A matter of the Egyptian heart

The Egyptians placed a lot of importance on the heart and it was believed to be the seat of the mind and the soul. In the English-speaking world, we usually treat "heart" as a symbolism of the feelings but for ancient peoples around the Mediterranean, it was instead the seat of reason and essence. They didn't realize yet the significance of the brain in that regard and of the bodily organs that Egyptian mummifiers traditionally preserved in their sacred rites, the brain wasn't one of them.

Considering how central the heart was to the ancient Egyptian perception of the soul, one would think we'd know how to pronounce the word by now. In hieroglyphs, it's represented only in consonants and we write this in standard orthography as ỉb. This unfortunately gives the false impression that we should just assume a pronunciation of /ib/. Indeed, Antonio Loprieno does reconstruct */jib/ and compares it directly with Semitic *libb- assuming in turn an Afro-Asiatic reconstruction of *lib (see Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic reconstruction [1995], page 31). So isn't that our answer?

I'm beginning to think it isn't. For one thing, this reconstruction could only work for the earliest stage of Egyptian before all instances of word-initial *y- were nullified in the language. Since the reed leaf symbol came to represent a glottal stop as a result, by the time of Middle Egyptian, we could only have had *ib at best. So isn't this our answer then?

To be honest something still seems off. The related Cushitic branch seems to instead point to *lub- with a rounded back vowel. If we derived an expectation of the Egyptian form from that piece of external data, we'd arrive at *ub, not *ib! Adding to the difficulty is that Coptic has replaced the word for "heart" with a completely different word, hēt (from ḥȝty). No clues there.

So what can we rely on to decide the matter? I finally came across the Hebraicized name Ḥophraˁ, the name of a pharaoh of the sixth century BCE. The original Egyptian form is represented in hieroglyphic writing as wȝḥ-ỉb-rˁ. It suggests that ỉb was at that point pronounced like the -oph- in Ḥophraˁ, causing me to want to side with the Cushitic reconstruction. Therefore *ub seems far more sensible than Loprieno's *(y)ib.

I'm curious about this word lately and want to get it right because of the parallel Proto-Berber form reconstructed as *ulβ. I wonder then if this might suggest that Proto-Berber had coloured the prothetic vowel with the original quality of the root vowel now lost between the two surviving consonants. If so, I have no clue how to account for the *i in Semitic *libb- however. The Semitic vocalism of the root now becomes the outlier.

On to the kinnor

Continuing on with my unintentional yet alluring theme of "musical instruments of the ancient Mediterranean", I'm lately exploring the whole issue with the stringed instrument known as a kinnor which is variously translated as a zither or a lyre. If it's true that the name of the kithara is ultimately from a Minoan compound meaning 'three-stringed' and containing the element *ki 'three' (see Paleoglot: The kithara), then it stands to reason that the similar name, kinnor, is probably likewise Minoan in origin and containing the same petrified numeral with a different second component.

I racked my brain on this one, looking at all the available comparanda I could amass this past few days and my findings can be summarized as follows:

1. Greek κινύρα (kinúra) 'lyre'
   
2. Mycenaean ki-nu-ra = *Kinúras [PY Qa 1301]
3. Hebrew כִּנּוֹר (kinnōr)
4. Hittite kinartallas ~ kinirtallas 'singer, musician'
5. Akkadian kinnāru 'lyre'
   

After reflecting today, I believe however that in the above pile that there are subtle red herrings lurking about, veering us away from the most rational solution. Although I was reluctant at first to accept it, Beekes' conclusion that Greek kinúra is loaned from Hebrew kinnōr now appears sensible to me. However his online commentary in his database is much too brief for a labyrinthine etymology such as this because the direction of borrowing implies that we must then reject the connection often cited between kinúra and an earlier Mycenaean name *Kinúras which therefore cannot mean 'kinyrist' but rather 'lamenter' (via an unrelated Greek word, kinurós 'wailing') in contradiction to, for example, John Franklin's suggestions in his elaborate article Kinyras at Pylos (see online pdf) that there is a connection.

From the Hebrew reflex, the famous Canaanite Shift of *ā > *ō by the close of the 2nd millennium BCE brings us back to an earlier form reflected directly in Akkadian as kinnāru. This same form explains the derivative in Hittite, kinartállas, whose accent I presume lies on the syllable just after the foreign stem kinar- in order to explain the alternation of a and i in spelling (ie. a reduced pretonic vowel perhaps?).

This all means that, to update the form I offered in a recent comment, the compound we're looking for in Minoan is precisely *ki-naro. I will withhold my analysis of the second component for a future entry.

Edward Sapir and the Philistine headdress

Browsing the web as usual I came across something that captured by attention. It turns out that Edward Sapir in his 1937 article Hebrew "Helmet," A loanword, and its bearing on Indo-European phonology had reconstructed a Philistine word *kaubaɣ- 'helmet' based on the Christian story of Goliath (1 Samuel 17:5). There in Samuel, the word for 'helmet' is recorded as either kōbáʕ (כובע) or qōbáʕ (קובע), a rather curious word of non-Semitic origin whose mystery has cultivated much academic curiosity. It's certainly connected with Hittite kupahis 'headdress' although exactly how this word was transmitted between Semitic and Anatolian groups is a riddle to solve. Note easterly Hurrian kuwahi too although seeking an origin of this word in Eastern Turkey seems most unlikely despite what Puhvel suggests (see Puhvel, Hittite Etymological Dictionary: Words beginning with K (1997), p.257).

