269 16 12MB
English Pages 374 [372] Year 1979
LINGUISTIC AND LITERARY STUDIES In Honor of
Archibald A. Hill Edited by
MOHAMMAD ALI J A Z A Y E R Y E D G A R C. POLOME WERNER WINTER
III: H I S T O R I C A L A N D COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
MOUTON PUBLISHERS THE HAGUE · PARIS · NEW YORK
Linguistic and Literary Studies ISBN: 90-279-7717-8
(VolumeI)
90-279-7727-5 (Volume II) 90-279-7737-2 (Volume III) 90-279-7747-X (Volume IV) © 1978, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands Printed in Belgium
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A L F R E D BAMMESBERGER
On the gloss to Matthew 26:8 in the Lindisfarne Gospels . .
9
W I L L I A M H. B E N N E T T
The Germanic reflex of Indo-European /a/ in originally medial syllables
13
P A U L W. B R O S M A N , JR.
The gender of Hittite i-stems
19
W A R R E N C. C O W G I L L
Agon: agelrö; A new r/n-alternation
29
ISIDORE DYEN
Subgrouping and reconstruction
33
C H A R L E S L. E A S T L A C K
From Proto-Tupi-Guarani to modern Guarani: Patterns of change in a native American phonological system
53
E R N S T A. E B B I N G H A U S
Germania VI, 10: A Germanic cavalry manoeuvre
61
HERBERT G A L T O N
The meaning of the Slavic words for 'still' and 'already' . . .
67
D E M E T R I U S J. G E O R G A C A S
Aitolikon-Anatolikon-Andoliko-Andeliko: A puzzling place name in Central Greece
75
6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
E R I C P. H A M P
Indo-European '6'
81
H E N R Y M. H O E N I G S W A L D
Adjectives as first compound members in Homer
91
GUY JUCQUOIS
Histoire des conceptions sur la racine en indo-europeen . . . S U M I T R A M. K A T R E
On some accent rules of Pänini
95 107
G E O R G E S. L A N E
Some remarks on reconstructed Germanic
117
H O W A R D W. L A W
Clauses, parallelism, word order, and particles in classical Nahuatl and Isthmus Nahuat
123
F A N G KUEI LI
A syntactic change in Thai
141
G O R D O N M. MESSING
How the cocktail was christened
147
GUSTAV MUST
Gothic aibr
155
HERBERTPENZL
Methods of textual linguistics and the old high German Ludwigslied
163
KAZIMIERZ POLASiSKI
Studies on Polabian morphophonemics
171
JAAN PUHVEL
Latin area and Indo-European threshing terminology in Hittite
175
E D W I N G. P U L L E Y B L A N K
Abruptness and gradualness in phonological change
181
TABLE OF CONTENTS
7
M A R I O D. S A L T A R E L L I
Α Latin conspiracy
193
LAURITS SALTVEIT
Some modal features common to English, German and Scandinavian
199
PHILIP SCHERER
The preverbal Gothic ga-
209
W I L L I A M R. S C H M A L S T E I G
Indo-European *-oN and *-ö
219
H. S C H U L T I N K
The prefix ge- in Dutch and German past participles
225
R I C H A R D Κ. S E Y M O U R
Linguistic change: Examples from the verb system of the Westfalian dialect of Nienberge (near Münster)
237
G E O R G E Y. S H E V E L O V
On the so-called signature of Queene Ann of France (1063) . . DENIS SINOR
The nature of possessive suffixes in Uralic and Altaic . . . .
249 257
OSWALD SZEMERENYI
On reconstruction in morphology
267
P A U L TEDESCO
Sanskrit sdbda- 'sound, voice, word': An etymology
285
MARIA TSIAPERA
Notes on the phonology of verbs in the Eastern Greek dialects
293
R. W H I T N E Y T U C K E R
A neglected Greek diphthong
299
C A L V E R T W. W A T K I N S
A Palaic Carmen . .
