29.454, Review: Indo-European; Historical Linguistics: Olsen, Hansen, Whitehead, Olander (2017)

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Subject: 29.454, Review: Indo-European; Historical Linguistics: Olsen, Hansen, Whitehead, Olander (2017)

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Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 14:01:00
From: Nicholas Zair [naz21 at cam.ac.uk]
Subject: Etymology and the European Lexicon

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-2264.html

EDITOR: Bjarne Simmelkjaer Sandgaard Hansen
EDITOR: Benedicte Nielsen Whitehead
EDITOR: Thomas  Olander
EDITOR: Birgit Anette Olsen
TITLE: Etymology and the European Lexicon
SUBTITLE: Proceedings of the 14th Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, 17-22 September 2012, Copenhagen
PUBLISHER: ISD, Distributor of Scholarly Books
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Nicholas Zair, University of Cambridge

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

“Etymology and the European Lexicon” is a  volume of collected papers given at
the 2012 edition of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft’s regular 4-yearly
general conference (with the exception of one contribution which was not given
at the conference, Andrew Miles Byrd’s ‘The rules of reconstruction: making
our etymologies more grounded’, 81-91). Full disclosure: I attended the
conference, but did not submit an article for this proceedings. It includes 43
papers in English and German, far too many to summarise the contents of here.
Despite the title, contributions are not restricted to narrow discussions of
etymology, nor indeed to the European lexicon (articles cover the Anatolian,
Tocharian and Indo-Iranian languages/language families, as well as Albanian,
Italic, Armenian, Balto-Salvic, Germanic, Greek, and Proto-Indo-European
itself - henceforth PIE). It is instead a sort of omnium-gatherum of topics
which were at the forefront of Indo-Europeanists’ minds in 2012 (and somewhat
afterwards: the latest reference I noted in the bibliography was to an item
published in 2015). 

Articles proposing etymologies of an individual word or words include: Václav
Blažek, ‘On Indo-European Barley’, 53-67; Petr Kocharov, ‘The etymology of
Arm. mart’ ‘possible’’, 209-17; Marek Majer, ‘The etymology of Proto-Slavic
*nizъ ‘down(wards)’ and similar forms in other branches’, 267-80; Michaël
Peyrot, ‘Language contact in Central Asia: on the etymology of Tocharian B
yolo ‘bad’’, 327-35; Brent Vine, ‘Latin gingīva and salīva’, 479-89; Andreas
Willi, ‘kakós and kalós’, 505-13. I will now list other major themes which
appear in the book. 

The identification and influence of substrate languages/languages in contact
with (Proto-) Indo-European, including: Harald Bichlmayer, ‘Was kann man an
lexikalischen und orphologischen Elementen aus dem Namenschatz der sogenannten
»alteuropäischen Hydronomie« gewinnen? Ein Zwischenbericht’, 37-51; Adam
Hyllested, ‘Again on pigs in ancient Europe: the Fennic connection’, 183-196;
Corinna Leschber, ‘On the stratification of substratum languages’, 235-50;
Biliana Mihaylova, ‘The Pre-Greek substratum revisited’, 307-17; Roland
Schumann, ‘Where is the substrate in the Germanic lexicon?’, 377-84; Theo
Venneman, ‘Nicht-indogermanische Spuren vorgeschichtlicher Wirtschaftsformen
im toponymischen Lexikon Mitteleuropas: Seen des Salzkammerguts und Ardennen’,
443-58.

The origin and semantics of derivational morphology in PIE and its daughter
languages, including: Katsiaryna Ackermann, ‘Investigating internal ways of
lexicon expansion in early PIE: observations on IE roots with potential *bh
extension’, 1-13; Davide Bertocci, ‘High-transitivity nasal presents between
lexical etymology and morphology’, 25-36;  Paul S, Cohen, ‘Reduplicated nouns
in IE’, 119-34; Hannes A. Fellner & Laura Grestenberger, ‘Greek and Latin
verbal governing compounds in * ā and their prehistory’, 135-149; Jay H.
Jasanoff, ‘PIE *weyd- ‘notice’ and the origin of the thematic aorist’,
197-208; Norbert Oettinger, ‘Die Wechsel-Ø/n- und -i/n im Rahmen der
indogermanischen Heteroklisie’, 319-26; Stefan Schumacher, ‘The development of
the PIE middle in Albanian’, 385-400.

