r/HistoricalLinguistics

The Wiktionary tells me uulpes comes from another source, which we can reconstruct. But the whole descent from wlkwos to lupus is pretty convoluted, with metathesis and borrowing from another language which had the PIE *kw to p shift. How well established is *h₂wl̥p-i-s ? How likely would be a doublet with a semantic shift ?

Basically, I can't find enough information for my liking on both these words

i want to know every single word from paleo-european languages (except modern basque, i would learn some of it but not all because it would be almost impossible) known to modern science so i would be able to try to group them into families and things like that

i appreciate every source about them especially the lesser known ones and substrates

i'm also intrested in proto languages to find out how the families are related (because they all almost certainly are related)

The pronoun stems *mV (I) and t (thou) in both Uralic and Indo European are so similar its hard to shake off. As well as some other morphological paralels like-

This, that: PIE * só, od, tod, Uralic *ta.

Plural Markings: PIE * -os (plural) -h¹ (dual), Uralic -t (plural) -k (dual)

t - s shifts aren't that rare, and while *h¹'s true value is unknown, it is an e-grade laryngeal. Meaning it could have been a glottal stop, a plain "h" etc. Which i believe could correspond to *-k.

The restriction against syllables beginning with a vowel is well known as an Afroasiatic phonotactical rule, Igor Diakonoff (Afrasian Languages, p. 42) states:

>“no syllable (including the initial) can begin with a vowel (hence the important part played by the phoneme /ʔ/, which is the principal substitute of the vocalic initial”

As people well acquainted with Afroasiatic linguistics will know, the idea of mandatory onsets is found in virtually every reconstruction – Though as I will set out to prove, it is wrong altogether both for PAA as well as Proto-Semitic, in fact I don’t believe any primary AA branch ever had such a restriction.

In Arabic, a glottal stop as well as the following vowel can be dropped in the beginning of some words when they occur after another vowel.

• fa "so" + ʔijlis "sit down!" -> fajlis "so sit down!"
• ʔana "I" + ʔibtasamtu "smiled" -> ʔanabtasamtu "I smiled"
• baytu "house" + ʔibnika "your son's" -> baytubnika "your son's house"

Yet in other words, no such thing happens

• ʔana "I" + ʔaktubu "write" -> ʔana ʔaktubu "I write"

When words of group 1 are compared with other Semitic languages, there is no glottal stop at all and the vowel trades places with the following consonants

• Arabic ʔibnu vs Hebrew ben, Akkadian biinum "son"
• Arabic ʔuzmur vs Akkadian zumur "sing!"

It is generally assumed here, that Arabic underwent metathesis in these words, and the glottal stop was later added epenthetically. Elitzur Avraham Bar-Asher(The Imperative Forms of Proto-Semitic and a New Perspective on Barth’s Law p. 4) says:

>"in all the imperative forms a metathesis occurred"

While I agree that the glottal stop is due to later epenthesis, it is problematic to assume that it is Arabic that actually metathesized these formations, because there is no clear criteria for when this metathesis occurs and when it doesn't, syllable weight, vowel quality and other factors are irrelevant. Instead I propose that items such as *bin "son" *sim "name" *ti- [reflexive prefix] and the imperative patterns 1i2i3, 1i2a3 and 1u2u3 were actually *ibn, *ism *it- and i12i3, i12a3 & u12u3, syllables truly starting with a vowel.

Akkadian then metathesized the initial vowel with the following consonant consistently, while NWS did so everywhere except in the reflexive prefix it-. Arabic on the other hand did generally not undergo metathesis, except sporadically in words like bintu "girl" from *ibnatu.

I propose that syllables lacking both an onset and a coda were banned in PS due to Arabic forms such as qul "say!" instead of otherwise expected ʔuqul.

The "smoking gun" evidence, however really comes from other Afroasiatic branches, where imperatives are similarly formed with a prefix vowel, suggesting this feature to be archaic:

	Perfect 3 masc. sg.	Imperative
Saho (Cushitic) source	yee-rheg-e	i-rhig
Tuareg (Berber) source	y-bdad	e-bded

An interesting curiosity, but very useful for proving Afroasiatic allowed these onset-less syllables is the fact that the quality of these vowels is very likely to be /i/, which is rather rare for non-root final vowels in Proto-Semitic. In fact, in Semitic words of the shape CiCVC, V is only allowed to be /a/. The only case where the quality is /u/, is if another /u/ follows, as in *uktub "write!". According to Newman, Proto-Chadic had the following vowel distribution:

>"PC was characterized by the same type of distributional restrictions that one finds in present-day Chadic languages. Thus no blanket statement that PC had this or that number of vowels would be correct as such.Rather, one would have to specify how many vowels and which vowels did PC have in initial position, how many and which vowels in medial position in open syllables, etc. In the re-constructions in this paper, I make use of all four vowels in final position, two vowels (i and a) in initial position, and, with a few exceptions, two vowels (ə and a) in medial position."

