Cross posted from: Latin@lemm.ee

lingua latina pater linguarum dimidum est 😎

I hope it’s okay for me to crosspost here.

  • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
    10·
    6 months ago

    Is PIE something like proto-indo-eurasian, or just something to do with pies?

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
        13·
        6 months ago

        There’s a bunch of guesses on how *h₁ *h₂ and *h₃ were pronounced in this Wikipedia page. They’re usually defined by their effect in child languages though, so it’s possible that some of those were actually multiple sounds.

        For *h₃ you’ll often see values like [ɣʷ] or [ʁʷ]; a labialised consonant (to explain why it often turns nearby vowels into [o] ) and voiced (as there are some claims that it voices nearby consonants, mostly Cowgill’s Law)

        My personal guess for *h₃ is completely heterodox, [ɸ]~[β]. I think that it’s directly associated with *b being so uncommon in PIE.

        • lars@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago
          1. Happy Lemmiversary
          2. I wish we could follow individual users because I could listen to you talk about PIE aitches for the next couple thousand years
          • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            Thank you! Sadly, I don’t talk too much about PIE in Lemmy because… well, it’s kind of a niche subject that most users don’t care too much about.

            Feel free to ask for further info on stuff, though. I do enjoy talking about it!

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      it’s not eurasian because the family is centered around europe and only extends to about india, chinese/japanese/korean are a separate tree.

  • undeffeined@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    6 months ago

    Cool diagram! Would be better if it pointed out that the Portuguese word “real” only refers to currency in Brazil, not Portugal. The origin appears correct and the word is used in Portugal either to say something is “regal” or “real”.

    • pirat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      I injected [adjective] objects into an objecting subject, but was rejected and ejected for the lack of conjecture in my self-projecting project(!)

      Did I miss any? Probably! … What does “ject” even mean in and of itself?

    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
      12·
      6 months ago

      Those are placeholders. “We don’t know what this sound is supposed to be, so we plop h+number there and call it a day.” You’ll see some reconstructions using *ə₁ *ə₂ *ə₃ instead, same deal.

      That said, the Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian etc. - the whole branch is extinct) preserved a few of those laryngeals; compare for example Latin ⟨ouis⟩ and Hittite ⟨𒇻𒅖⟩ ḫāwis, from PIE *h₂ówis (sheep). Since Anatolian split way before the other languages, this makes me wonder if they weren’t vocalised already in Late Proto-Indo-European.

      • nialv7@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        TIL, thank you!

        Follow up question, since it’s not reconstructable, and nobody knows what it sounds like, how did we figure out they were there, and which PIE words had them and which ones didn’t?

        • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
          5·
          6 months ago

          how did we figure out they were there, and which PIE words had them and which ones didn’t?

          Mostly by the effect in the nearby vowels - often, a sound triggers changes in nearby sounds, before being dropped.

          Here’s an example. Greek often shows an initial vowel where other IE languages show none. Like this:

          Greek Sanskrit Latin
          ἐλεύθερος / eleútheros “free” – līber “free”
          Ἔρεβος / Érebos “Darkness” रजस् / rájas “darkness” –
          ἀστήρ / astḗr “star” स्तृ / stṛ́ stel[la] “star”
          ὀδούς / odoús “tooth” दत् / dát “tooth” dens “tooth”
          ᾰ̓γρός / ăgrós, “field” अज्र / ájra “field” ager “field”

          Disregard for a moment the last line, focus on the first four. Why is Greek showing “random” initial vowels where Sanskrit and Latin have none? There’s no underlying pattern; it’s probably inherited then.

          However, you can’t simply claim that Greek inherited the vowel and the other two lost it, without causing a problem: why didn’t Sanskrit and Latin delete the initial vowel from अज्र / ájra and ager?

          The solution that a linguist called Saussure found to oddities like this was to propose that PIE had three sounds, not directly inherited by the descendants. He called them *ə₁ ə₂ ə₃; nowadays we call them *h₁ h₂ h₃. In that specific environment (word start, before a consonant):

          • Greek: h₁→e, h₂→a, h₃→o.
          • Latin, Sanskrit: get rid of them

          And the initial vowel in the fifth line (that pops up in all four) is actually inherited.

          (The ancestors of those five words are nowadays reconstructed as *h₁lewdʰ-, *h₁régʷos, *h₂stḗr, *h₃dónts, *h₂éǵros. Sure, the fifth one has a laryngeal… but also a vowel, that’s the vowel being inherited by Sanskrit and Latin.)

          That hypothesis also helps in quite a few other situations, like:

          • Why do sometimes a long vowel pops up from nowhere? A: short vowel + laryngeal.
          • If PIE loved triconsonantal roots so bloody much, why do some roots have less consonants than expected? A: a laryngeal got deleted.
          • Where did Sanskrit get those aspirated consonants from? A: from a stop consonant followed by a laryngeal.

          Also, note that, when Hittite was discovered, all that “laryngeals” talk stopped being just a conjecture - because Hittite did preserve at least *h₂ and *h₃, and probably also *h₁ (it depends on how you analyse the cuneiform spelling).

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    My mind is really reading “tritium” instead of something like “re” with that h3reg in the middle.

    Also interesting to note: the word “rial” in arabic, also used to denote currency, descends from the portuguese/spanish real

      • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        It’s from a later period, as al-andalus was a name mostly used during the islamic conquest in the 8th century, right? The first real coins are from 14th century Spain, while the peninsula was still divided between the northern christians and southern muslims