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Is there any evidence of (pre)proto-IE? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4950 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 18 03 August 2011 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I know this is a long shot, as it is likely impossible there is any remaining evidence today about the origins of Proto-indo-European. I have tried to look at various resources online but can't find much; almost all sources have detailed information of the development of IE languages up to the hypothesized Proto language, but beyond that it is like standing at the edge of the sea. Or perhaps I am just not tying apt search words.
Basically my question is, is there anything out there about where Proto-IE evolved from? Not its geographical or tribal origin, but rather from what root may the language have arisen. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5047 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 2 of 18 03 August 2011 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Basically, PIE is already a language that was reconstructed by methods of comparative linguistics as it's far older than any written language and as such there's no direct evidence of its existence, other than logic and hindsight of linguists.
There is research into prePIE but a lot of it is done by quacks that presuppose or outright invent some theory about a mother language (usually instilled by alien overlords) and then try to work from that, rather than the traditional more rigorous scientific methods. While there's valid research into pre-proto-languages (such as internal reconstruction, wiki it) it scarce due to lack of scientific evidence. My guess is that if you want to get into prePIE you should start with some science texts on comparative linguistics and linguistic reconstruction of how proto languages are being analyzed and you're bound to find some good pointers on where to dig deeper. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 18 03 August 2011 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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There has been some work about potential predecessors of Proto-Indo-European, but the conclusions, suggestions or even conducting of such research are rightly or wrongly controversial (in fact it's common for work in this field to be looked down upon or even shouted down/dismissed out of hand by many influential linguists today even though the idea of science is to keep exploring and test hypotheses rather than to proclaim one's findings/beliefs as the "truth" in an oddly unscientific but sanctimonious way). Postulated ancestors of Proto-Indo-European would be (Proto-)Indo-Uralic, Nostratic, Eurasiatic or Proto-World/Proto-Human. All of these would be reconstructions too, but on arguably shakier ground since they would be reconstructions of reconstructions.
Some linguists have been working on an etymological database that also include reconstructions from what would be predecessors of PIE. The databases are here and in your case, you'd want to look at "Long-range etymologies" and "Nostratic" etymologies to see what they've come up with based on the reconstructions from PIE among other proto-languages. Regardless of the controversy, the amount of data here is impressive and quite a lot of it comes from established etymological sources. I think that it's questionable to label linguists who are into thinking/researching beyond today's accepted classifications as quacks since there's a difference between a professionally-trained linguist and someone who's not. Quacks' ideas include wide-ranging classifications (which have been/are independently supported or investigated by some professional linguists), in addition to idiosyncratic ones such as the example of Croatian or Serbian dilettantes who insist that their native language is not of (humble?) Slavonic origin but of (glorious?) Iranian origin. Keep in mind that there's no attestation of Proto-Indo-European. All proto-languages are educated guesses and are dependent on analysis of attested samples from languages, living or dead, that are assumed or postulated as having originated from such an ancestor or believed to have coexisted. It's a somewhat circular way of thinking, but this is what supports most current notions in historical/comparative linguistics which is still based heavily on the tree-model. Strictly speaking it's somewhat presumptuous to talk of a proto-language's vocabulary or structure as markers of what was used in reality (even though it is common to think so), since they are based on what has been analyzed so far. However conclusions about the proto-language would change if for whatever reason linguists were to find more evidence (something like what happened when linguists stumbled upon something later known as Hittite which changed our understanding of PIE (yet again)) or change the "membership" or "relatives" of languages that we've been brought up to consider as developments of that proto-language (again rigidly adhering to the validity of the tree-model), and thus allow for a different set of samples to inform reconstructions for the proto-language. As another example, imagine if linguists somehow had no attestations of Gothic and Old Norse. Indeed would they even fathom the presence of such languages? What kind of reconstruction would we then see for Proto-Germanic? Would it be heavily influenced by what we observe in Icelandic as it's considered to be a conservative language? This is why I'm skeptical of linguists who resort to name-calling and uphold scrupulously the status quo because I've always learned that science differs from religion by allowing for conclusions or addition to our body of knowledge taken from hypothesizing, and investigation/experiments/controlled testing. In this case, let the linguists interested in looking past the accepted classifications do their work rather than be scorned by those in the mainstream (incidentally this isn't meant as a direct shot at s0fist, but this kind of stuff is what discouraged from graduate work in academia since it becomes easily dominated by one group/researcher and starts to become close-minded or more interested in promoting its own theories for self-interest or ego). 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5047 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 4 of 18 03 August 2011 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | ||
No offense taken, in fact I was quite amused by your polite circuitous attempt at calling me a linguist. I'm not, not even close, in no manner other than being an innocent bystander at slashdot.org, where over the years there's been a number of articles attempting to study/analyze various stages of proto human languages, most of those attempts bordering on amusing lunacy (not talking about or discouraging real research into the topic, merely the hoax articles on /. et al). Thanks for the response, Chung, hopefully more people with deep knowledge of the subject will surface and drop their 2c into this metaphorical fountain. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 18 04 August 2011 at 11:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Chung has defined the situation of studies into proto-Indoeuropean and even older proto's well: the studies are based on what we have rescued of ancient texts plus a system for analyzing later languages. There are some premises for such attempts: it is assumed that changes in sound systems are caused by datable sound shifts, and this can be defended on the ground that the methods use to describe such changes have shown their efficacy in the analysis of the later Indoeuropean languages - so basically if these methods can describe in detail how Low German differs from High German through a reference to a number of datable 'revolutions' then it is logical to assume that the same mechanisms also transformed some undocumented Proto-indoeuropean language into the oldest and the most conservative attested variants - which makes a little backwards-engineering tempting. It is the result of this endeavour that is called proto-Indoeuropean.
