PIE ablaut & Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[Carol F. Justus]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

>=======================
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>mcv at wxs.nl

>cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) wrote:

>>A major reason for doing exhaustive studies of Hittite 'know' and other verbs
>>such ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'eat' was to explore the ablaut types in Hittite that
>>differed from e.g., es-/as- 'be'. At that time I noted (pp. 14-16 on
>>etymology) just a few etymological relations. The major one was the
>>comparison with the singular:plural alternation of the old perfect (vida:
>>vidma, wait:witum etc.) suggesting that Hittite 'know' might be
>>grammatically cognate, albeit not formally cognate, with the IE pattern.

>>An oddity which looked even older was the one with Latin sum, sumus, sunt:
>>es, est, estis that had a parallel in Hittite uhhi, umeni, uwanzi : auti,
>>auszi, aummeni, autteni 'see'. Then (as now) there were phonological
>>explanations for the 'sum' set, but the fact that Hittite 'see' showed such
>>a similar patterning raised questions in my mind as to whether the
>>phonological explanation of the Latin forms might not be ad hoc, that these
>>two (independent?) groupings of a 1sg, 1pl, and 3pl together with zero
>>grade-like forms as opposed to 2sg, 3sg, and 2pl full grade forms might not
>>reflect something almost totally lost to us.

>>In that context the sg:pl alternation looked like a reanalysis or leveling
>>of an older pattern on a basis (sg vs. pl) that we still understand.

>That's an interesting possibility.  However, it is difficult to
>see what 1sg, 1pl and 3pl might have had in common from an
>accentual point of view.  The singular/plural split, on the other
>hand, makes good sense in that respect: the plural forms had one
>extra syllable ("plural" *-en-), which may have caused the accent
>to shift one syllable to the right.

>Also, if *o derives from **a:, as I have proposed, the Hittite
>a/e ablaut in the hi-conjugation can be seen as old, and be
>derived by the rule that unaccented *a: (in the plural) is
>shortened to *a (> *e), while accented *a: (in the singular)
>remains and becomes *o (Hitt. /a/).  Shortened *e in the plural
>may have attracted the accent secondarily in Hittite (so it
>remained as /e/), while in the other IE languages it may have
>stayed unaccented and therefore suffered further reduction to
>zero (o/zero Ablaut in the PIE perfect).

Oops! I just noticed that I incorrectly translated 'eat' for Hittite
ak(k)-ek(k)- 'drink' in my earlier message. It was a lapse conditioned by
the fact that 'eat' is another one that ablauts in Hittite.

If the Hittite /a/ of 'know' corresponds to Greek perfect /o/, then it
corresponds nicely with the perfect meaning often associated with 'know'.
Are you suggesting that Greek perfect /o/ was also originally **a? Is **a
different from *a and hence responsible for the Latin and Greek distinction
between /a/ and /o/?

Besides the clearly relic pattern of Hittite 'see' (comparable with Latin
sum), Hittite has the a/e pattern of 'know' (/e/ only in the 2pl) but also
the pattern e/a of 'be' (/a/ only in the 3pl). Are you suggesting that
these are two different accentual patterns.

I don't recall what Craig Melchert (book 1994?) and Sara Kimball (various
articles with her book appearing any day now in Meid's Innsbruck series)
have done with these, although I do know that Sara has incorporated the
evidence from plene writings in Hittite as evidence for PIE accentual and
length correspondences.

Carol Justus