Greetings trom an Iranian Farsi(Parsi) speaker who is good at Swedish. I have always been profoundly interested in this subject. delighted to find your channel.
Thank you so much for posting this. I recently found your channel and I feel like I'm just taking the college courses I care about, for free. You are the man.
This was excellent. Thanks so much to you Jackson and Tony. Videos like this are extremely helpful for those.of us beginning to find our way in these complex fields.
Since we have so little evidence of the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe, excepting Basque, Etruscan if it is autochthonous, Raetic, and parts of Linear A, if we can identify pre-Indo-European loanwords, that would be a glimpse into Old Europe.
Unless you can match for example local topographic names with words in a more distant language, it's difficult to distinguish "native" words from later iron age innovations. In English we assume unusual "p-" words/names are non-Germanic (e.g. Pybba or Penda). Also we have at least two earlier layers, local hunter-gatherer languages, and potentially afro-asiatic farmer languages. (Potentially since we know the people are genetically afro-asiatic, but there are clear isolates like Sumerian that don't fit linguistically).
I think it's also worth noting that roughly all indo-European branches with the possible exceptions of Anat and Toch were spoken in Europe (and not just on the pontic steppe) at some point in their history before they are attested. So any hypothetical Old European loan could potentially appear in almost any IE lang, making it harder to distinguish from PIE vocabulary.
@portable-cimbora you're contradicting yourself, besides the Saami and Suomi came later. References to fianna and Finns in different areas may be connected but aren't necessarily the same people. Welsh and vlach are related words but not closely related people or languages. (Vlach or voloch are Slavic terms for Romance speakers - Romanians, Aromanians, Italians etc.)
@UCbRBJxcj1D3pwO0sXSrWHTA ??? Welsh are not mysterious. It's the Anglo-Saxon term for any "foreigner", particularly the British-Celts (Cumbrian, Cambrian, Pictish or Cornish). Germanic speaking people's used cognate terms for other peoples on the continent , and it was borrowed by Slav and Romance languages for particular "foreign" groups near them.
@portable-cimbora Arthur is a later medieval myth, so yes very far off. Geoffrey of Monmouth was creating an origin myth to validate the Welsh Tudor claim to the British throne (ironic since Tudor is a Germanic name).
I am Dutch and I am very interested in indo European languages and I think Dutch is an underrated gem in this. In my research I found Dutch words (especially older Dutch words) to be much closer to Indo European words from for example Iran and Anatolia than other Germanic languages. Many times it is just a one or two letter difference or a slightly different ending. Many times I see linguists from other countries make all kind of "chains" of what Germanic words originally meant going through all kinds of morphisms while the (old) Dutch word usage (up to the 1900s) would explain everything. My mom comes from an pretty isolated area with it's own west Saxon dialect/language and I am partially raised with it. And to my surprise when I first read/saw Beowulf in anglo-Saxon I could read many parts of it without too much problems. Gothic is a bit harder but also kind of understandable.
@@janetrobinson1864 I guess it's rather "Plattdeutsch", i.e. Saxon, North Sea Germanic like Frisian. Both didn't undergo the 2nd Germanic loud shift and therefore conserved older forms of Germanic.
@@mistersir3020 Beowulf (oud saksisch): Ðá cóm of móre under misthleoþum Grendel gongan· godes yrre bær· Engelse vertaling : He came now from the moor under misty fells Grendel walking. The wrath of God was on him. Nederlands : Daar komt uit moor onder mistigheid, Grendel komend. God(en) ontberend. Moor is een oud Nederlands woord voor Moeras. Zoals je ziet ligt het modern Nederlands een stuk dichter bij 9e eeuws oud Saksisch dan het Engels. Als je het Saksische dialect spreekt/begrijpt komt het nog een stuk dichterbij. Engels is overigens voor een groot deel ontstaan vanuit het Fries en Saksisch. Gothisch : Gothic: infinitive: giban, preterite: gaf; Dutch: infinitive: geven, preterite: gaf; Gothic: haban, preterite: habáida, Dutch: hebben, preterite: had, áigan ("to possess") - Eigen kunnan ("to know") - Kennen saian ("to sow") - Zaaien gasalja (“companion, comrade”) - Gezel ganso ("goose")- Gans Gothisch (Matteus 6:9-13): unsar þu in himinam weihnai namo þein Winterswijk, Achterhoek/Gelderland, Nederland (Matteus 6:9-13): Unzen Va in (die) hemelen, Eheiligd (Gothisch gebruikt een variant op gewijd) dien name zijn
I hoped the a ā theory was touched here. Short version of the theory is the prepie had a ā which later went to pie e ō, e split to e/ē and ō shorten in most environments to o except for where e when to ē. The evidence for this theory is based off of Sanskrit o > ā. The theory does state e/ē stayed a/ā near h₂/h₃ and k found in roots
Awesome! I also just saw in your bio that we are both from H-Town originally! Very cool! You have an amazing channel and please keep posting this content!