Quite eerily, I've already suggested a Minoan word for 'head' or 'summit', *kaupaθa (read Paleoglot: A hidden story behind Cybele the Earth Mother?), but I was ignorant at the time of Sapir's published hypothesis. This Minoan etymon is my attempt at better explaining (via expected Etruscan *caupaθ) the source of both Germanic *haubida- and Latin caput in a way that an over-cited Indo-European root (*)*kaput- just can't convincingly accomplish without fiddling with the phonetics. Surely, given this particular set of uncannily similar yet phonetically irregular reflexes, we should seriously be thinking about recent loan transmission rather than leaping to the comparatively more contrived assumption of some long-ago Proto-Indo-European utterance. Add to this Greek κύπτω (kúpto) 'to bend forth, stoop forth' for which Beekes fails to find a credible Indo-European etymology and suggests Pre-Greek origin, much to my bookish delight. Nonetheless, some do try even to loosely etymologize the aforementioned Philistine word in Indo-European terms with no noteworthy success.


Matching the spirit of Sapir's whimsy while in honest desire to crack this Mediterranean puzzle, I wonder sometimes about the elusive Philistine language and its origins which scream 'Aegean' all over it. Unfortunately, the Philistine civilization also still screams 'mystery' all over it and with no forthcoming answers in sight. We must remember though the mention of the *Pirastu [prst.w] in Egyptian records, one of the 'Sea Peoples' listed to have attempted a minor coup on Egypt at the end of the 2nd millennium BCE.

Now, would it be unfathomable to posit the idea that the Philistine language could be a direct descendant of Minoan (or perhaps a Minoanized language) in which the word for 'head' (and subsequently for 'headdress' through metonymy) became, for the sake of public brainstorming, *kopað in this dialect? Semites, Hittites or some other intermediary might perhaps have misheard the voiced dental fricative /ð/ as a voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/ (ie. ayin) or a voiced glottal /ɦ/. Stranger things have happened in loanwords, eg. the Semitic name of the famed North African city of Carthage which entered into Greek as Καρχηδών (Karchēdṓn), into Latin as Carthāgo, and into Etruscan as *Carθaza.

A Mediterranean flute wanderword

Here's a quick note about a wanderword that I noticed. It starts with a quote from Festus, 403 which equates Latin tibicen 'flute player' with an alleged Etruscan word subulō 'flute player'. What first has to be realized is that this is surely a Latinized form of the original word and so I've had *supulun logged in my database as a suggestion.

Now I found the term sb.t 'flute' written in Ancient Egyptian, leading me to wonder about its exact vocalism and its connection to the Etruscan word. A quick gander in Crum's Coptic Dictionary shows the same word in Sahidic as sēbe 'reed (of a flute)' which points me to an Egyptian form *sūbat, curiously similar to the Etruscan. The word relates to sbȝ 'to play a flute' which in turn is cognate with Semitic *zamāru 'to play music', suggesting Afro-Asiatic heritage. If the Etruscan word is related, there's no question then that the word is ultimately Egyptian. The next question is how this word would have travelled to Italy.

Relating to this caper is another word I've discovered recently in Greek: συβήνη 'flute-case, quiver' (Myc *subānā ?). This is pretty coincidental, I think. The same root *sub- appears to be present as in Etruscan and Egyptian and we even may be seeing an Aegean derivational suffix *-na attached. Is an Eteocretan or Minoan term *supana in order? Is the word for 'flute' in Etruscan then *sup?

An odd North African text in Greek

Memiyawanzi needs your help. Recently the blog author's been discussing an interesting North African inscription which is written entirely in Greek letters but which features Greek, Latin and some other language. Is it Punic or something else? Is it just ancient babbling in tongues? Could we unite worldwide to solve these interesting capers? Of course we can - Linguist power!

How many fingers do you see?

Phoenix recently relayed a story told him by his teacher of Berber which was in turn recounted to him by an aged Morrocan professor about an interesting coincidence between the names Crete, Kos and Samos and the Berber numbers for 'three', 'four', and 'five'. This fun game of telephone may remind one of how Plato got his hands on the whole Atlantis scoop and how things got blown totally out of proportion thereafter.

Lest anyone take the hearsay seriously, I should stamp out that notion quickly. It's merely an idle novelty of factlessness, of course. I'm not sure about the real origins for the name of Crete or Kos offhand. However, I can manage to cut off one of these pernicious tentacles of ignorance by referring to dear Strabo who had long ago alluded to a connection between the name Samos and words for 'high' (Strab., Geo. 8.3.19) which, it turns out, are Semitic. Given its history, the naming of Samos is attributed therefore to Phoenicians and not to the counting proficiency of the Berber.