305
8
TABLE OF CONTENTS
J O H N M. W E I N S T O C K
On Scandinavian labialization
315
W I L L I A M E. WELMERS
Initial consonants in Niger-Kordofanian noun class affixes . .
323
ROGER W. W E S C O T T
A Bini morphicon: Constructing a glossary of bound forms . .
331
KAY W I L L I A M S O N
Consonant distribution in Ijo
341
S T E P H E N A. W U R M
Developments in Papuan genetic linguistics since 1968 . . . .
355
ON THE GLOSS TO MATTHEW 26.8 IN THE L I N D I S F A R N E GOSPELS ALFRED BAMMESBERGER
The phrase discipuli indignati sunt in Matthew 26.8 of the Lindisfarne Gospels is glossed by Aldred as discipulas I degnas abloncgne I wrade weron (Skeat 1887:213, Kendrick 1960:80v). Here abloncgne is clearly meant as a synonym for wräöe. Since -ne can readily be parsed as the termination of the nom. (acc.) pi. masc. of a past participle, it is our task to determine the underlying verb. The simplest solution would be to consider -bloncgne as past participle to a reduplicating verb blangan; just as we find blcmdne (pi.) along with blandan 'mix', we might as well expect äblangne (spelled abloncgne) to belong to äblangan. This view has been held by a number of scholars, e.g. Jordan (1906:77), Kolbe (1912:37f.), Sievers-Brunner (1951:337), Flasdieck (1936:286), and Campbell (1959:318). Yet there is one major obstacle to this interpretation in that a verb äblangan, which ought to mean 'anger, worry' or the like, is otherwise completely unknown in Old English. If one wanted to argue in favor of a hapax legomenon, it seems a methodical requirement that the unique form ought to be transparent within the linguistic system for which it is posited. Therefore we have to inquire whether a reduplicating verb äblangan can be accounted for within the morphological pattern of an old Germanic language. One possible connection of OE äblangan would be with Swedish blänga (Holthausen 1934:26), which, however, is in itself by no means clear (see Hellquist 1966:84); at any rate it is a weak verb and so of no immediate help. Jordan (1906:77), indeed, rejected the comparison of OE blangan with supposedly cognate Swedish material, but his own attempt at explaining blangan as a 'nasalinfigierte Form zu belgan' does not carry conviction either. It is quite out of the question that a nasal infixed somewhere into the root of Gmc. *belg-/balg-/bulg(OE belgan, bealg, bulgon) could lead to blang-; furthermore one would certainly require some type of motivation for the infix. Since it therefore eems impossible to give a satisfactory account of blang-,1 we must next
10
ALFRED BAMMESBERGER
ask whether there can be an error in transmission; perhaps abloncgne is to be viewed as a corruption of some different form. Jordan (1906:77), who thought that blang- was somehow related to belg-, clearly felt what might be expected as interpretamentum for indignati sunt.2 Since we find bulgon glossing indigne in Mk. 14.4 (Skeat 1871:111, Kendrick 1960:123r) of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the past participle of äbelgan can reasonably be expected as a rendering of indignati and a synonym to wräöe. Then the original reading of the gloss to Mt. 26.8 would have been abolgne3 weron. May we assume a scribal corruption of abolgne to abloncgne ? From what we know about scribal practice,4 the corruption abloncgne instead of abolgne is understandable. 5 The main error consists in twice anticipating a letter. From abolgne the -/- was written too early, but in the resultant ablogne the -n- was also anticipated and then written in its proper place thus yielding ablongne. Finally the -c- in abloncgne, the actual manuscript reading, is probably just due to an orthographic fad. For unjustified insertion of -c- into the sequence -ng-6 numerous examples like doncuncgo (with c over the letters η and g) in Luke 18.11 (Skeat 1874:175, Kendrick 1960:184v) or teigduncges 'decimas' (with c over the letters η and g) in Luke 18.12 (ibid.) could be given. For the decision on whether a paleographically acceptable emendation is to be carried out, linguistic considerations are of prime importance. In the present case the manuscript reading cannot be defended either from the point of view of the Old English lexicon, since there is no verb blangan, or from the angle of comparative Germanic word formation, since a required reduplicating verb *blang-an- cannot be accounted for within the morphological inventory of Germanic. Therefore the emendation of abloncgne to abolgne7 must be considered as very likely indeed; 8 if the emendation can be accepted, the lemma blangan 'anger' has to disappear from Old English grammars and dictionaries. University of Freiburg im Breisgau