The Anatolian branch of I.E. is the top tier in my opinion. It has this magical blend of preserving many P.I.E forms alongside absorbing bits and pieces from surrounding language families (some very influential ones from antiquity). Luwian hieroglyphs are mega aesthetic and Hittite cuneiform just works surpirsingly well, in terms of writing into clay it's way easier to use cuneiform, the Hittites knew this ;-) lots of sumerograms and akkadograms in Hittite writing but some how that just makes it far easier to learn the inflection and conjugation endings. Plus there's still plenty of mystery left to uncover in the languages - what on earth does the kan enclitic really do? The Hittite corpus is also reasonably big meaning we have just about every type of text you could want to read. Today I was re-looking at the Hittites talking about their conflic with the Alashiyans.. very interesting. Learn Hittite folks!
I took Intro to Linguistics 101 near the end of my degree program just because I needed an elective. It turned out to be really interesting, and I kind of felt like I had missed the chance for a more interesting career path. No regrets, though. Especially with your interviews and lessons offering side studies on a casual basis.
About h3, it seems appealing to posit that its distinct vowel coloring effect is caused by a distinct POA. Maybe h1 is glottal, h2 is velar, h3 is uvular. Or h1 is velar (or there was both velar and glottal but we can't distinguish them), h2 uvular, and h3 pharyngeal or epiglottal. Other straight-up velar sounds are rare enough in PIE (and iirc there is inconsistent that *k potentially did color vowels the same way that h2 did) that it's hard to be certain whether velars had the vowel coloring effect.
Maybe the laryngeals correspond to *š, x, k in the prehistory of of the Uralic languages. Or if Indo-European and Uralic are cognate families, the laryngeals became distinct in Indo-European as part of the innovation of ablaut and h1 (glottal) was the zero grade and h2 and h3 (uvularized palatal-pharyngeal or epiglottal) were the full grade (h2 being the e grade and h3 the o grade).
There's something about our modern notion of writing and transcripts that we take for granted but is actually not all that trivial. I think writing systems being invented or adopted doesn't mean that culture is going to dump all of their oral literature on paper. That's, like, theirs. It's passed down. Why write it down, y'know? It takes a lot of convincing before people would want to become literate, let alone put their entire culture and language on paper...
Whether or not people take a lot of convincing to become literate is a matter of context. If literacy is brought by a settler colonist type conqueror, who is clearly stronger, winning, and bringing overwhelming change, peoples have been known to take up literacy rather quickly to get in on whichever power this technology may be conferring on their new rulers/enemies. Not dumping their entire language and culture on clay/stone/paper immediately, no, especially as this also depends on the level of repression present. I guess you may be referring to situations where an empire conquers an area yet nothing much changes for the locals. Like, their original rulers become vassals and there's this extra layer above, but everyday life remains pretty similar for most people. That would give very little incentive indeed, except for those vassal kings and their courts probably. Or situations where you see your neighbouring group(s) engage in literacy but it doesn't seem to give them any specific advantages, so why bother as you say.
I am not a professional linguist, but it seems to me that Latin was greatly influenced by a considerable Etruscan substrate. One good example that gets a lot of use is the ending -al/-ar.
Do You know anything about why the Thracian inscriptions found on Samothrace are compared to Anatolian languages?In what stage is this linguistic investigation? And to which of these languages?