Odysseus, Uthuze and Utnapishtim

I've been dwelling the past few days on the origin of Etruscan words. Many words appear to be of Doric origin and then there are even older loanwords, it seems, showing Anatolian IE, West Semitic and Egyptian influence. On the topic of the origin of the Etruscan name, Uθuze (''ET Cy G.1'' and ''OI G.39''), we need only look to a borrowing from Greek Ὀδυσσεύς 'Odysseus'. Or so it seems.

Now, please forgive me, my readers, if I should tread on something that's already understood by everyone but me. However, on closer inspection of the aforementioned Greco-Etruscan connection, even if we should say that the name was borrowed from a Greek vocative form Odusseu, we can see that Greek voiced, unaspirated /d/ doesn't nicely become a voiceless aspirated /tʰ/ at all. We should rather expect Etruscan plain t. And thus, we trek through yet another etymological safari hunt.

Upon investigating the origin of Odysseus, we may find that the origin is spoken of vaguely as "uncertain". As far as I'm concerned, uncertain is one of the most disgusting words in the English language because it's such a common excuse for intellectual laziness. Why is it uncertain? Must it truly be uncertain?

In the Etruscan form, I can't help but be idly amused by Uθ- at the beginning which strongly reminds me of Sumerian utu 'sun'. This combined with a free-word association with Utnapishtim, the legendary Babylonian survivor of the World Flood, evokes a Sumerian name Utu-zi 'Life-breath of the sun' being readapted to Ut-napishtim (napishtim = 'life, breath') but still written in script using the Sumerograms UD-ZI^[1]. Things get complicated if we consider that the other corresponding Sumerian name normally cited, Zi-ud-sura, may be a "re-borrowing". That is to say, Sumerian Utu-zi 'Life-breath of the sun' would have become a partial calque Ut(a)-napishtim which would be reinterpreted by scribes and priests to mean 'he found (uta-) life-breath (napishtim)' (nb. the replacement of Sum. utu 'sun' with Bab. ūta 'found') and thus back into Sumerian with the reformulated Zi-ud-sura 'Life of long days', now implying a character who has found immortality. Odysseus' relationships to an underlying sun-god motif have already been noted in literature which is what made my synapses fire in the first place.

So I now wonder if this Sumerian name Utuzi reached Anatolia and the Aegean by the second millenium BCE in order to better explain the source of the Greek and Etruscan names.


NOTES
^[1] It seems that the journal Kairo (1987) has beaten me to the punch on that one (see link).

PIE "look-alike stems" - *(s)kerp- vs. *gʰrebʰ-

Based on Phoenix's latest entry on pairs of suspiciously similar Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stems (see Phoenix's Blog: #6 *(s)kerp- ~ *gʰrebʰ-), I discovered what I admittedly expected to eventually uncover - that these pairs are in part the product of early Proto-Semitic (PSem) loans in the neolithic Mid IE period and in part the product of phonotactic constraints imposed on stems that irregularly lost their *s- in the Late IE period, perhaps due to PIE speakers losing track of the true etymological source of these stems in the course of time.

I remember seeing a stem similar to *gʰrebʰ- somewhere in Proto-Semitic. As I've explained to Phoenix, I treat Nostratic works such as the sources of Allan Bomhard and John Kerns as helpful leads to potential IE-Semitic contact. Bare with me, since while I'm a kind of sympathist to the theory of Nostratic, I hardly believe that Bomhard and Kerns are completely on the ball with it and there are many series which they consider cognate but which I think are more likely more recent loans, particularly so when they list a supposed cognate series with only PIE and Proto-Semitic data to substantiate their reconstructions. Very suspicious indeed.

So, it's not surprising that I managed to find a lead in one of Bomhard and Kern's books (see Bomhard/Kerns, The Nostratic Macrofamily (1994), p.386) which compares PIE *gʰrebʰ- "to scratch" with a list of Semitic data which suggest a triliteral skeleton *grb. It just so happens that precisely this skeleton is explicitly listed in Murtonen, Hebrew in Its West Semitic Setting (1989), p.140 with accompanying attested forms in various Semitic languages and with semantics revolving around "itching".

This then leads me to wonder if the following hypothesis has meat:

PSem *garābu "to scratch" ~ *šagāribu "made to scratch; itchy"
↓
MIE *ɢaréba- "to scratch (tr.)" ~ *saɢérba- "to scratch (intr.)"
> early Late IE *ɢreb- ~ *sqerb-
> PIE *gʰrebʰ- ~ *(s)kerp-

Theoretically, the stemfinal *bʰ would devoice to *p in original *skerbʰ- once speakers of Indo-European no longer were consciously aware of the historical connection with *gʰrebʰ-, and this would especially occur after *s- came to be irregularly omitted and phonotactic "stop voicing harmony" pressures took over. Once the sibilant disappeared, it would be all too easy for even a native speaker to get confused between a historical phonetic [k] (an allophone of voiced *gʰ following a sibilant) and the homophonous phoneme *k. The confusion would be made more likely if this "optional" s-mobile as a fossilized foreign morpheme, as I continue to maintain, had never ever become a productive phoneme in Pre-IE or PIE as some PIEists still believe.