NOTES 1
Schlutter (1910:161) compared abloncgne with Welsh blwng 'indignabundus', which latter may represent Celtic *blungo-. If abloncgne were a loanword from Celtic it would be extremely hard to explain the -n- between the stem and the ending -e. Schlutter also considers the possibility that Celtic might have borrowed the word from Old English, but, since OE abloncgne cannot be convincingly accounted for, this view
A GLOSS IN THE LINDISFARNE GOSPELS
11
must be rejected; on Welsh blwttg see Pokorny 1959:159. Schlutter's article is thus of no help in dealing with the gloss in hand. 2 In the corresponding passage of Ru.1 we find abcelgede weron (Skeat 1887:213), a derivative from belgan, namely the σ-grade jan-verb -belgait (WS -bielgari) < *balgija-·, this form is morphologically transparent, whereas abloncgne defies any linguistic analysis. 3 The form might also be abolgene, since in the strong past participle "syncope is frequent in VP, but less so in Ru. 1 and North." (Campbell 1959:267). 4 For scribal errors in the gloss to Lindisfarne see the list in Ross-Stanley 1960:59. 5 Ross 1934 puts forward a well-considered theory on emendation with special reference to the Lindisfarne gloss. The emendation of abloncgne to abolgne suggested in the text above seems acceptable within the framework of Ross's recommendations. 6 There are "sporadic OE examples like uulatunc and more frequent examples in later English" which "seem to reflect a tendency to unvoice final [g] after /n/" (Kuhn 1970:28); if then -nc occurred in word final and -ng- in medial position, a compromise spelling -ncg- could easily arise (see also Sievers-Brunner 1951:193f.). Lindelöf (1901:92-3) comments on similar cases in Ru.2 and warns against drawing phonetic conclusions from these sporadic spellings. 7 In the Index verborum glossematicus Ross-Stanley (1960:66) enter abloncgne with a?; obviously they have doubts about its authenticity, but in keeping with their generally sound policy of introducing emendations very sparingly they have left the manuscript reading unchanged. 8 The manuscript reading has in fact been emended to abolgene by Toller 1921:1; a similar view is taken by Hall 1962:2.
REFERENCES Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Flasdieck, Hermann Max. 1936. Die reduplizierenden Verben des Germanischen. Anglia 60.241-365. Hall, John Richard Clark. 1960. A concise Anglo-Saxon dictionary. 4th ed. Cambridge: University Press. Hellquist, Elof. 1966. Svensk etymologisk ordbok, vol. 1. Repr. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerups Förlag. Holthausen, Ferdinand. 1934. Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Jordan, Richard. 1906. Eigentümlichkeiten des anglischen Wortschatzes. Anglistische Forschungen 17. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Kendrick, T. D. et al. 1960. Codex Lindisfarnensis. In aedibus Urs Graf, Oltun et Lausanna Helvetiae. Kolbe, Theodor. 1912. Die Konjugation der Lindisfarner Evangelien: Ein Beitrag zur altengllschen Grammatik. Bonner Studien zur englischen Philogie 5. Bonn: Peter Hanstein Kuhn, Sherman Μ. 1970. On the consonantal phonemes of Old English. Philological essays: Studies in Old and Middle English language and literature in honor of Herbert Dean Meritt, ed. by James L. Rosier, 16-49. The Hague: Mouton. Lindelöf, Uno. 1901. Die südnorthumbrische Mundart des 10. Jahrhunderts: Die Sprache der sog. Glosse Rushworth 2 . Bonner Beiträge zur Anglistik 10. Bonn: Peter Hanstein. Pokorny, Julius. 1959. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern & München: Francke. Ross, Alan S. C. 1934. A theory of emendation. Speculum 9.179-83.
