Timeline for Why is reconstructed PIE so typologically unusual?
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25 events
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| Oct 9, 2022 at 2:17 | answer | added | lvxferre | timeline score: 6 | |
| Sep 22, 2020 at 4:59 | comment | added | Lucian | And how exactly does one determine what constitutes a typological irregularity in the first place ? By examining the languages of today, along with a handful of extinct ones ? Does this seem like a meaningful way for determining the characteristics of most languages from the distant past ? | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 18:23 | comment | added | Alex B. | @JanusBahsJacquet Naturally all the PIE phonemes (through their allophones) were physical entities but I consider all our attempts so far at finding out more about their their phonetic reality is like us playing the Glass Bead Game. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 18:20 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @AlexB. Sorry, you’re right about that – you only said *h2 could be syllabic, not fricative. But in most non-glottalic contexts (and I think even in some glottalic proposals as well), it is assumed to be a fricative (whose place of articulation is not precisely known) and also to have a syllabic variant used between consonants. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 18:16 | comment | added | Alex B. | @JanusBahsJacquet "what do you mean that *h2 was a fricative" - sorry but I never said this. I wrote "and s being a strident (=fricative)" My position re the PIE laryngeals is agnosticism :) | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 18:15 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @AlexB. Also, if you consider all PIE phones purely algebraic symbols, what do you mean that *h2 was a fricative? Algebraic symbols do not have phonetic realities and as such, that statement would make no sense. They are algebraic in the sense that they represent actual phonemes whose precise qualities we do not know for sure; not in the sense that they have no phonetic reality. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 18:15 | comment | added | Alex B. | @JanusBahsJacquet thanks for the clarification. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 18:11 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @AlexB. Not in English, no, but in various other languages, yes. Ryukyu pštu ‘person’, Mandarin si, zi, ci (for many speakers), Hungarian s /ʃ/ ‘and’, Nuxálk sxs ‘seal blubber’, etc. When I said “nothing unusual”, I didn’t mean it was common, just that it is a well-known phenomenon, not some bizarre idea. It’s typologically uncommon, yes, but by no means impossible. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 18:11 | comment | added | Alex B. | @JanusBahsJacquet "There’s nothing unusual about syllabic fricatives" - I'm afraid it's not quite true. While we have documented some languages where even fricatives can be syllabic, it's pretty uncommon, for a number of reasons (see any intro book on acoustic phonetics or linguistic typology). | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 18:04 | comment | added | Alex B. | @JanusBahsJacquet to me the laryngeals (and, broader, all PIE phonetics are essentially algebraic symbols, nothing else.) | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 17:54 | comment | added | Alex B. | @JanusBahsJacquet "There’s nothing unusual about syllabic fricatives (/s/ is syllabic in the word pssst used to attract someone’s attention discreetly in English)" - can you give me more examples of syllabic s which are not onomatopoeic words please? | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 16:36 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @AlexB. There’s nothing unusual about syllabic fricatives (/s/ is syllabic in the word pssst used to attract someone’s attention discreetly in English), but the point is that *h2 and *s are both generally presumed to be fricatives (in non-glottalic terms). Within fricatives, it’s more common for sibilants to have syllabic variants than for non-sibilants, so it’s true the PIE distribution (which is the reverse) is typologically unusual. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 15:51 | comment | added | Alex B. | also linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1239/445 | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 15:20 | comment | added | Alex B. | re "why can /h2/ be syllabic but not /s/" : I thought h2 was syllabic when it vocalized, right? and s being a strident (=fricative) is typically unusual (if not impossible) for being the syllable nucleus, no? | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 14:54 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @YellowSky The scarcity of vowels itself is not necessarily weird, but the distribution is rather unusual. In languages that have two vowel phonemes, they are rarely both mid vowels. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 13:00 | comment | added | Alex B. | Besides the perennial problem of how to apply the findings of typological statistics to historical linguistics, there’s another undesirable assumption, PIE was a stable language that never changed? Very unlikely of course. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 12:52 | comment | added | Alex B. | Take a look at this linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/1398/445 | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 10:43 | comment | added | Tristan | @YellowSky especially just North of the Caucasus, which happens to be pretty much exactly the area most commonly accepted as the PIE Urheimat | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 9:22 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | The scarcity of vowels is not very much typologically unusual. Kabardian can well be analysed as having just a single vowel phoneme despite that phonetically all the 5 cardinal vowels are present, most of them are reflexes of the single vowel influenced by the articulatory features of the nearby consonants. For example, [u] is found only near the labial or labialized consonants. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 9:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackLinguist/status/1305793484947890176 | ||
| Sep 15, 2020 at 8:35 | history | edited | Omar and Lorraine | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 15, 2020 at 8:08 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | You may find this article by Martin Kümmel interesting. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 5:27 | review | First posts | |||
| Sep 15, 2020 at 11:53 | |||||
| Sep 15, 2020 at 5:26 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | The glottalic theory helps because /t t' d/ (or /t t' tʰ/ etc) is more typologically reasonable than /t d dʰ/, mostly. We see that sort of three-way contrast in e.g. Georgian, while I can't think of any living language that contrasts voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated stops. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 5:19 | history | asked | M. Sperling | CC BY-SA 4.0 |