Still on the hunt for Semitic-PIE connections

I don't know why but I'm hooked on the eastern European Neolithic lately. Ever since I've overcome my denial that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Semitic (PSem) not only had linguistic and cultural contact with each other due to intercontinental trade between the Balkans and Anatolia but that these prehistoric contacts must have been significant enough to affect PIE in a way that linguists could only describe as "intensive contact" by all the markers linguists would use to define something as such, I've been on the neverending hunt for more evidence of Semitic loans in Proto-Indo-European. And not only that, but within the precise context of my pre-existing theory of Mid IE which I've independently arrived at by my own internal reconstruction of PIE proper. I was always dismayed by Allan Bomhard's ignorance of possible IE-Semitic loans in his rush to reconstruct Proto-Nostratic in Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996), but now I'm even more dismayed as I find other hints at this apparently extensive intercultural communication.

I think I've noticed another possible loan from PSem into PIE. Compare PIE *mesg- (possibly pronounced [mezɢ̰-]) "to dip in water"^[1] with PSem *māsiʔu, active participle of triliteral root *msʔ "to wash"^[2]. Interesting? I think so. The link would suggest that it entered Indo-European via Mid IE *mesg̃a-. The reinterpretation of Proto-Semitic glottal stop *ʔ as a creaky-voiced *g̃ by Mid IE speakers makes better sense if we theorize that word-medial glottal stops had already softened to a velar /h/ in Indo-European before contact with Semitic. I believe the other loans I identify in my pdf so far also suggest that this was the case. It all seems good but I admit there's one slight problem. Since I've already theorized that uvulars were only allophones of their velar counterparts at this stage, I've apparently treed myself into a logical pickle and I can't quite account for the source for the added uvularization (i.e. the velar stop is "non-palatalized" according to traditional PIE notation, thus according to the reinterpretation of the sound system I stand by, the *-g- in *mesg- would appear to be a uvular creaky-voiced stop). Hmmm, perhaps I'm still missing something in my theory. Exciting!


NOTES
^[1] Adams/Mallory, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (1997), p.160 (see link).
^[2] Greenfield/Paul/Stone/Pinnick, Al Kanfei Yonah: Collected Studies of Jonas C. Greenfield on Semitic Philology (1991), p.471 (see link).

Updates on Semitic loans in Mid IE

Here it is. A new version of my original pdf listing possible Proto-Semitic loans in an early stage of Proto-Indo-European. Hopefully, many of the errors in the first draft have been ironed out to everyone's satisfaction.

SemiticPreIEloan_20080820.pdf

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As always, नमस्ते.

The so-called imitative status of PIE *pneu- "to sneeze"

I don't have a lot of time to talk, folks, so I'll be brief about something bugging me lately. Recently, Bradshaw of the Future wrote in the article Sneeze and pneumatic about the origin of "sneeze" in PIE *pneu- calling it an imitative root. This is in fact a common description of this Indo-European root. However the question I'm posing here is: How do we really know that this is an imititative root?

The cold truth is that we don't. We only assume this to be true because of the semantic nature of the verb. So we should be cautious to distinguish solid facts from these sorts of unverified or unverifiable assumptions. I mean, I don't know about any of you, but personally my sneezes never sound anything close to "pneu".

I've been exploring an alternative origin of this word, not from an echoic origin, but rather as a possible Semitic loan. I've mentioned before in Pre-IE Syncope and possibly expanding the Metathesis rule that there may be some loans from Proto-Semitic that exhibit word-initial metathesis of consonants in PIE after experiencing the event of Syncope. Metathesis is one common tactic for renormalizing syllable structures after awkward clustering is caused by the disappearance of unstressed vowels. Such metathesis is guided by a universal rule in world languages known as sonorancy hierarchy. Certain clusters are universally avoided such as *rp- or *bft- for example. So if it's generally accepted that Pre-IE must have undergone Syncope, then it's naturally implied that awkward clusters like this should have occasionally arose and that there must have been a mechanism in place to restructure these roots.

So in that light, here's yet another hypothetical Semitic loan path to discuss amongst ourselves:

Proto-Semitic *napāḥu "to blow" → Mid IE *napéwa-

This would then become late MIE *nᵊpéwᵊ- (via Reduction) and then *pneu- by early Late IE via phonotactically motivated Metathesis in order to avoid the less desirable outcome of **npeu-.

Enjoy that thought. I know I do.

Ejective or Pharyngealized Stops in Proto-Semitic?

An interesting side-effect of obsessing over these correspondances between Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Semitic (PSem) is that I've been noticing some potentially interesting and very minute details about Proto-Semitic pronunciation. There's one issue that's starting to get me excited involving the exact nature of “emphatic” stops.

From what little I've admittedly read on Proto-Semitic, my understanding so far is that emphatic stops are considered to have originally been either ejective stops (as in Amharic) or pharyngealized stops (as in Arabic). Regardless of which one they were, they apparently derive from the ejective stops of Proto-Afro-Asiatic, the ancestral proto-parent of the Semitic, Egyptian, Chadic, Cushitic and Berber languages. Interestingly, the Mid IE correspondances that I've identified so far seem to suggest to me that, rather than having ejectives stops, Proto-Semitic had pharyngealized stops as in modern Arabic. The reason why I think this regards equations like PSem *ḥāniṭu “ripening” based on the triliteral verb root *ḥnṭ “to ripen” (c.f. *ḥinṭu “wheat, barley”) and Mid IE (MIE) *xénda “to blossom” (> PIE *h₂endʰ-).