The position in the PIE language family of Tocharian and Anatolian: José
Virgilio García Trabazo, ‘Zum indogermanischen und anatolischen Wortschatz der
»materiellen Kultur« und seine Relevanz zur Chronologie der
»nach-anatolischen« dialektalen Spaltungen’, 161-8; Melanie Malzahn, ‘The
second one to branch off? The Tocharian lexicon revisited’, 281-92; H. Craig
Melchert, ‘“Western affinities” of Anatolian’, 297-305.

Semantics: Bettina Bock, ‘Rekonstruktion von Semantik’, 69-80; Antje Casaretto
& Carolin Schneider, ‘The relationship between etymology and semantics of
local particles in the Rigveda’, 105-18; Rosemarie Lühr, ‘Basiskonzepte’,
251-66.

EVALUATION

The book is well-produced, and includes several very high-quality diagrams and
images in black and white and colour (most notably the maps on 444ff). I
noticed a small number of typos throughout, and also a number of ‘non-native
speaker-isms’ in the English articles; neither of which affect the
comprehension of the articles nor the pleasure of reading them. The type, as
usual in this series produced by Ludwig Reichert, is rather small, making the
footnotes even smaller, which elderly eyes or underpowered spectacles may not
appreciate. 
Overall, my impression is that the quality of article in this collection is
reasonably high, given its unfocussed nature and its origin in a large
conference which aims to bring attendees from around the world together more
than to discriminate finely among their contributions. A handful tend towards
recapitulations of the authors’ previous work, or surveys of other authors’
views on a particular problem, without much new analysis. A less kind-hearted
group of editors might have jettisoned these.

My own interests and abilities do not allow me to comment on every article in
this wide-ranging collection. In the rest of this review I will make some
comments on topics and articles that seemed to me particularly striking.

I begin with the remarkable number of articles on the identification of
(Proto-Indo-European or otherwise) substrate languages mentioned above; a
perennial, but not normally quite so popular, topic. This may partly be the
result of the emphasis put on his version of the notional ‘Pre-Greek’ language
in recent publications by Beekes (2010: xii-xlii, 2014): Mihaylova’s article
explicitly intends to show that ‘Pre-Greek’ was an Indo-European language,
contra Beekes’ view that it was not. These articles are split between those
who attempt to identify substrate features, with varying degrees of
carefulness and restraint (notably Bichlmeyer, Leschber, Mihaylova, Venneman)
and Schumann, who argues that supposed examples of ‘substrate’ vocabulary in
Germanic can be etymologised perfectly well as coming regularly from
Indo-European elements in the normal way. This puts the finger on the general
problem involved in identifying lexical items of an unknown language borrowed
into a known language: what words to pick and what to compare them with. One
person’s unetymologisable word, and hence substrate borrowing, is another
person’s inherited Indo-European formation, either because the linguistic
understanding of the development of Indo-European languages increases over
time, or because of differing views on this development. 

Leschber’s article demonstrates the comparison problem. After a rather
unsceptical tour of ‘old linguistic strata’ in Europe and beyond, she puts
forward four Balkan etyma as borrowings from a substrate. Thus, she compares
Romanian mal ‘mountain, hill; shore coast’ and Albanian mal ‘hill’ to
“formally and semantically similar” words in Basque, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic,
north Caucasian and Dravidian languages. But the formal similarity seems to
consist of a shape mVl- (where V = a vowel), with no attempt to provide a
morphological  analysis of the words quoted; given such a wide variety of
languages to choose from and the vagueness of the semantics, it is almost
surprising that she could not find more forms to quote. These problems are
reminiscent of those that attend attempts to identify ‘long-range’ language
relationships (on which see, for example, Ringe 1999 and Campbell & Poser
2008:  234-296). Indeed, Leschber draws on the resources of those who advocate
for such relationships, while remaining vague herself about the exact status
of her four Balkan words.     