12
ALFRED BAMMESBERGER
Ross, Alan S. C., and E. G. Stanley. 1960. The Anglo-Saxon gloss. Companion volume to Kendrick 1960. Schlutter, Ο. Β. Beiträge zur altenglischen Wortforschung Π. Englische Studien 42.161-204. Sievers, Eduard, and Karl Brunner. 1951. Altenglische Grammatik. 2nd ed. Halle: M. Niemeyer. Skeat, Walter W. 1871. The Gospel according to Saint Mark in Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian versions. Repr. 1970. Oxford: University Press. Skeat, Walter W. 1874. The Gospel according to Saint Luke in Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian versions. Repr. 1970. Oxford: University Press. —, 1887. The Gospel according to Saint Matthew in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian versions, Repr. 1970. Oxford: University Press. Toller, T. Northcote. 1921. An Anglo-Saxon dictionary: Supplement. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
THE GERMANIC REFLEX OF INDO-EUROPEAN Μ IN ORIGINALLY MEDIAL SYLLABLES WILLIAM H. BENNETT
IE /a/ (or, in terms of laryngeals, H) was regularly lost before a vowel, as in pres. ind. act. pi. 3 *wom(9)onti > Sk. vamdnti beside the corresponding singular form *womdti > Sk. vdmiti 'vomits'. A somewhat similar development appears to have affected Germanic when /a/, with the loss of a following intervocalic [j], came to stand before any vowel that remained a vowel, as in IE *tak-d(j)ö > *-(d)ö, hence PGmc. *paxö > Go. paha 'am silent'. When the [j] was followed by a consonant and so survived, the preceding /a/ also survived, as in IE *taksjmi > PGmc. *pagajmi (by Verner's Law) > OHG dagem 'am silent'. When intervocalic [j] was lost before /e/, the /e/ became nonsyllabic between vowel and consonant, so that /aj/ plus /e/ produced the same reflex as /SJV before consonant: IE *taka(j)esi > PGmc. *paxajzi > Go. pahais 'art silent' (Bennett 1962). For other opinions on the parent suffix of third-class weak verbs, see Flasdieck 1935, Sehrt 1956:6-7, and Polome 1967. A much more widespread loss of /a/, in which it was not followed by [j], occurred in originally medial syllables, affecting Iranian, Armenian, Slavic, Baltic, and Germanic. Thus /a/ in IE *dhug(h)dter 'daughter' (Pokorny 1959:277) appears as ß/ in Sk. duhitä and as /a/ in Gk. thugdter, but no trace of the originally medial vowel remains in NPers. duxtar, Arm. dustr, OCS düsti, Lith. dukti, or in such Germanic forms as Go. dauhtar and OE dohtor. In Germanic itself, this loss is well attested by such instances as *anatä > Olcel. qnd 'anteroom' (Pokorny 42), *ardtr> Olcel. ardr 'plow' (62), *bherag- > OHG birka 'birch' (139), and *kohmos > OE healm 'blade, stalk' (612). The object of the present investigation is to determine whether Germanic consistently reflects this last-mentioned loss or merely shows it in certain words as a sporadic, hit-or-miss development, as sometimes assumed. In the final decade of the last century, the loss of /a/ in originally medial syllables was unknown to Streitberg, who concluded (1893:47-8)
14
WILLIAM Η. BENNETT
