavic) *šeivaFenno-Volgaic *šaršV Baltic *šerš ’moldy’Germanic elder-names like Holunder < kel- ’black’and Flieder ? < *pelh1i- ’grey’ ~ Slavic *plěšnĭ ‘mold’, Lith. pìlkas

‘grey’English elder and Mother Elder (‘the Old Lady’), reshaped from OE

ellærn, partly after other tree-names in -der (cf. MLG elderne), corresponding to MLG alhorn.

Latin sambūcus, sabūcus, formally looks like ’sand’ + plant-suffix -ūcus

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The sturgeon (I)

c) Shared semantics of non-identical formations

• If the Indo-European homeland was situated to the North of the Black Sea, the Indo-Europeans must have known several sturgeon species (in the Black Sea itself and the rivers to the North of it – but, curiously, theres is no common designation for the sturgeon in IE languages

• Words for ’sturgeon’ in North and West IE are probably formentlig innovations derived of old material

• Characteristics of the fish = scutes as back-fins. *ster- in Balto-Slavic and Germanic perhaps = the root *ster- ’stiff’ (cf. the stiff grass species Da. star = Nw. dial. finne ’carex’)

• Common Balto-Slavic / Germanic / Latin / Proto-Fennic formation pattern ’sturgeon’ < ’sharp’ + ’fin’ or just ’(the fish with a characteristic) back-fin’, i.e. ’scute’

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The sturgeon (I)

• Lat. aci-pēnser ’sturgeon’ aci- probably ’sharp, peak’ + pen- in penna, pinna ’fin’= PGmc. *finna-? Same type as accipiter?

• Balto-Slavic: Slavic *asetr-, *esetr- > e.g. Czech jester; Lith. eškėtras, ? *ak’- ’sharp, peak’ + -ster- (metatheses like these and intrusive -k- are common in Lith.) as in PGmc.

• PGmc. *sturjō- ’sturgeon’• Cf. Fi. sampi ’sturgeon’ ’back-fin of a fish’. Why ’sturgeon’?

It has so-called scutes instead of proper back fins

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An Indo-European concept

* ’(enter into) an new expected phase’ (e.g. a human life phase, a phase of the moon, or a season of the year)

also ’(necessary) equipment used in a rite of passage between such phases’

Passages of the year: E.g. new year, solstice, equinox

Etymological sources of denotations of this concept in individual IE languages:

a) *ar- or *H2er- ‘(1) fulfill, accomplish; enter into a new phase (2) take necessary precautions; equip, furnish; (>) arm’, perhaps identical to *H2er- ‘to fit, to link, to join together’

b) *korH-u- ‘top, peak, crown’c) *H2ieu- ‘life, vital force, energy youth; young’d) *kʷelh1- ‘turn (also of the year)’

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Meanings of Lithuanian šarvaĩ, šárvas, šarSvas

1a) discharge (after birth), placenta 1b) menstruation1c) discharge (from the mouth of the dead)’ 2a) armament2b) soldier’s outfit, weapons and ammunition2c) carapace 3a) dowry3b) burial object3c) a kind of wagon; bottom board of a wagon 4) the month of December (obsolete)

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Meanings of Lithuanian šarvaĩ, šárvas, šarSvas (2)

The various meanings have been satisfactorily explained by Bernd Gliwa (2006) as from an earlier meaning *physical sign and ritual equipment in a rite of passage’. But he does not treat the older meaning ‘December’ mentioned in Brodowski’s Lexicon Lituanicum:

Formal correspondences:

Cretan Greek Dios-koúros ‘6th month of the year’ Greek koúrētes ‘young men in their capacity as warriors’,

guardians of the infant Zeuskorē ‘young girl’

korýssō ‘put on a helmet; arm, equip’ kory- ‘top’ korý-bantes ‘armed dancers connected with the male child-

to-adulthood passage’, lit. ‘going to the top (in a certain ritual)’ (= akro-bat-) Old English hyrstian, hrystian (= Danish ruste) ‘arm, equip’

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Meanings of Indo-European words of the shape arma or the like (PIE *ar-mo-)

1a) Hittite, Luvian arma- ‘moon(god); month’ 2a) Hitt. armae-zi ‘to be pregnant’2b) Delphish Greek arma ‘coitus’ 3a) Hitt. ārmēš ʻpart of bullock-wagon’3b) Mycenean Greek a-mo ‘wheel’, Greek hárma ‘wagon’3c) Lithuanian armaĩ ‘front axle on wagon’

4a) Lat. arma ‘weapons, weaponry, implements of war; tools’; 4b) Epic Ionic Greek hármena ‘instruments, tools; sail, tackle;

food’, Gk. arma ‘food’

5) Sogdian r’m ‘new year, first month of the year’

6) Umbrian arsmor ‘rite, ritual’

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Meanings of of Latin juv-, jūn- and Lithuanian jaun-, Slavic jun- (= Eng. young)