In Proto-Afroasiatic, a similar distribution would have occurred, which explains why /i/ is common word initially, but not in other non-final syllables in Proto-Semitic. With the cognate vowel distribution, we can infer that these vowel-initial morphemes and lexical items go back to Proto-Afroasiatic

A Call for Investigation of Gule

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Raoul Zamponi (https://www.academia.edu/126721374):

>

This book presents the first systematic study of Gule, a dormant East African language isolate, offering a tentative grammatical sketch based on historical documentation collected by Brenda Z. Seligman. Readers will gain valuable insights into a previously unstudied language through systematic grammatical analysis and comparative linguistic examination of the available materials, including a previously unknown audio recording made in 1966 by Wendy R. James. The book delivers this through detailed documentation analysis, identification of areal linguistic phenomena shared with neighboring East African languages, and thorough vocabulary assessment that establishes Gule’s unique status among world languages.

>

However, when I examined the lists I decided that rather than having a "unique status", many Austronesian words were close matches:

Gu. dusuit ‘two’, Au. *duSa

Gu. if ‘hair, wool’, Au. *ipu- 'hair, feather' (no p in Gu., several other p / f matches below)

Gu. au 'dog', Au. *asu (maybe *aswu \ *wasu to explain w- in four Formosan languages)

Gu. tis ‘milk’, *titis 'drip, ooze', *titiq 'female breast; suck the breast' (related like *bandyo- > Old Irish bann(a)e ‘drop’, I. bainne ‘milk’)

Gu. si ‘to drink’, Au. *sip-sip, *sep-sep, *sedut 'sip, suck, drink' (and several other similar roots)

Gu. rus ‘rain’, Au. *rinis 'drizzle, drizzling rain', *rins-rins ? > Old Javanese 'riris soft rain', Balinese riris 'rain gently, drizzle' (likely rel. rin & ren *rintik 'steady dripping, as of sweat or drizzling rain', *rendeŋ 'constant rain, a rainy day, rainy season')

Gu. gŭdĭ-n \ gadˤi-n ‘your head’, Au. *quluh ‘head’

Gu. ki, Au. *kuCux ‘louse’ (likely < *ku-, *kuman 'itch mite, chicken louse')

Gu. tufena 'dust', Au. *tapuŋ 'dust, rice flour' (Manobo tapuŋ 'any fine powdery substance; to brush the dust off something'), *tapuk 'dust, dust in the air; knock the dust off something'

Gu. gără̄wáig, Au. *RuqaNay 'man' (likely < *qaRuNway to explain irreg. pl. gămoi)

Gu. ɟok ‘God’, Au. *qiaŋ 'ancestor, deity, divinity'

Gu. wadus ‘girl’, *wati-qazi 'unmarried'?, Au. *wati 'husband or wife; to marry', *qazi 'no, not'

Gu. fŭ̄m, Au. *pijiko \ *pisiko 'flesh, meat, muscle' (if < *pims- to explain voice vs. un-)

Gu. adatˤwa ‘tongue’, Au. *dilaq 'tongue; to lick', *dilap \ *dilat 'to lick, stick out the tongue' (variation might be < *adilat-qwa if tqw > tˤw, or similar; any rel. Nilotic *ŋaljɛp ‘tongue’ ?)

Gu. adon ‘path, road’, Au. *zalan

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There were also several that differed in meaning, but seem more or less likely cognates:

Gu. kĕlu 'star', Au. *kelap 'shine, sparkle, twinkle'

Gu. kas, ‘fire’, Au. *kasu 'smoke'

Gu. tos ‘to kill’, Au. *tusuk 'pierce' ( > Toba Batak ma-nusuk 'to stab, kill')

Gu. wɔr \ wɔd \ wat ‘tree; (piece of) wood; stick’ < *wart ?, Au. *wakaR 'root' (since likely rel. *wakir, *wakat 'root', likely < *wakart or *wakiRt (depending on nature of *R))

Gu. taʔ ‘sun’, Au. *taqo 'cook in earth oven'

Gu. of ‘stone’, Au. *oro 'mtn.' (if < *ofro, etc.)

Gu. abū-n 'your belly, abdomen', Au. *kambu 'belly, stomach, abdomen, womb, intestines'

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I ask that people with more knowledge of each group look into this further. For more notes:

Many Proto-Austronesian words for body parts end in -ŋ, & the cited Gu. words with -n 'your _' might show that the cause is an affix becoming part of the stem.

In Gu. gără̄wáig, Au. *RuqaNay 'man' (likely < *qaRuNway to explain irreg. pl. gămoi), the rec. also might fit the names of people from New Guinea, like Kuruwai, Kumbai \ Kombai, etc. I mention this because I noticed a similar relation between Au. & some languages there.