that IE /a/ became /u/ in Germanic syllables that did not bear primary stress. So far as originally FINAL syllables are concerned, this analysis is correct (cf. Meillet 1937:101): IE *anats ( = Lat. anas) produced O H G anut and (with «-umlaut) Olcel. gnd 'duck' (Pokorny 41-2). If it were true that /a/ in originally MEDIAL syllables likewise became /u/ in Germanic, however, IE *dhughdter would appear as Go. *dugutar, IE *kobmos as OE *healum, and so on. Streitberg's /u/-theory is repeated in his Urgermanische Grammatik (1896, §56), in which is added the now startling assertion that IE Je/ and /a/ were in ablaut alternation and appear respectively as i and u (or o) in Germanic; this alternation, actually nonexistent, had been posited by Bartholomae (Hirt 1902:9). Streitberg's purported examples, which are accompanied here by page references to Pokorny, are the following: Go. tig- 'decade' beside O H G zwein-zug and Olcel. tuttugu 'two decades, twenty' (191), O H G enit and anut 'duck' (42), Go. haubip and Olcel. haufoö 'head' (530), Go. aqizi and O H G ackus 'ax' (9), Go. sigis and O H G sign 'victory' (389), O H G kranih and kranuh 'crane' (384), and OE hefig beside Olcel. hQfogr 'heavy' (528). As additional evidence are cited Lat.pl. jügera beside Go. sg. jukuzi 'yoke' (509) and Sk. sedimä 'we have sat' beside Go. setum 'we sat' (885). Of all these purported examples, however, only two originally contained /a/ in a medial or final syllable, namely O H G enit = anut and Sk. sedimä = Go. setum. The other supposed instances are irrelevant. To account for the phonologic divergence in O H G enit = anut, it is necessary to consider a Pre-Old High German development that is likewise represented in Go. tig- (OE OS -tig, etc.) = O H G -zug 'decade, -ty'. Though Prokosch (1939:289) says that u in O H G -zug is unexplained, it does not appear to be inexplicable. In Proto-Germanic, the form for 'decade' was declined as an «-stem, as it still is in Gothic: pi. acc. tiguns, gen. tigiwe, dat. tigum. The other historic Germanic languages reflect this form as a suffix, namely *-tegu > *-tigu. In Old High German, a weakly stressed medial vowel frequently shows an assimilation to the vowel of a following final syllable, as in sibun 'seven' beside the inflected form sibini, keisar 'emperor' beside gen. keiseres, nagal 'a nail' beside nagultun 'they nailed'. In forms like these, the phonetic environment of the medial vowel was highly variable, changing with the vowel of the final syllable, so that the assimilation could not occur uniformly throughout all forms of a word. In contrast, the phonetic environment of -ίνα. Pre-OHG *-tigu was constant; that is, -/- was invariably followed by -u in the final syllable. With the same assimilation of a weakly stressed
THE GERMANIC REFLEX OF IE / a /
15
medial vowel to that of a following final syllable, Pre-OHG *-tigu produced OHG -zug.1 To return now to OHG anut and enit: it has been observed that IE *andts, with /a/ in an originally final syllable, developed regularly to OHG anut and (with u-umlaut) Olcel. Qnd 'duck'. Accordingly, it is not the u of OHG anut that requires explanation; rather, it is the / of the alternate form enit. Both OHG anut and Olcel. Qnd had /-stem plurals, as respectively in nom. entiandendr < PGmc. *and-iz with *-iz < IE *-ej-es.
In the plural, the reflex of IE /a/ was regularly lost in an originally medial syllable, hence IE nom. *anat- + *-ejes > PGmc. *andiz. In the singular, on the other hand, the reflex of /a/ produced /u/ in an originally final syllable, as in IE nom. *anats > Pre-OHG *anud. When the Old High German singular developed directly from this form, the historic outcome was anut. But when the singular as well as the plural was inflected as an /-stem, namely *anud + the new stem vowel -/-, the form underwent the same medial vowel assimilation that has been considered in the foregoing paragraph: *anudi became *anidi, just as inflected *sibuni became sibini 'seven'. Then, with the regular operation of /-umlaut, *anid(i) produced O H G enit.