21:48 nowadays in disney and maybe all children media the word for death and kill are not allowed. All the cartoons have to make up euphamisms for death, like dissapear
I was surprised by the question around @25:00, but the answer was right. Anatolian IE is not very related to Greek or Armenian. Those come from a much later Balkan route language subgroup.
Regarding the Hittite wheel word. I was curious if it could be a loan word. Earliest invention of the wheel was probably between 4500-3000bce. Somewhere in the Middle East/Western Asia (probably). The Hittites were after that, but how popular the wheel was/ how fast it spread isn’t very clearly known. And either way, it could *still* have ended up being a borrowed word at some point anyway. I found ~“hurkos” for the Hittite word for wheel. Two language families in the area were probably a proto-Turkic and possibly a proto-mongolic. I only spent a handful of minutes hunting down possibilities. And Turkic has a few. But a common Mongolic reconstruction for the verb “to turn, to move around” is “hergi-“. Which is surprisingly close and to turn/move around implies turning being part of locomotion, so that being so close and having a good “using wheels to move around” possible meaning. Now, do I think proto-Mongolic shared the name of their invention with the people they were sharing the actual wheel with? I mean, maybe? I just thought it was interesting. 😂
the H in Pali, which is a prakrit related to sanskrit indicates an exhaled exclamation (for lack of better word) of the previous consonant. Dhamma for instance. also maybe an interesting note is the slight pause between double consonants. so its pronounced something like "DHam-ma"
concerning the laryngeals, in my generation i remember reading that they were predicted to be in PIE by a famous 19thC linguist whom i cant remember at this late date out of my memory, but it was the decipherment of the laryngeals in hittite that proved his predictive supposition.
Gabriel Germain, in his work Homer wrote that Homeric Greek was put in a metre that belonged to an indo-european language from the Aegean area. In light of Hittite study of grammar does it look likely it may be Hittite, to which is added the hegemony over Troy?
Around the hour mark they're baffled by the theory that the change from pastoralism to agriculture would change a population's features, so I wanted to clarify that the theory isn't about sudden genetic change but the way people's bodies develop under different stresses. Genetics being the hard to change blueprint, but the physical body people end up with being influenced by the environment they're raised in. The amount and type of physical activity (including chewing), nutrition, endless other variables and their effects on posture, muscle and bone development throughout the skull and body and everything else. In this case the theory is that a relatively narrow upper and lower jaw compared to their Proto-Indo-European ancestors made certain sounds more or less comfortable to produce. Like any explanation for pre-historical linguistic changes, who the hell knows.
Great video, very interesting points, thank you both! I've been looking into Sauji from Afghanistan, a very interesting language. Though I don't see major clear outside influences in Sauji, some minor uralic substracts might have been carried out, as probably in sarmatian and balto-slavic. But as Anthony said, the thing is: what couldn't be explained through the proper IE linguistic connections? Surely there might be some caveats here and there with all branches, as the aforementioned germanic "ship".
I'm no linguist, but had some exposure to Luvian studies and noticed some common words with modern Armenian, which I speak. Any scientific confirmation of this?
@@PhilipDjaferis Number of words that are obviously related are not many, but they exist. E.g. καρδιά and zārza (z pronounced as 'ts"). But more important than lexicon is morphology. If you compare the declension of Anatolian words with Ancient Greek it's strikingly similar.
Harvard en 2022 a situé le berceau de la langue indo-européenne en Arménie , le professeur David Reich , je suis très étonné que l’on n’en parle pas plus !
Honestly I think the Greeks were the sea peoples. I think they attacked Troy and other places and when they tried against Egypt Ramses destroyed their armies effectively depriving the Greeks of males and leaders leaving what we see in the archaeological record which is urban collapse and increased pastoral nomadism. The only men remaining would be pastoral nomads that didn’t sail with the armies. We know Troy was attacked and most probably for loot so if the Achaeans succeeded there why wouldn’t they continue to attack other places.