To an Indo-Europeanist or Nostraticist who may be simultaneously of the belief of both a Glottalic IE and a Glottalic Semitic, the two words may be associated only with some difficulty despite congruent semantics because PIE *dʰ is supposed to be underlyingly plain /d/ while Semitic emphatic *ṭ is presumed to be an ejective /tʼ/. However, I don't think this is the only rational option.

As stated earlier on my blog, I've come to the conclusion that MIE's inherited ejective stops had already deglottalized to stops with creaky voice, opposing the plain-voiced stops (i.e. The ones traditionally written with superscript “h”). In other words, I believe there was an intermediary stage lasting from the Mid IE period to well into Fragmenting PIE when the traditionally-described “plain stops” (or rather, the “ejective stops” of the Glottalic Theory camp) were in fact creaky voiced stops (i.e. half-voiced stops). Thus, even if PSem had ejective stops, MIE speakers should be expected to find more native approximates to these foreign sounds. And indeed, this appears to be the case from the examples I've shared so far in my continuously edited pdf of Semitic loans in PIE.

However, we still have problems equating these two aforementioned lexemes if one remains resolute in this adapted belief that MIE had creaky-voiced stops while PSem had ejective ones since it's hard to explain away such a phonetically implausible replacement of an entirely unvoiced ejective stop with a creaky voiced stop by any innocent speaker no matter how foreign they may be to the exotic sound of ejective stops. Yet, if we allow our minds to consider the possibility of pharyngealized emphatics in Proto-Semitic where concurrent voicing would still be possible, albeit delayed a moment after stop closure, then the mystery of the equivalence between MIE *d /d/ and PSem *ṭ /t^ʕ/ in the above example immediately disappears. In fact, elegantly so if I do say so myself (and I will because I'm playfully cocky that way). This can also explain what would otherwise be problematic correspondances regarding MIE creaky-voiced *g̃(ʷ) and PSem *q (if /k^ʕ/) as in the example of PSem *qawāmu “to rise up” vs. PIE *gʷem- “to come”.

Determining typical forms behind Semitic verbal loans in Pre-IE

If one looks to Norman French and Middle English as a typical example of intense linguistic contacts between two historical languages in order to understand better the Proto-Semitic and Proto-IE contacts during the Neolithic, one may notice that only a small number of verbal forms in French loans typically surface in English. For example, many verbs were simply borrowed from the presentive form (c.f. French (il) part vs. English to part). However there are also many verbs which were borrowed into English based on French infinitives (c.f. French rendre vs. English to render which fossilizes the infinitive ending in -re).

Given that, I start to wonder if maybe it would be more organized on my part to compare Semitic and PIE verbs according to only a few specific verbal forms. So I've been thinking about how to answer the question “If I were to pick only two Proto-Semitic verb forms as sources of PIE loans, which would I pick that would fit most or all of the data the best?”

Based on the handy Semitic Binyanim pdf, my answer at this point would now have to be: 1) the nominative-declined active participle of the shape *CāCiCu and 2) the nominative-declined infinitive of the form *CaCāCu. This could account for almost all Semitic verbal loans that pop up in Mid IE, if we assume that Mid IE speakers simply ignored vocalic length (i.e. interpreting both PSem *a and *ā as MIE *e), that MIE employed a fixed penultimate accent, and that the rule of Proto-Semitic accent by contrast was that it was to be either placed on the first available non-wordfinal “heavy syllable” (i.e. CV: or CVC) from left-to-right or on the initial syllable by default. Predictably, the irregular essive verb *yiθ (becoming PIE *h₁es-) would be an outlier from this general pattern and “to be” is a rather oddball verb cross-linguistically speaking.

So, I guess I need to update my SemiticPreIEloans.pdf document on esnips to reflect this. I hope that sounds a bit more organized than what I've been saying so far. Little by little, I'm gettin' there hopefully. Cross fingers.

What do I "know"?

Both Mehri wēda and Akkadian wadū (variant of idū) make it uncertain whether it's appropriate to reconstruct *w- or *y- as the first radical of the Proto-Semitic (PSem) triliteral meaning “to know”^[1].

Considering the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *weid-, it's just too tempting to wonder if there's a connection. If the original PSem root had *w-, then it would predictably become *y- in Western Semitic languages as is the case with other Iw-verbs like *wθb “to sit”.

The question is: What, if any, PSem form can plausibly account for the semantics and phonetics of the PIE root if this was indeed a Neolithic loanword? So I've been consulting a handy pdf called Semitic Binyanim for a hint at a sturdy answer. One form that may fit could be the active G-stem participle which is reconstructed to be of the vocalic structure of CāCiC-. So in theory, I'd then expect *wādiʕ- “knowing” and this would be one option to explain the PIE root, if correctly formed that is, since PSem *ā appears to correlate with PIE *ei also in the equation of PSem *θalāθi = PIE *treis “three”. I really need to find an in-depth book on Proto-Semitic grammar though...