As already observed, Streitberg's theory that IE /a/ became PGmc. /u/ in originally medial syllables is clearly incorrect; otherwise, IE *dhughdter would have produced Go. *dugutar, not dauhtar, and so on. Yet this theory is still current. It has been curtailed in scope, to be sure, but only to make allowance for words in which the loss of /a/ in originally medial syllables is so obvious that it cannot be denied. Indeed, the loss of this /a/ and its supposed preservation as /u/ may be described together in the same Germanic grammar. Thus Krahe (1963) states in §46 that in many instances /a/ was lost in pre-Germanic medial syllables, as in IE *dhugh3ter > Go. dauhtar, etc. In §45, however, he says that this /a/ often appears in Germanic as /u/ - provided that the /a/ had not already been lost - hence IE *(we)wftame ( = Sk. vavftimä 'we have turned') > Go. waurpum and OHG wurtum 'we became'. This is a rather facile formulation: if one of the two posited phonologic changes (the loss of /a/) is supposed not to have occurred, the other (/a/ > /u/) can be substituted for it. But this two-way option evokes some awkward questions. First, why would the pre-Germanic loss of /a/ occur only in certain words like IE *dhughater > OE dohtor but not in others like pre-Gmc. *wftame > O H G wurtum or pre-Gmc. *sedame ( = Sk. sedimä) > Go.
setuml
And, even if it is supposed that /am/ in pre-Gmc. *wftame might somehow produce -um in OHG wurtum, how is -urn to be explained in forms
16
WILLIAM Η. BENNETT
that had never contained /a/, for instance IE *widme (originally 'we have seen') > Go. witum and OHG wizzum 'we know' ? These two questions give rise to still others. If it is assumed that /a/ in originally medial syllables was not always lost in Germanic but survived as /u/ in certain specific forms, what were these forms, and what did they have in common? It has been observed that Streitberg's purported examples of /u/ < /a/ in originally medial syllables have no phonologic support. Accordingly, this supposed development can be illustrated only by instances of /u/ in Germanic preterit indicative dual and plural endings: Go. du. 1 -u, 2 -uts, pi. 1 -um, 2 -up, 3 -un, OHG pi. 1 -um, 2 -ut, 3 -un, etc. In short, the envisioned preservation of /a/ as Gmc. /u/ in originally medial syllables is presumed to be confined to a single morphologic subclass. I can see no sound reason, therefore, for supposing that the pre-Gmc. /a/ in question was arbitrarily lost in certain words (or word classes) and - just as arbitrarily - was not lost in others. Rather, it appears advisable to distinguish sharply between what is known and what is merely assumed. If we accept only what is known, IE /a/ had three predictable reflexes in Germanic: /u/ when surviving in originally final syllables (*anats > OHG anut), /0/ when lost in originally medial syllables (*dhughdter > OE dohtor), and otherwise /a/ {*pdter > Go. fadar 'father'. 2 It is true, to be sure, that /a/ in pre-Gmc. *sedami and /u/ in Go. setum occupy the same relative position within the word, but this detail alone does not show that the two vowels are phonologically related, especially in view of the fact that /u/ in the ending -urn occurs also in forms that had never contained /a/. As opposed to this assumption, three other interpretations have been suggested, any one of which is more defensible. Of these, no two are wholly incompatible, so that they may be considered separately or to some extent in combination. According to one opinion, a form like IE *widme, when losing its final vowel in Germanic, would become *wittp, with -ψ then producing -um in Go. witum and OHG wizzum. This is the conclusion expressed in Krahe's Gothic grammar (1948:120 and 1967:128); contrast his interpretation in 1963, §§45-6. On the other hand, Marchand (1957:107-8) observes that in the Germanic first person plural of the preterit indicative, not only in strong verbs of Classes IV, V, VI, and VII but also in all classes of weak verbs, the syllable immediately preceding the ending was long. If Edgerton's Law is believed to have operated in this instance, the parent ending {me} would thus have the allomorphic form *-rpme, which would regularly produce PGmc. *-umme and historic -um: a
THE GERMANIC REFLEX OF IE / θ /
17