Mihaylova’s article is more restrained, and hence more convincing. She aims to
isolate the 23 most plausible lexemes which demonstrate the existence of an
Indo-European ‘Pre-Greek’ language, which show a number of consistent sound
changes. Many of these are well-known and do indeed look extremely tempting,
e.g. púrgos ‘tower’ next to German Burg ‘castle’ < *bherĝh , ómbros ‘storm of
rain’ beside Latin imber ‘rain’. But similar problems emerge: the semantic
similarity may be overly broad, e.g. ámbōn ‘crest of a hill’ beside Old High
German amban ‘belly’, Latin umbo ‘boss (of a shield)’. Different etymological
analyses may be available, now or in the future, e.g. ákhnē ‘chaff’ is derived
from *ak-nē, with a Pre-Greek development of *k > *kh by Mihaylova; but a
Greek etymology *ak-snē is equally plausible and would also give ákhnē. The
very process of choosing the words is problematic: ideally, languages show
regular sound-changes across the lexicon - if one is allowed to choose a very
small number of words out of the mass of unetymologised Greek words and leave
the rest aside, it is perhaps not surprising that one can find a number of
apparent ‘sound changes’ that they have in common. Moreover, a worrying number
of examples are attested only in Hesychius, a fifth century AD collection of
unusual words primarily from Greek dialects, but also from a number of other
languages, known from a single fifteenth century manuscript, whose evidential
value is problematic. 

Turning away from substrates, Byrd, in his article on ‘The rules of
reconstruction’ states that “we should always ask ourselves: could the native
speakers of the language in question actually have pronounced the sounds that
we reconstruct for their language?” (81), and that “PIE, like all languages,
possessed a grammar. A synchronic grammar” (85). It should be acknowledged
that this hyper-realist approach is not one taken by all scholars in the field
(compare, e.g. Clackson 2007: 16-17), for whom ‘reconstructed PIE’ “may have
some features in common with the spoken IE parent language, but it is not the
same as it, and it is not a real language”. For those who take a more
sceptical view of the ‘reality’ of PIE, Byrd’s strictures are likely to be of
less importance.  Nonetheless, his proposed rules of good etymology are
thought-provoking. Part of these is a reluctance to reconstruct sequences of
phonemes which are reconstructed for paradigmatic/etymological reasons without
being (directly or indirectly) attested in a daughter language. Of this type
he argues that one can use a principle of ‘similarity’ in reconstructing
sequences: thus, although not directly attested in this form, we can
reconstruct *bzd- ‘fart softly’, due to its differing only in voice from
*pst-, which is securely attested in *pster  ‘sneeze’ and *psten  ‘breast,
nipple’. This is a plausible approach, but it must be used carefully; for
example, it seems clear that in PIE /m/ was less sonorous than /n/ (some of
the evidence for this can be found in Cooper 2013: 11-12). Consequently, we
cannot assume that evidence for a sequence involving /n/ will necessarily
support the reconstruction of a similar sequence involving its fellow nasal
/m/. 

Paolo Poccetti, ‘The Italic words for ‘moon/month’ and ‘sun’: new evidence
from the Sabellian languages’, 354-63, provides the text of a recently
discovered Oscan inscription and argues both that it contains the word for
‘sun’ (suleis) and that the adjective minnaris, as part of the name of a
religious festival, is derived from the word for ‘moon’. It should be noted
that the inscription he provides as a parallel for his analysis is Cp 30 in
Rix (2002), rather than Cp 29 as printed (354). Although the argumentation he
provides for the meaning ‘sun’ is strong, I am not entirely convinced:  the
context is not entirely certain, and such a form causes phonological problems.
It looks like an exact counterpart of Latin sol ‘sun’, which is best
reconstructed as *sōwol, although *sāwōl is also conceivable. Neither of these
would be expected to give Oscan suleis, since intervocalic *w is not lost in
Oscan. Poccetti’s suggestion that both forms come from *sh2wōl > *swōl
requires a starting form which does not fit with the known evidence for the
paradigm of this word in PIE (Zair 2010/11 [2012]: 210-11), and does not
address the problem that *sw- is normally retained in Oscan, as shown by e.g.
svai ‘if’. An alternative possibility that suleis goes back to *sh2ul- > sūl-
is more plausible (it would then be identical to Old Irish súil ‘eye’, which
is generally assumed to have undergone a semantic shift from ‘sun’ via a
metaphor of the sun being the ‘eye of the sky’). But long *ū usually gives -ī-
in Oscan, as in tiium ‘you’ < *tū-om.  