I live in Israel and a good friend of mine is a specialist on the Philistines and on the archeology of Philistine sites. In his opinion all evidence point to the Philistines as not just being from the general region of the Aegean, but actually Mycenean Greeks, who spoke Mycenean Greek and who were the prime focus of Homer and Hesiod in the Archaic Greek era. Since the Philistines were just one group of the Sea Peoples, and since they all seem to have come from the Aegean, we can assume that most if not all of those groups were Mycenean Greeks, except maybe the Lukka who might have been Lycians. The Minoans were assimilated into Greeks by 1200 BCE, so even a Minoan origin points to a culturally Greek origin.
please remove this indo term from this hocus pocus indo - european nomenclature .... european's are middle-easterm people their culture, rreligion all r middle-eastern please spare the iindian's ....indian's don't want to aasociate themselves with neither european nor middle eastern.... european sud feel happy with their middle-eastern cchristianity identity simple....indian's got nothing to do with ur middle eastern culture, religion, language or whatever...... please spare the iindian's with ur alien's theory or language theory........
@roberto lang whatever... just remove indo from this hocus pocus PIE theory .. iindians do not want to associate with europe u guys can play with ur european theory or some jjesus wwesus ssins theory or may be some alien theory ... just leave iindian out of it....
"I didn't really see that as my trajectory". Somehow I find us language ppl needing to explain, or at least having the need to explain, why we never became historians or literature scholars. It's odd, although somewhat understandable when one thinks on it for a bit. Regards, "I never saw it as my trajectory, ie. to write histories or on ancient literature - languages _an sich_ be my thing".
i am rather surprised that in telling the story of the discovery of the IE and Hittite relationship, not only root is Grimm's law version of the other IE eat root. but not to mention that the object of the in that hittite text is and the genitive plural in hittite and anglo-saxon are exactly the same syllables. also, i wonder what his thought is about the relationship that Jan Puhvel points out about the Homeric past tenses as comparable to the hittite past tenses? and what he might speculate about what that might imply on cultural contact or earlier linguistic proximities in space and time.
As said here Hittite should not be taken as a predecessor & basis for studying Luwian W Anatolian languages. E.Zangger quotes Emil Forrer'...the Luwians were a far greater people than the Hittites.'(from a letter written in Aug.1920) So there was important work as early as the 1920s.
what i had learnt actually quite a bit before you young whippersnappers were born about that substrate in germanic that seems to be non indo-european vocabulary is that the pre- or proto- germanic speakers came into contact with another linguistic group and borrowed words from it. there was/is some other speculation that this contact is correlatively source of the vanir and aesir gods and goddesses.
40:00 Bangala (Bengali) is a language which lacks “grammatical gender” although some Sanskrtic nouns and adjectives do have genderized forms (like abhineta = actor, abhinetree = actress). Arguably Bengali lost grammatical gender if we compare it with Prakrits and modern languages in Bengal and surrounding areas. Similarly, it is certainly possible that some of the Anatolian languages lost gender.
There needs to be more research into the connection between IE and Afro-Asiatic. One of the words that helped translate Hittite was the word for eat, but what appears to be related root is found in Semitic as gh-d referring specifially to eating by an animal. Towards the end of this video there is mention of the word for white albus in Latin, the same root is found in Semitic in words for white / milk - Halab, laban. That's just two of hundreds of examples.
Is anyone looking at Gardener's much derided work on 'Black Athena' linguistics evidence? I am not a linguist. But Jackson Crawford gets me up in the morning.
Origin of the feminine gender: Any good evidence against that originally there were only animate and inanimate (neuter), then some neutral plurals used as abstract concepts got reinterpreted as singular and feminine? Forming a seed for a distinction between a masculine and feminine concept of nouns. Cf Latin opus - opera, and then opera could be reinterpreted as a singular feminine.
Horay! I feel so ignorant (which was the hope of a previous teacher) I love listening to the conversation, but not much was understood than the fact that there is so much more that I do not know.
Melissa, we should always desire to surround ourselves with people with know more than us. That's how we become more knowledgeable. So, in that sense, may we always feel ignorant!
@portable-cimbora that's because they were all borrowed from the same source at various points during the Medieval or Early Modern Periods through either Arabic or Ottoman interlocutors. I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here.