1a) Latin Jūnō, a moon-goddess, probably ‘the new moon’; she was the guardian deity of women, the foundress of marriage and the protecting goddess of lying-in women

1b) Latin mensis jūnius ‘the month of June’ in which there were no particular holidays devoted to Juno

1c) Lithuanian jaunáitis, jáunatis ‘new moon’; jaunis ‘June’

2) Lith. jaunóji ‘bride’ 3a) Latin juvenes, juventūs ‘band of young men of military age’,

Umbrian iouies ‘warriors’, in a fixed phrase followed by hostat- anhostat- ‘armed or unarmed’

3b) Serbo-Croatian jùnâk ‘soldier; hero; young man’, Jug, a legendary figure connected with midsummer

4) Jānus Jūnōnius ‘god of passages’

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Meanings of Greek telos (< *kʷelh-o-s ’turning’)

1) teleó-mēnos ‘with full complement of months’2) ‘marriage rites; sacred rites’3) In verbal derivatives ‘bring to birth’4) ‘man’s full age, manhood; troops, army unit’5) ‘end; death’

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Yuletide

*kʷelh1-o-s also meant ’cycle’ (like the reduplicated form *kʷe-kʷl-o-s > English wheel, Greek kýklos, Sanskrit cákra-)

= 2nd part pf Germanic *jeuhla-, juhla- ’winter solstice’ (English yule, Danish jul), i.e. -hla. In older Germanic languages, this word was used as a name of the midwinter month.

But what is the *jeu- part?

The other solstice month was in Latin mensis jūnius which has been interpreted as ‘Juno’s month’ or ‘the month of the new moon’, but what about ‘the month of the (summer) solstice’? Cf. also the name of Jug, connected with midsummer

If so, *j(e)u-hla- < ’the turning point of the (winter) solstice’ or = Skt. cákram rtásya ’wheel of the year’?

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Turkic months of passage

Uighur aram Hunno-Bulgarian alem ‘first month of the year’

have no counterparts in other Turkic languages and may be borrowings from Indo-European

Cf. Sogdian r’m

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Bēt-armones = Korý-bantes = Akro-bat-’going to the top’ ?

or rather

’those who are entering into the new phase (of life)’ ?

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*ar- without -m-

Lycian ara- ‘rite; order’Sanskrit adv. áram ‘fittingly’Russian radet’ ‘carry out rites’ (Slavic *VRC- > rVC)Russian roditi ‘give birth, bear fruit; care about, heed’Russian radunitsa ‘remembering of the dead; ‘1st Sunday after

1st full moon on or following the vernal equinox’Serbo-Croatian Radovan Iranian *Ardavan ‘righteous (of

deceased ancestors), a personal name but also the designation of a chosen person who enters the home on Christmas morning, performs ritual actions and spells at the fireplace and is believed to incarnate an ancestor spirit (Aleksandar Loma 2008)

Avestan Arədvī and Skt. Arámati- ‘goddess of order’ = Greek Ártemis = Lat. JūnōArtemis was the god of female childhood-to-adulthood passages

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An Indo-European concept

- ’(enter into) an new expected phase’ (e.g. a human life phase, a phase of the moon or a season of the year)

also ’(necessary) equipment used in a rite of passage between such phases’

Passages of the year: E.g. new year, solstice, equinox

Etymological sources of denotations of this concept:

a) *ar- or *H2er- ‘(1) fulfill, accomplish; enter into a new phase (2) take necessary precautions; equip, furnish; (>) arm’, perhaps identical to *H2er- ‘to fit, to link, to join together’

b) *korH-u- ‘top, peak, crown’c) *H2ieu- ‘life, vital force, energy youth; young’d) *kʷelh1- ‘turn (also of the year)’

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A Uralic cognate?

Proto-Uralic *är(V) mV ‘year; autumn’ < ‘ripening, fulfillment; (new) season’:

> Votyak arm- ‘year’Vogul oarem ‘time’Zyryan ar ‘autumn; age’ < *arm (final -m disappears)

from a root *ärV (Samoyed forms all mean ‘autumn’ and comes from PSam. *erəjə < PU *ärV-jV)

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Evidence from linguistic landscapes

In the East, in the original Slavic area, no non-IE substrates are known (non-IE languages are newcomers)

All substratum proposals involve (otherwise unknown) Indo-European languages such as Georg Holzer’s ”Temematisch” and various kentum dialects (e.g. Trubachëv)

= a sharp contrast to all other IE speaking areas

This alone is suggestive of the E Slavic area as the point of departure

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Contemporary linguistic evidence

a) complexity of terminologies pertaining to semantic fields (“semantic packages”)

b) shared specific semantics of identical formationsc) Shared (cultural) semantics of non-identical formationsd) Evidence from the structure of the linguistic landscape:

Where are there no non-IE substrates?e) Loanword evidence

f) - to be compared with non-linguistic or overlapping evidence, such as our knowledge of prehistoric and historical migrations. We know them in all directions from the E Slavic area

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tracing the indo-europeans through linguistic palaeontology (ii)

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