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History of EnglishFIL ANG 524

2013/2014

Week 2

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Proto-Indo-European

Spoken perhaps 5000 to 6000 years ago the Indo-European homeland problem

the two homeland hypotheses: Gimbutas & Renfrew

Trask (1994:357)

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Maria Gimbutas and the Kurgan culture

5th and early 4th millennia BC, the region of the Volga River,north of the Caspian Sea

They buried their important dead in tombs which were often

covered by an artificial mound called in Russian a kurgan.

Apparently they were warlike pastoralists who rode horses and

used wheeled vehicles; they had a cult of sky gods and sun

worship, a strongly patriarchal organisation, and a great love forhorses and weapons.

There is evidence that the Kurgan people, some time after 4000

BC, spread out eastwards into central Asia, Persia, and India,westwards into central Europe and the Balkans, and southwards

across the Caucasus into Anatolia.

Trask (1996: 358-9)

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Colin Renfrew argues that, at a time when states and even cities didnot yet exist, no group of people could have possessed the economicand technological resources necessary to launch large-scale invasionsand to overrun already populated lands.

He advanced a very different scenario: IE speech must have defused

slowly and peacefully across Eurasia in conjunction with someeconomic or technological advance.

He can find only one such advance which is sufficiently widespreadand important to be the vehicle of such linguistics spread: the

development and spread of agriculture. Agriculture did spread out slowly across much of Europe and Asia

from a very few small sites principally in the Middle East, but thatspread of agriculture began not 6 000 years ago but over 10 000 years

ago, in the Neolithic, or the Late Stone Age. This date is quite unacceptable to most linguists: such an early date

would require IE speech to have diffused over a vast area during thethousands of years while hardly changing at all, something whichhistorical linguists consider impossible. Trask (1996: 360-1)

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A recent contribution to the debate: Bouckaert, R., Lemey, P.,Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Alekseyenko, A. V., Drummond, A. J., Gray,R. D., Suchard, M. A., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2012). Mapping the originsand expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science, 337:957960.

In this paper we identify the homeland of the Indo-European

language family by adapting phylogeographic methods initiallydeveloped by epidemiologists to trace the origins of virusoutbreaks. Instead of comparing viruses, we compare languagesand instead of DNA, we look for shared cognates words that have

a common origin, such as mother, mutter and madre acrossvarious Indo-European languages. We use the cognates to infer afamily tree of the languages and, together with information aboutthe location of each language, we trace back through time to infer

the location at the root of the tree the origin of Indo-European.

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The analysis finds that an Anatolian origin is more

likely than a Steppe origin.

http://language.cs.auckland.ac.nz/

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Language Log

Andrew Byrd reading Schleicher's Fablehttp://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7179

ARCHEOLOGY

Telling Tales in Proto-Indo-European

http://archaeology.org/exclusives/articles/1302-proto-indo-

european-schleichers-fable

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The pre-history of Proto-Into-European?

Some proposals:

Nostratic

The Nostraticists propose that Nostratic existed about15,00012,000 BC, among hunter-gatherers, generally

somewhere in South-West Asia. They have opponents in

abundance who challenge the entire concept of Nostratic, andmost certainly ones ability to reconstruct proto-languages at

such a time depth

Mallory and Adams (2006:84)

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Mallory and Adams (2006:84)

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The tree of originof humanlanguages, drawn

by Merritt Ruhlenin 1994, based ongenetic knowledge,with the likely

range of initialdivergence dates(Kya= 1,000 yearsago)

From

Cavalli-Sforza(2000:169)

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From Cavalli-Sforza (2000:94)

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Two models of linguistic change andtwo ways of representing the internal structure of a

language family

Tree model Stammbaumtheorie,

August Schleicher (182168)

Wave model Wellentheorie,

Johannes Schmidt (18431901)

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Tree model

Within a language family:

some languages are more closely related and formsubgroups

they are identified as such through

shared innovations changes which have appeared insome members of the family but not in others

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Trask (1994)

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The Indo-European family of languages

(a simplified representation)

Proto-Indo-European

Slavic

Germanic

Celtic

Italic

Albanian

Hellenic

Armenian

Baltic Indo-Iranian

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Mallory and Adams (2006)

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A modern tree diagram

of the Indo-European

languages suggested byEric Hamp (1990)

From Mallory and Adams

(2008:74)

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Wave model

a wave model diagram is similar to a dialect map

a language change spreads like a wave

an innovation spreads from its point of origin to some

but not all speakers (dialects, languages)

it shows graphically the continuing contact between

dialects and languages (branching in the tree model

suggests series of clean brakes with no connection

between branches after they have split)

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Mallory and Adams (2006:73)

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Wave model

Trask (1994)

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Today

http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/family.maps

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The Uralic

languages

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Today

http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/family.maps

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The Germanic family of languages

Most specialists believe Proto-Germanic was spoken

in southern Scandinavia perhaps around 500 B.C.