NOTES
^[1] Bibliographic Bulletin (1982), University of Virginia, p.193 (see link).

A list of possible Proto-Semitic loanwords in PIE

I decided to get organized and produce a pdf that I plan on updating as new information comes forth concerning Proto-Semitic (PSem) loanwords in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Hopefully, if anything, it will provoke interesting discussion or cause one to ponder on the exact cultural and linguistic relationship between Proto-Semitic and Proto-Indo-European during the Neolithic... or perhaps disgust and ire from the peanut gallery. Oh well, it's worth a try:

SemiticPreIEloans_20080817.pdf

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Kook alert: Rhaetic is now a Semitic language?

Here's something to add to the "crazy folder". The 2007 article in this pdf that I came across yesterday is entitled Rhaetic: An extinct Semitic language in Central Europe by Professors Dr. Alfréd Tóth and Dr. Linus Brunner. The claim should look suspicious to even moderately educated readers from the start but even if one is temporarily lured by these doctorate-bedecked authors, the ludicrous translations that these highly imaginative but weakly methodical sorts typically produce betrays the rather lengthy historical preface they go through all in order to add credibility to the hopeless translations that follow:

reit[i] emuiu thinake
"My Ritu, I have given firewood." (page 74)

la [e]ste phutikhinu
"Estu, don't kill us!" (page 77)

la sbaphi rimaki nageki khašikhanu epetav
“Don’t dry out my bath; we need your help; I give berries (fruits?).” (pages 79 & 80)

Must I go on? It's good for a laugh. Thankfully even these documents serve a purpose as a kind of "intellectual shibboleth" since scholars who cite these nonsensical works for anything other than an example of undiagnosed psychological disorder are likewise probably not dealing with a full deck of cards. Life is short. Let's not make it shorter with craziness, okay people?

How long was the contact between Pre-IE and Proto-Semitic?

It's cloudy and rainy today in Winnipeg. So since I can't suntan, it's a perfect day for more rants about Pre-IE! Hooray!

In a previous post entitled Semitic and IE in the Neolithic: How intensive was the language contact?, I began to wonder how important the contact was between these two language groups. I can't help to this day that there is much much more to this topic than understood so far by current linguists. I'm going to dare to push this topic further however by assuming that the Semitic-PIE language contact indeed was intensive and by now trying to ascertain the duration of the contact in terms of date range. Now that I've made my pdf of my theories on Pre-IE, I want to make it more accurate.

I figure that 5800 BCE is as good a time as any for this contact to have started since this is the heart of the Neolithic and, archaeologically speaking, there is ample evidence showing cultural contact between people of the Near East and those of Eastern Europe by this time. Within the context of my theory, this is the Mid IE period preceding the rule of Syncope by several generations. Let's assume for now that these are the upper bounds of contact (until I find reasons to move the start date, that is).

I forgot that, in my aforementioned article, if I'm correct that Semitic *gádyu "kid" is specifically loaned into Late IE as *gä́id̰ə-, rather than into Mid IE where we would have rather expected **géid̰a- based on its theorized vowel inventory (as well as other loans showing the same vocalic sound correspondence), then this provides a new lower bounds of circa 4800 BCE of this contact. In early Late IE, I've already felt the need to propose an extra low-front vowel *ä that arises just before Syncope due to a deletion of some pretonic laryngeals (e.g. late MIE *mᵊxéd̰ᵊ- > early Late IE *mäd̰- > PIE *mad- "to be moist, to be drunk"). So this extra vowel in the system would explain the later vocalism in *a (PIE *ǵʰáido-) which I can't currently explain with Mid IE phonology.

This is something else I have to change in my current pdf on Pre-IE sound changes apparently.

Checkmate has me 'at a loss'

I have to give a plug to the blog Bradshaw of The Future who recently wrote about the origin of the word "checkmate" and then added further to this interesting etymological puzzle by writing a follow-up entry.

Excellent and thorough work done, congrats. I've been a chess buff since I was still in gradeschool which fortunately had its own chess club. I've been hooked by the intricate logic of the boundless game ever since. So I always had assumed that checkmate meant "the king is dead" and was from Arabic. I had read that the "mate" part was from Arabic mat 'dead', which ultimately comes from the Semitic root structure *[mwt]. The Semitic root in turn has an Afro-Asiatic cognate in Egyptian also as mwt (presumably pronounced *māwat, hence Sahidic Coptic mou). It all seemed airtight and my normally curious mind never revisited the issue again.

Well, it turns out that it may very well be from Persian and instead means 'the king is at a loss', not 'dead', as the blogauthor of Bradshaw of The Future goes to the effort of pointing out.

Semitic and IE in the Neolithic: How intensive was the language contact?

