Bomhard - An Outline of the Historical Phonology of Indo-European (1975) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Indo-European phonological system as traditionnally reconstructed must be regarded as extremely unlikely since that system is totally isolated typologically. Therefore, an alternate reconstruction, along the lines suggested by HOPPER and GAMKRELIDZE-IVANOV, is substituted for the traditional system. The ramifications caused by this substitution are discussed briefly, and the development of the system in the daughter languages is then traced.
Welcome to Proto-Indo-European Linguistics – Urindogermanische Sprach-forschungen, a new digital journal in Indo-European linguistics. The timing of the founding of the journal in 2016 is no coincidence, as Indo-European linguistics celebrates the 230th anniversary of Sir WILLIAM JONES's announcement of the descent of the Indo-European languages from a common source, now known as Proto-Indo-European. This year also marks the 200th anniversary of a key work of FRANZ BOPP (1816) and coincides with the 100th anniversary of BEDŘICH HROZNÝ's announcement and proof of the Indo-European (IE) character of Hittite in 1915 and 1917 respectively. Beyond these celebrations there is an even more compelling reason to launch a new journal: the recent publication of the glottal fricative theory (GFT), containing the recently revised Proto-Indo-European (PIE) reconstruction theory, and its groundbreaking ramifications. The GFT originally appeared in JOUNA PYYSALO's dissertation System PIE: The Primary Phoneme Inventory and Sound Law system for Proto-Indo-European in 2013 and has now been digitally tested and proven to be correct in Proto-Indo-European Lexicon (PIE Lexicon) at http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi. PIE Lexicon, the computerised version of the GFT, presents the first purely comparative reconstruction theory implemented as an operating system ever in the history of Indo-European linguistics. In practice, the entire PIE reconstruction has been revised to only contain comparative components exclusively inferred by means of the principle of postulation, i.e. FICK's rule of two witnesses. The reconstruction of the GFT is therefore the inductive equivalent of the IE data, and hence PIE Lexicon is capable of automatically generating the data from PIE on the basis of digitised sound laws. This logical equivalence of Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European means that at this very moment the field is in a transition phase from Indo-European linguistics into Proto-Indo-European linguistics, a development reflected in the title of the new journal, Proto-Indo-European Linguistics.
The Indo-European and Semitic Languages . Saul Levin
American Anthropologist, 1972
ciple of marked and unmarked linguistic categories, the discussion of the relation between syntactic and semantic structures, and linguistic change in social contexts, are three examples of such important new developments. The reviewer agrees with the author that the orientation of the book, on the whole, has not suffered. An understanding of the development which has occurred since and which will be made in the future will presuppose an insight into the relations described in the book. The Indo-European and Semitic Languages. SAUL LEVIN. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1971. xlii + 775 pp., illustrations, chapter notes, appendix, index. $25.00 (cloth). Reviewed by GEORGE CARDONA University o f Pennsylvania and Center f o r Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences This work attempts t o establish a relation between Indo-European (IE) and Semitic by considering, in greater detail than any comparable work known to me, morphologic and syntactic materials. The author treats
2018
This paper discusses some aspects of the functional competition between nominal morphology and verbal morphology to express low transitivity in different IE languages with respect to other areally contiguous language families. In West and North IE (Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic), experience predicates often select oblique experiencers, which are also common in Finno-Ugric. In West and North IE, the inherited middle conjugation is decaying or lost altogether , replaced by structures based on the reflexive pronoun. By contrast, in South and East IE (Anatolian, Greek, Early Indo-Iranian and Tocharian), the middle inflection is still productive and represents the main strategy to encode experience predicates, in addition to denominal verb formations; in these languages, oblique experiencers are much more rare than in West and North IE. South and East IE languages have striking correspondences with Semitic, which is also poor in oblique experiencers and in impersonal constructions in its earliest varieties. In Ancient Semitic, the experiencer is regularly the subject of the clause, while low transitivity is expressed by a highly articulated verbal morphology. Accordingly, the preferred use of verbal suffixes or of oblique cases to express low transitivity-both inherited from PIE-tend to be reinforced in different IE areas by the contact with different language families where these strategies are also more or less productive.
Indo-European Linguistics in the 21st Century (2)
2018
Revisionist trilaryngealism, consisting of the hypotheses CC•C, *h1 h2 h3, and at least two different vowels PIE *e *o (and optionally PIE *a), has split the laryngeal theory into several mutually incompatible models. The models of EICHNER (1973, 1978, 1980, 1988) and MELCHERT (1987)/RIX (et al. 2001) are characterized by symmetrical, but opposed reconstructions for Hitt. a-(*h3e-vs. *h1o-) and Hitt. ḫa-(*h2e/o-vs. *h2/3e/o-). In KORTLANDT's (2003-4) model the preservation of *h2 and *h3 is conditioned by the distributions of *e/o. Both laryngeals are allegedly retained before *e, but lost before *o in Old Anatolian. In addition, it is theoretically possible to define a variant of KORTLANDT's model in which the distributions are reversed. The present paper focuses on KORTLANDT's model in both its original and reversed form and demonstrates the internal inconsistency of this model, due to which it has to be discarded as a serious option for PIE reconstruction. This leaves us only the models of EICHNER and MELCHERT/RIX to compete with SZEMERÉNYI's (1967, 1970, 1996) monolaryngealism for the solution of the PIE laryngeal/vowel problem.
Bomhard - Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1995)
Distant (or long-range) linguistic comparison seeks to investigate the possibility that certain languages or language families, not previously thought to be genetically related, at least not "closely" related, might indeed be part of still larger groupings, which may be called "macro families". This paper will focus on Indo-European. The purpose is to show that Indo-European is not genetically isolated but, rather, that it is distantly related to certain other language families of northern and central Eurasia, the Indian subcontinent, and the ancient Near East. Where appropriate, issues concerning the other language families with which Indo-European is most likely related will also be discussed.