Germanic languages are believed to have strated outmore than 2000 years ago as regional dialects of

Proto-Germanic

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Mallory and Adams (2006:21)

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Germanic

languages

today

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The Germanic family of languages

(a simplified tree)

Proto-GermanicProto-Germanic

West GermanicWest Germanic North GermanicNorth Germanic East GermanicEast Germanic

English

German

Dutch

Flemish

Frisian

Yiddish

English

German

Dutch

Flemish

Frisian

Yiddish

Swedish

Danish

Norwegian

Faroese

Icelandic

Swedish

Danish

NorwegianFaroese

Icelandic

(Gothic)(Gothic)

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The Germanic runic alphabet futhark

(Page 1987:8)

angular letters of uncertain origin, cut in hard material (stone, bone,

wood)

in some inscriptions runes are arranged in a fixed order

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Examples of runic inscriptions:

Page (1987:2, 31)

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Page (1987:29, 40)

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Page (1987:7)

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View of end View of end

Front Back

http://www.britishmuseum.org/

The Franks Casket

(named after theman through whomit came to the

British Museum)

Length: 22.9 cm

Width: 19.0 cmHeight: 10.9 cm

A whale bone box

The inscriptionsattest a dialect fromnorthern or northMidland England

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The early runic inscriptions (Page 1987:24)

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Brezafuthark tentatively attributed to the 6th c.

inscribed on a semi-circular half-column (56 cm high, 30 cm wide)

the building itself may have been an early Christian church the inscription is not complete: the last three letters are broken

away, and the carver missed out b

the runes are between 0.5 and 2.6 cms high.

http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/germ/runentab.htm

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The National Museum of

Bosnia and Herzegovina

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The Anglo-Saxonfuthork

introduction of Christianity the Latin script introducedinstead of the runic scriptfuthork

Page (1987:19)

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f u o r c

feoh ur orn os rad cenwealth wild ox thorn god ride torch

cattle mouth journey

each rune represented a sound and it also represented

a word beginning with that sound

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lnglanglong

ungjungyoung

konung, kungKnigkingmanMannman

hemHeimhome

sverdSchwertswordfiskFischfish

hundHundhound

stjrnaSternstar

huvudHaupthead < OE heafod

SwedishGermanEnglish

Some cognate words from the shared vocabulary

of the Germanic language family:

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Cognate words of Latin origin from the shared vocabulary:

(the early contact between the Romans and the Germanic tribes

on the continent)

pepparPfefferpepper

vinWeinwine

kokakochencook

kpakaufencheap

tegelZiegeltilepundPfundpound

milMeilemile

SwedishGermanEnglish

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Names of the days of the week

Tuesday < Tiwes-dg the day of the god Tiw, an old god of war Latdies Martis (the day of Mars)

Wednesday < Wodens-dg the day of the god Woden (Odin), the chief god of war, Runes,

poetry and witchcraft LatMercurii dies (the day of Mercury)

Thursday < Thunres-dg the day of the god Thunor, the god of thunder

Latdies Jovis (the day of Jupiter)

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Friday < Frige-dg the day of the fertility goddess Frig, Woden's wife. Latdies Veneris (the day of Venus)

Also:Saturday < Stern(es)-dg

LatSaturni dies (the day of Saturn)

Sunday < sunnan-dg Latdies solis (the day of the sun)

Monday < monan-dg Latlunae dies (the day of the moon)

S h t i ti f

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Some common characteristics ofthe Germanic languages:

Verb system:

two tense verb system: present & preterite

strong verbs: vowel change (vowel gradation) in the

stem to mark past tense

weak verbs: a dental suffix (-de, -te) to mark the past tense

Fixed (dynamic) stress on the root syllable (usually the first

syllable)

Dual adjectival declension (strong and weak)

The First Germanic Consonant Shiftalso called

Grimms Law Jacob Grimm (1785-1863)

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Grimms Law Jacob Grimm (1785-1863)