Okay, let's tackle this issue once and for all. The "borrowing hierarchy" mentioned in Elsik and Matras' Markedness and Language Change: The Romani Sample (2006) has got my mind turning and churning ever since I read about it. While I was always aware of the widely accepted early IE-Semitic contacts^[1] and presumed that it was the result of direct contact, I never thought about quantifying the level of contact between these two protolanguages until this past year. That is to say, whether it was a light contact or whether it was an "intensive" contact one shade removed from creolization. Despite the naysaying nihilist badnewsbears who say the past can never be figured out, I for one have no interest in desperate people's grandiose and arrogant prophecies about what our human species somehow cannot know in the future. I want to know exactly what happened. Scientific inquiry is about asking questions and seeking answers and those who say "I give up!" should be left behind in the dirt to rot in their depression.

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About the borrowing hierarchy

The borrowing hierarchy presented here prioritizes which kinds of words are more likely to be borrowed in a language depending on the intensity of contact. So let's start with verbs. It's suggested on page 320 of Markedness and Language Change that the following borrowing hierarchy exists:

content verbs > modal verbs > existential verbs

So what this is saying is that verbs from general vocabulary (content verbs) are likely to be borrowed first before other verbs that express moods such as "can", "would", etc. If contact is intensive enough we should even observe borrowed verbs denoting existence such as "to be". Later on in the same page of this book, it specifies the hierarchy followed by nouns:

content noun > pronoun

So again, we expect ordinary nouns borrowed into a language before loaned pronouns find their way into a language. If we see a borrowed pronoun, it can be a sign of rather intensive language contact, as happened in Old English when the language borrowed the Norse pronoun "they". To add to this, I personally suspect that third person pronouns are more likely to be borrowed from one language to the next than first or second person pronouns and I might be tempted to modify the chain to: content noun > 3p pronoun > 1p/2p pronoun. But I digress. That assertion isn't important to the evidence I'm about to shamelessly suggest to demonstrate intensive contacts between an early stage of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Semitic (PSem) around 5500 BCE.

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Evidence for intensive contacts between Proto-IE & Proto-Semitic

As already explained with a footnote, the idea that early Proto-IE speakers and Proto-Semitic speakers were in contact with each other isn't controversial, but debate continues on as to how, where and when they were in contact with each other. The neolithic is really the most sensible time for this to have occurred since it gives widening trade as a motive for this cultural and linguistic exchange. The how is clear then: growing trading networks in the Neolithic and exchange of goods. The relations at this time between the Balkans and Syria are reflected firmly in archaeology which show commonalities in ceramics and material culture. However, Neolithic trade only gives us a window between 6000 and 4000 BCE, so as far as I'm concerned, the precise "when" is too obvious to feign confusion. The matter of where this contact occurred continues to be a senseless debate, egged on by sensationalists like Ivanov and Gamkrelidze who attempt desperately to place Indo-European in Anatolia. It doesn't fly. The least controversial hypothesis is that PIE was centered around modernday Ukraine and there's no reason to rebel against this economical view. However, it must be understood that if this contact started a millenium or more before PIE proper, there's no guarantee that earlier stages of the language existed further to the south as I suggested earlier for the stage of PIE I refer to as Mid IE (MIE).
So let's get straight to the chase and start mapping the possible loans from PSem into PIE and see how intensive this contact might have been:

content verbs:

PSem *šáðrawu 'he causes to scatter (caus.)' (root *[ðrw])
=> PIE *streu- 'to scatter' (via MIE *satréwa-)

modal verbs:

(?)

existential verbs:

PSem *yiθ 'there is'
=> PIE *ʔes- 'to be' (via MIE *es-)

PSem *báwiʔu 'it is come (stat.)'
=> (?) PIE *bʰeuh₂- 'to appear, to become' (via MIE *béuxa-)

content nouns:

PSem *θáwru 'bull'
=> PIE *táuro- (via early Late IE *tä́urə-)

PSem *gádyu 'kid, young goat'
=> PIE *ǵʰáido- 'goat' (via early Late IE *gä́id̰ə-)

PSem *sábʕatum 'seven'
=> PIE *septḿ̥ (via MIE *séptam)

pronouns:

PSem *šu 'him, himself'
=> PIE *swe 'oneself' (via MIE *sʷa).

So I hope you all enjoy these ideas. I'm still stuck on finding an example for "modal verbs" because PIE morphology expressed mood by way of inflection not seperate words but I'll be continuing to adapt my argument in the future. If I goofed up on the Semitic verbal forms, please let me know and correct me because I had to derive them from their root forms and I'm more familiar with IE and Aegean languages than Proto-Semitic which I've sadly neglected far too long.

NOTES
^[1] Hock/Joseph, Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics (1996), p.513 (see link): "Given the evidence of 'bull' and other pastoral/agricultural words in western Indo-European languages that are likely to be borrowed from Semitic or Afro-Asiatic, one may begin to wonder whether the western Indo-European agricultural words for 'field', 'plough', and 'sow, seed' may likewise owe their origin to Semitic or Afro-Asiatic influence. Archeologists find much evidence indicating that many important aspects of European agriculture, perhaps even all of agriculture, spread from the ancient Near East."