parallel development would occur in the dual 1: IE *-uwe/-uwo > Go. -u. This analysis implies that PGmc. *-umme, occurring in the great majority of verbs, would be introduced by analogy into the strong classes I-III. And thirdly, if some aberrations in the operation of Edgerton's Law are believed to make its application questionable in this instance, the preterit indicative plural 3 (Go. -un, OIcel. -u, OHG -un, OE OS -on, etc.) can be traced to the corresponding parent aorist *-nt. Regardless of which interpretation (or interpretations) may seem more credible, the /u/ of some preterit indicative endings must be ascribed to analogic leveling. But any of the foregoing analyses is surely preferable to the theory that /a/ in originally medial syllables survived in Germanic as /u/, though only in preterit dual and plural endings and for no apparent reason. I would suggest that the pre-Germanic loss of /s/ in originally medial syllables was not sporadic but consistent, occurring in forms like preGmc. *wft(3)mi as well as in those like *dhugh(d)ter. If pre-Gmc. *wit(d)mi had retained its /a/ in Proto-Germanic, the result would have been *wurdame, and the Old High German form would have been *wortam,
not
University
of
wurtum.3 Michigan
NOTES 1
The effect produced by u in a final syllable was even farther-reaching in Old Icelandic. Thus Pre-Olcel. μ in a final syllable umlauted α in a medial syllable to ρ and then to u, which in turn effected an umlaut of a in an initial syllable, as in fem. nom. sg. *annaru > *anngru > *annur(u) > Olcel. gnnur 'second, other'. This development was comparatively rare in the other Old Norse dialects. But when the medial vowel occurred in a constant phonetic environment, as in *-tigu (surviving in ONorw. tu-tigu), the umlaut was far less restricted, hence not only Olcel. tuttugu but also ONorw. tuittugu, tyttugu, tugtugu, tyktugu, tut(e)gu, tiugu, Ork. tuttu tuttugu (Noreen 1923, §449, note), and OSw. tiughu 'two decades, twenty'. 2 One etymology would have IE /a/ in an originally medial syllable survive in Germanic as /a/: *k:enak0- > OHG honag 'honey'. But the etymology itself is questionable. As Pokorny notes (564), the ablaut in this word is obscure. Sk. kanaka- 'gold', if related to *kenak0-, should have medial -i-, not -a-, and clear-cut evidence for /a/ is wanting. 3 I am indebted to Warren Cowgill for helpful suggestions. Thanks are due also to my colleagues Robert L. Kyes and Ladislav Matejka. REFERENCES Bennett, W. H. 1962. The parent suffix in Germanic weak verbs of class ΠΙ. Language 38.135-41.
18
WILLIAM Η. BENNETT
Flasdieck, Hermann. 1935. Untersuchungen über die germanischen schwachen Verben III. Klasse. Anglia 59.1-192. Hirt, Hermann. 1902. Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. Ergebnisse und Fortschritte der germanistischen Wissenschaft im letzten Vierteljahrhundert, ed. Richard Bethge, 3-25. Leipzig: Gesellschaft für deutsche Philologie. Krähe, Hans. 1948. Historische Laut- und Formenlehre des Gotischen. Heidelberg: Winter. —. 1967. 2nd ed. by Elmar Seebold. —. 1963. Germanische Sprachwissenschaft, 1: Einleitung und Lautlehre. 5th ed. (Sammlung Göschen, 238). Berlin: de Gruyter. Marchand, James W. 1957. Notes on the origin of some Gothic inflectional endings. Modern Language Notes 72.107-10. Meillet, A. 1937. Introduction ä l'etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes. 8th ed. University: University of Alabama Press. (1964 reprint.) Noreen, Adolf. 1923. Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik. 4th ed. Halle: Niemeyer. Pokorny, Julius. 1959. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1. Bern and Munich: Francke. Polome, Edgar. 1967. On the origin of Germanic class III of weak verbs. Beiträge zur Indogermanistik und Keltologie (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, 13), ed. Wolfgang Meid, 83-92. Innsbruck: Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität Innsbruck. Prokosch, E. 1939. A comparative Germanic grammar. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America. Sehrt, Edward H. 1956. ai und au im Gotischen. Fragen und Forschungen im Bereich und Umkreis der germanischen Philologie (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin: Institut für Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 8), 1-11. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Streitberg, W. 1893. Review of Vorgeschichte der altgermanischen Dialekte, by Fr. Kluge. Indogermanische Forschungen 2: Anzeiger 44-52. —. 1896. Urgermanische Grammatik. Heidelberg: Winter.