Similar methods have to some extent been used on the analyses of morphology and (to a lesser extent) syntax, and one of the more thought-provoking claims I have seen is that Proto-Indoeuropean may have been an ergative language - which is funny, considering that none* of the attested Indoeuropean have anything but a smattering of ergative-like constructions (le bois fend - je fend le bois, cfr an older thread here). In spite of the success of these methods they don't cover all aspects of any language, and they don't take wawe theories into account (those that describe the dialects of a language as the pattern created by isolated developments) so you should see any attempt at reconstructing a stage before the known European languages as a hypothesis, - and as Chung mentioned, any day a new source like the venerable Hittite inscriptions may appear that changes the rules of the game. So to go beyond the reconstruction of Proto-Indoeuropean to even earlier stages is a waste of time. However that is not what really is happening when people discuss larger groups. The godfather of these attempts to find larger groups (and find groups that include language without a long attested history) is a man named Greenberg, who did some statistical calculations for 'central' vocabulary and found some patterns that spanned large areas of the globe. However in this method there are no built-in indications as to how you should use these patterns to reconstruct the supposed common ancestor for each group. And besides the attempts of some crackpots to find relations between distant language because they contained some apparently similar words illustrate the dangers inherent in Greenberg et al.'s much more sober project. Trying to go one single step back from the oldests and the most conservative languages in a group of language to supposedly common, but unattested ancestor is already a daunting task. Going beyond that is foolhardy, and with most languages on the planet having no long literary tradition you must simply accept that detailed reconstruction attempts can't be done on a sound scientific basis. correction: * In the old thread about ergativity I just found the following passage in message 16 (by Eskandar): "Kurdish has inherited ergativity from its Indo-Iranian roots; other Indo-Iranian languages such as Pashto, Baluchi, and Hindi-Urdu share this feature" Edited by Iversen on 20 September 2011 at 2:19pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4950 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 6 of 18 06 August 2011 at 2:19am | IP Logged | ||
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I loved all the answers; they are very concise and information-packed posts. Thank you.
I just recently understood the concept of accusative vs. ergative—so simple yet hard to grasp for a dilettante. I've been wondering if morphological alignment is “just the way a language is,” or are there advantages/disadvantages of one alignment over the other which makes a particular one more prevalent. At first glance, it seems just like the linguistic equivalent of matter and anti-matter: a universe of anti-matter will be the same as our universe of “not anti-matter,” just different charges for the subatomic particles. But anti-hydrogen and hydrogen would still possess the same fundamental properties. Similarly, ergative languages and accusative languages may have different alignments, but they manage to convey the same piece of information (“The cat saw me.”), and the recipient understands the same interpretation. I think, right? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6666 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 7 of 18 06 August 2011 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd say that beyond the Indo-European languages, we don't have enough sources to reconstruct the proto-languages with a sufficient degree of certainty (maybe the Semitic and Dravidian languages, but then?) Even with Proto-IE there's a lot of speculation.
I think it's an incredible achievement that we have more or less reconstructed Proto-IE, but I'm in doubt that we can really go back further than that without inventing a time machine. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5307 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 8 of 18 03 November 2011 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think there is one difficulty with the concept of preprotolanguages. At the time when such languages should have been spoken, during and just after the last ice-age, there were perhaps not distinctly separate languages in Eurasia, but rather a languages continuum that gradually changed from far west to far east.
At that age people probably did not live in nations or even greater tribes, but rather in small grous that constantly intermingled, and that situation would affect the linguistic situation. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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