UPDATES
(Mar 19 2008) I decided to throw PSem *báwiʔu and PIE *bʰeuh₂- into the list as a point of discussion. The verb 'to become' is considered an existential verb in the cited book, and hence would be more evidence of the strongest kind of language contact. I add a question mark here because I'm undecided as to which of two competing proposals work best. Nostraticists often link PIE *bʰeuh₂- to Uralic *puxi 'tree' with an underlying meaning of 'to grow up from the ground' and hence later 'to appear' and 'to become' in PIE. This is plausible and I must admit that in order to establish a clear link between the PIE and PSem words, the fact that the laryngeals are incongruent (i.e. a glottal stop in PSem but a uvular fricative in PIE) needs to be addressed. Otherwise however there is an alluring semantic and phonetic link between the two that would postdate the etymology that many Nostraticists provide. So chew on that for a while. ;)

Proto-Semitic as a second language

This will be something to ponder for the weekend. It's another crazy idea I had that may not be so crazy. Let me just first spit out the revelation I'm having and I'll explain it all afterwards.

I will start with the claim that Proto-Semitic originated from the Syria-Palestine area^[1], rather than from Southern Arabia as has been so often claimed. Then, considering the well-known fact that Neolithic innovations originated from Western Asia and only later spread into Europe, I'm going to suggest that Proto-Semitic speakers were not only people with agricultural know-how, but that their language became a vibrant trading language well beyond their immediate area. What I'm suggesting is that multilingualism was not only common during the Neolithic but even vital for communities and their material well-being. I don't know why I didn't clue in before, but if Proto-Semitic speakers were ahead of everyone in terms of technology, naturally their language too might become a hot commodity. And if knowing that language was in demand for trade, then it follows that there were large areas surrounding the immediate Proto-Semitic language area where people would have adopted Proto-Semitic as a second language!

Think about it now. Around 5500 BCE, speakers of "Mid Indo-European" (MIE), ancestral to later Proto-Indo-European (PIE), might have been situated further into the Balkans to take advantage of goods coming in from the south, perhaps along the coastline, and these people would have been at least semi-fluent in Proto-Semitic in order to communicate with the incoming traders. (I mean, how else could they likely communicate with each other other than becoming bilingual?) The Syria-Palestine area was afterall a center for agriculture and we know that there are words in Proto-Semitic relating to agriculture as the American Heritage Dictionary explains in detail: "There are many Proto-Semitic terms referring to agriculture, which was a significant source of livelihood. Words for basic farming activities are well represented: fields (*ḥaql-) were plowed (*ḥrθ), sown (*ðrʕ), and reaped (*ʕƛd); grain was trampled or threshed (*dyš) and winnowed (*ðrw) on a threshing floor (*gurn-), and ground (*t’ḥn) into flour (*qamḥ-)." As for multilingualism in ancient communities, this shouldn't be much of a shocker considering the examples of Quechua and Swahili. Multilingualism was much more common in ancient times than we often appreciate.

My idea hopefully will raise mindteasing issues concerning the loanwords in PIE. Are they really the product of direct Proto-Semitic contact or is it even more direct than I thought. That is, are these loanwords rather the natural result of generations of bilingual speakers of both languages? Bilingual interference like this happens all the time and I can speak with authority on that, being bilingual, that it is a common tendency for two languages that reside in your brain to jumble together sometimes, producing spontaneous loanwords. I remember the time I accidentally blurted out the word *distach instead of detach while talking to a friend. I realize now that this was because of a subconscious mental association between the French prefix dé(s)- and English de- or dis-. Even though my native language is English, French obviously had an affect on me. It only took a second for my tongue to say it, but hours to reflect on the implications of my dysphasic faux pas. Unlike in the modern age of grammatical simulacra, there would be no anal-retentive grammarian in the Neolithic to stop a bilingual person whose mother language was PIE from slipping up now and then, using a Semitic word for a PIE word that he or she may have momentarily forgot. It would only be a matter of time for the products of this language switching to become normalized in a community and spread to neighbouring communities.

I have tonnes more ideas on this, such as the "borrowing hierarchy" issues in relation to intensive language contact which were brought up in Elsik and Matras' Markedness and Language Change: The Romani Sample (2006) which I cited in an earlier post, but I'll just have to take this one blogpost at a time. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in... Hehe.

NOTES
^[1] Lipinski, Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar (2001), p.43 (see link): "Since the Semitic languages go apparently back to a common origin, the question of the location of the speakers of this Proto-Semitic language has been often considerederd of importance. Various regions have been taken into account: Syria, Arabia, and Africa." Sadly, Lipinski seems to overrely on geographical names to draw a conclusion about the likelihood of Semitic speakers in Syria. He seems here to be ignoring or is ignorant of the important issue of Semitic loanwords in PIE altogether.

UPDATES
(March 14 2008) I should just clarify something just in case people incorrectly add two plus two together to make five. The graphic above is not meant to endorse in any way the "Out-of-Anatolia" fringe hypothesis promoted by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, which is in my view assuredly wrong. I've been convinced by Alan Bomhard's view that Indo-European originally came off the steppelands of Western Asia from the east. However, I'm tossing around a new idea that Late IE was largely an offshoot of northern Mid IE dialects (although I haven't the foggiest idea how I could prove this!).