What is the actual evidence for *wulfaz being the original Germanic word for wolf, rather than *wargaz? Is it only because the former is attested in Gothic? The latter seems a lot closer to Sanskrit vṛka, and I know how linguists hate plebs making connections between words simply because they sound similar, but I would love to hear someone explain why this is the consensus. Both of the Germanic terms seem to be explained as forming due to "taboos", which to me sounds a lot like the archaeologist cop-out of labeling rare weapons "ceremonial".
The r in Sanskrit is a red herring. The related terms are wulfaz, lupus (borrowed from a neighboring language with different sound changes), loukos, walkwe, vilkes, wilk, vrka etc.. It wasn't the only word for wolf (Celtic and Armenian use "howler") and seems to be a steppe usage - in Anatolian it means lion instead. L and r are phones which are hard to distinguish, and frequently switch. Wargaz on the other hand didn't even mean wolf except euphemisticly in a limited cultural area. All the surrounding languages, Germanic or Finnic, have the sense of outlaw, criminal, outcast etc. (Finnic languages are especially good at preserving the ancient meaning of borrowed Germanic terms). Remember also that Gothic came from the same region as eastern Norse, and reflects an earlier dialect and lexicon that separated before warg came to mean wolf in its homeland.
@@AllahuSnackbar270 tokharian walkwe seems the most archaic form, like in the Oscan lupus the kw seems to have become a bilabial. These are regular sound changes and are expected.
@Gary Allen Sometimes they're flimsy or extremely heavy, but other times they're just a bit heavier than usual or have a unique design. If it can be used to kill someone, and maybe just requires a unique fighting style, I think it's a cop-out to label it ceremonial.
Hey It's May be interesting, could you make a video about similarity of melodies in islandic folk song "Á Sprengisandi" with polish-ukrainian "hej sokoły"? I can't find any collaborative composers of this sound ...
I personally feel Sanskrit is INCREDIBLY overrated and over-emphasized in IE studies. Of course it offers certain valuable insights (such as regarding the mobile accent, etc.) but I think it has also deviated from "PIE" to a greater extent than Proto-Hellenic or Proto-Italic, for example. I personally believe that a PIE speaker would understand the latter two languages much easier than understanding Sanskrit, which deviated so far from the original PIE homeland and underwent many phonological and lexical shifts in the process
Comparing Sanskrit (an actually attested language) with Proto-Hellenic or Proto-Italic (reconstructed proto languages) is not a fair comparison. The reconstructive method needs attested languages to actually work properly. A fairer comparison would be among the attested classical languages: Sanskrit with Latin and Greek. While the latter two languages can certainly provide insight to PIE that Sanskrit cannot; Sanskrit, particularly that of the Vedas, is still the most archaic of the three attested languages and has by far the largest corpus to work from. As for changes I would argue the changes undergone by Latin and Greek are both rather large in comparison to Sanskrit. Sanskrit importantly preserved the PIE root system as a transparent part of its grammar, something Pāṇini was able to describe clearly in his writings.
The recent genetic evidence makes it clear that Germanic was not "learned" incompletely, there was a large influx of Indo-European speaking steppe herders (50-90% of the resulting population depending on neolithic farmer density) with a mobile population which then ranged across the European plain from the North Sea to the Caspian.
I apologize, maybe I am feeling jaded this evening but less than a minute in I stopped the video. As soon as the guest sounded like a valley girl in highschool I had to bail. I realize that is a shortcoming but I value my time too much to gamble on it. I hope I was wrong and others don't have a hair trigger like I do. All the best.
nonsense sanskrit pundit in india already said that the oldest ved the rig ved has two ( sometime three) component old & ( middle & new) and the new & new shows some but little similarities between hhittites and avestan while atharva ved does show some similariries with hhitties, mittani, & avestan,..... while the old part of rig ved is very different than the new part of rig ved in terms of sentence formation .......
@@MultiSpeedMetal there are no contemporary to Vedic literature or cultural evidence in Europe which are similar to India. Still pushing this narrative is hilarious .
@@arcane3464 Considering that you people tend to date the Vedas to like 10,000 BCE, no place on earth has such old literature. Of course, this isn't true, but how could one possibly change a hindutva fanatic's mind without literally opening their cranium and picking out their brain.