For minnaris, Poccetti reconstructs *mēnā-, with the ‘littera rule’ whereby a
sequence of long vowel followed by a single sonorant becomes a short vowel
followed by a geminate sonorant. The etymological connection with ‘moon’ is
plausible, but not the supposed developments. There is no other good evidence
that the littera rule took place in Oscan; while in Latin, where it definitely
did occur, it took place only in the sequences ‘high vowel + voiceless stop’,
‘/a/ + sonorant’, and ‘front vowel + /l/’ (Sen 2015: 42-78). Rather, minna- is
probably derived from *mēns-(V)n-, with the n-enlargement seen in the related
languages Umbrian menzne, Marsian mesene. In general, Poccetti is a little too
trusting in the consistency of the spelling of Oscan: he states that the
spelling variation of the first vowel in fisia-, fiisia- and fiísia-
‘festival’ may be due to synchronic and diachronic variation in the language,
and that the use of a single <i> in minnaris reflects a genuine short /i/,
since <ii> or <ií> are used for a long vowel. But, as is clear from looking at
the corpus of Oscan, in the Oscan alphabet there was simply free variation
between use of single or double letters to write long vowels (and geminate
consonants), which can often be found even within individual inscriptions. A
further case where the spelling is important is on p.354, where fusent is
accurately identified as a 3rd plural future indicative in the main text, but
footnote 3, apparently referring to fusent, states “[f]or textual and
syntactic reasons, the imperfect subjunctive is more likely than a future
indicative” (the footnote does not seem to follow on well from its position in
the main text; I suspect it is left over from an earlier draft). It is certain
that fusent must be future indicative: the imperfect subjunctive would be
written fusins.     

Elena Triantafillis, ‘-d- verbal bases (claudo, mando, plaudo…) between Latin
and Indo-European: an etymological analysis’, 415-25, argues that a number of
Latin verbs whose roots seem to end in a -d- which is lacking in the related
verbs in other Indo-European languages should be considered to be originally
compounds involving the verb do, dare ‘give’ (from PIE *deh3-). This is
already the standard analysis of uendo ‘I sell’, which transparently consists
of uenum ‘for sale’  + do, as further demonstrated by its perfect uendidi,
which maintains the reduplicated formation seen in dedi ‘gave’ (see also the
compounds credo, credidi ‘believe’, condo, condidi ‘build’ etc.). For the
other verbs considered here, however, the suggestion is a new one.
Triantafillis also raises the possibility that at least some of these forms
really reflect the root *dheh1- ‘put’, which has similar ‘light’ semantics to
‘give’ and would give the same phonological result as do < *deh3- in the
middle of a word in Latin. Strangely, Triantafillis does not mention the
counterpart of mando ‘order’, in the related language Oscan, whose perfect is
manafum. Since *dh gives -f- in Oscan while *d remains as -d-, this
demonstrates that we have the ‘put’ root rather than the ‘give’ root, for this
verb at least. Overall, the idea that the Latin verbs in -d- reflect old
compounds involving do and *dheh1- is plausible, since we know that some of
the verbs already come from such an origin. Presumably the variation in
perfect formations (uendo, uendidi but e.g. mando, mandaui and pendo, pependi
‘hang’) is due to the creation of the constructions at different times in the
history of Latin, with older forms becoming more opaque and hence being
restructured to fit into the productive types of perfect formation at the
time. 

REFERENCES

Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010). Etymological Dictionary of Greek. With the
assistance of Lucien van Beek. Leiden & Boston: Brill

Beekes, Robert S. P. (2014). Pre-Greek: Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon. Edited
by Stefan Norbruis. Leiden & Boston: Brill

Campbell, Lyle & William J. Poser (2008). Language Classification. History and
Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 

Clackson, James (2007). Indo-European Linguistics. An Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press

Cooper, Adam I. (2013). The typology of PIE syllabic sonorants. Indo-European
Linguistics 1, 3-67

Ringe, Don (1999). How hard is it to match CVC roots? Transactions of the
Philological Society 97, 213-44

Rix, Helmut (2002). Sabellische Texte. Die Texte des Oskischen, Umbrischen und
Südpikenischen. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter

Sen, Ranjan (2015). Syllable and Segment in Latin. Oxford: Oxford University
Press

Zair, Nicholas (2010/2011 [2012]). British *-āw- and *-āg-, and the Celtic
words for ‘sun’. Die Sprache 49, 194-208


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Nicholas Zair is Lecturer in Classics (Classical Linguistics and Comparative
Philology) at Cambridge University.





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