Reconstruction talk:Proto-Indo-European/wódr̥

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Is there such thing as Indo-Uralic?--71.111.229.19 23:02, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Only as a perennial proposal. For a rundown of the history and issues surrounding the problem, see Wikipedia. See also Proto-Uralic *wete and Proto-Indo-European *wed-. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:54, 28 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Descendants[edit]

Are Thracian udrēnas and Phrygian bédu also descendants? -- Prince Kassad 13:48, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Descendants[edit]

Where can I find the tree to add to the Descendants? Leasnam (talk) 20:28, 31 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Click the little "+/-" button to the right of the list. --Yair rand (talk) 20:49, 31 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rhotacism[edit]

Are there any linguists who have noticed, like I have, that Sanskrit udan leaves the possibility for Rhotacism in this instance? Though all the other daughter forms plead a final r, has anyone discussed this in any books or papers?

It has been suggested by some linguists that at some point in early PIE, word-final -n became -r. But it's not really an established sound law, and later PIE evolved plenty of counterexamples like the -men suffix anyway. —CodeCat 00:42, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This is just like the neogrammarian insistence that the e/o vocalism of Greek and Latin was original, and that an a coloring laryngeal colored PIE e to Sanskrit a. All this despite the fact that in Arabic Phonology, a was advanced to æ the environment of most consonants, including ħ, ʕ, h and ʔ. In northwestern Africa, the open front vowel æ is raised to ɛ or e. Other good examples are Ancient Hebrew, which had a vowel system that included e and o, but descended from one that did not, Proto Semitic. Or like how in the Great Vowel Shift, aː shifted to ɛː. There is also the fact that a Open front unrounded vowel is more common than e or ɛ universally, yet some reconstruct a PIE with only one vowel, e. I find this a bit strange.— This unsigned comment was added by Idielive (talk • contribs).

I have a great deal of trouble understanding what you're talking about. You seem to be shoving a bunch of mostly unrelated ideas together into an argument which has nothing to do with the question you asked initially. —JohnC5 06:26, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Not to mention that laryngeal theory was in early, rudimentary form during the time of the Neogrammarians, and they were its main critics, and that Sanskrit a isn't ascribed to laryngeal coloring, but to a universal merger of all non-high vowels into a. In attempting to demonstrate that mainstream Indoeuropeanists don't know what they're talking about, he/she has merely demonstrated that he/she doesn't know what they're talking about. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:32, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Whatever time your talking I was never implying. And according to laryngeal PIE, h2e became a in Sanskrit, likewise did h3e and h1e, even though these two are not a coloring. 

h₁ésti > ásti

h₁édti > átti h₂éǵeti > ájati For more information see this link http://new-indology.blogspot.com/2013/07/indo-european-linguistics-indo-iranian.html

Yes, that's the unconditional change of *e and *o into *a. This had the effect of nullifying the vowel colouring of the laryngeals in Indo-Iranian. —CodeCat 19:52, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Geez, this guy wants to resurrect pre-Neogrammarian philology, where – in Voltaire's words – vowels counted nothing and consonants only very little. Groovy. Law of Palatals? Examining the classical evidence closely? Reading an introduction and trying to understand the relevant arguments? Intellectual rigour? Who cares. Just an annoying hindrance for one's freewheeling etymological and historical speculations. Cranks are just like that.
That said, it has often been suggested that at some point prior to the final stage of Proto-Indo-European that we can reconstruct directly, *e (probably [ɛ]) was indeed a short [a], exactly because of those typological arguments and other parallels (Kümmel has suggested *o [ɔ] goes back to a long [aː], with interesting additional points). However, this does not change the fact that it's not so simple as once imagined, that Indo-Iranian simply preserved the ancient state of affairs. And that's because of the issue of the palatals, which cannot be explained away so glibly as our crank tries. (Often overlooked, the Uralic evidence also supports the consensus story.) There's no way around reconstructing Proto-Indo-European with the "European" vocalism that's best preserved in Greek; sometimes sound changes simply describe odd circles: Schumacher pointed out PIE *t > Pre-Verner Proto-Germanic *þ > Proto-Germanic *ð > West Germanic *d > Old High German *t in Old High German fater. So Pre-PIE **/a/ > PIE *e > PIIr. *a isn't absurd at all; unexpected, messy things happen. Reality does not conform to our subjective aesthetic preferences. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:34, 24 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Florian Blaschke: Reminds me of this. Has some great gems like "Laryngeals are one of these sacred entities. Linguists discuss about their number as theologians could discuss about the number of divine hypostases" —Aryaman (मुझसे बात करो) 20:32, 24 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Aryamanarora: The IP above left a link to the same blog you're linking to, written by one Giacomo Benedetti. So I'm not sure why you say "Reminds me of". But yeah, funny one. The days of the Great Number-of-Laryngeals Debate are long past and most mainstream Indo-Europeanists operate with three just like Saussure did, and only a few with four – I don't really know anyone who assumes more than four, or only two, or only one (except maybe a couple of old philologists who've never warmed up to those newfangled laryngeals anyway). Trilaryngealism is a solid consensus now. By the way, Kümmel's paper on Proto-Indo-European phonology is here. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:22, 27 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Florian Blaschke: Oh wow, what a coincidence (though perhaps you may not believe it). I didn't read the whole IP post. I too found that blog post a while ago while googling for some papers on Sanskrit outcomes of PIE laryngeals, and bookmarked it since it was kind of funny. —Aryaman (मुझसे बात करो) 19:44, 27 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Aryamanarora: I saw your mistake (that you linked as a joke an article that Idielive linked seriously) and nearly lost it. I even explained the situation to a nearby non-linguist non-Wiktionarian friend of mine because I knew the pay off would be good enough. That really made my day. —JohnC5 05:02, 28 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@JohnC5: lol, thanks, I still can't believe it was same article... I believe I looked up something like "laryngeal sanskrit orientalist" in Google. —Aryaman (मुझसे बात करो) 05:07, 28 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Aryamanarora: Wow, that's really funny. I was initially just confused, I didn't even get what was going on; while I did consider the idea of a coincidence, it seemed too unlikely, haha. Looks like this Benedetti is a popular crank I hadn't heard of yet. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:27, 28 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

*wóh₁r̥[edit]

Anyone up for incorporating some discussion of Lubotsky (2013), "The Vedic paradigm for 'water'" into this? This has a fairly sensible proposal that वार् (vār) would be an old Kortland Effect doublet of the better-attested nominative *wódr̥, seemingly indeed implying that this is actually analogical and that the PIE nominative would hence have been *wóh₁r̥. --Tropylium (talk) 18:00, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Tropylium Interesting. I just encountered a mention of the same proposal in Kroonen. I remember seeing other proposals for *d > *h₁ under various conditions, and have always wondered what's up there – why would *d in particular merge with *h₁ so often? Some millennia-old kind of T-dropping? Or D-dropping, in this case.
The proposal sounds sensible enough; just add it. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:11, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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