THE
GENDER
OF
HITTITE
i-
STEMS
PAUL W. BROSMAN, Jr.
According to a widely disseminated view the Hittite language was at the time of its attestation approaching a genderless state through restriction of the neuter. Friedrich (1960:43) has held that the neuter was far advanced in a process of decline. Kronasser (1956:106, 138), at one point, made the more emphatic statement that Hittite was clearly on the way to becoming genderless, but more recently (Kronasser 1966:107) appears to have modified his position somewhat in remarks limited to the assertion that the masculine or common gender predominates among the aand i- stems. Not long ago I pointed out (Brosman 1968:527) that belief in the progressive restriction of the neuter seems to conflict with the apparent use of the Hurrian suffix -ta as a plural ending of Hittite neuter i- stems, since the latter phenomenon would depend on the assignment to the neuter of a large number of loanwords, a process implausible in the case of a dying category. In this connection a hasty count of Hittite i- stem nouns revealed that masculines were a little more than twice as numerous as neuters. Since neuter i- stems were quite rare in Proto-Indo-European, these figures suggested that at least among the i- stems, the vitality of the Hittite neuter had increased rather than diminished, particularly if one accepts the prevailing opinion that the inherited masculine and feminine have been combined in the Hittite masculine or common gender. However, the limited amount of evidence cited could be held to establish little of a more general nature other than that the question of Hittite gender may be more complex than it at first appears. A further conclusion, therefore, was that a complete survey of nouns of all declensions would be necessary in order to determine the basic descriptive facts concerning gender in Hittite. More recently (Brosman 1971:33-7) I attempted such a survey of the «- stems, which, being much fewer and therefore more manageable, could be treated with reasonable thoroughness in a single brief article. The results, which tended to reinforce those of the superficial evidence of the i- stems,
20
PAUL W. BROSMAN, JR.
were, in brief, that u- stems with inanimate referents were as nearly evenly divided between genders as could be determined; however, with the addition of those having animate referents, which had an association with the masculine that, among the u- stems, was absolute, the masculine outnumbered the neuter twenty-four to seventeen or nineteen. In addition, there was evidence to indicate that, through the most recent period of borrowing, loanwords with inanimate referents might be assigned to either gender. The purpose of the present article is to return to the i- stems and begin a treatment of them similar to that given the u- stems. The total number of i- stems collected identifiable as to gender was 300, of which 195 were masculine, eighty-seven neuter and eighteen of varying gender. 1 Because of the substitution of a rigid standard for a measure of personal judgment in the admission of heteroclitics, these figures differ slightly from those reported previously. 2 The present study contains no word possessing any heteroclitic forms. However, words preceded by Glossenkeile have been included. When forms before which a Glossenkeil occurs at least once are removed, the figures above become 180 masculines, eighty-three neuters and seventeen variable. As could be inferred from the inconsistency with which Glossenkeile are employed with the words before which they do appear, it is known that many foreign words occur in Hittite contexts without an overt indication of their origin (Kronasser 1966:152-3; Laroche 1959:14). It is, therefore, almost certain that the remaining material contains a number of other non-Hittite forms. That this element was of appreciable proportions is especially likely in the case of the i- stems, for /- stems were notoriously productive in Luwian, the language of many, if not all, of the Glossenkeil forms (Laroche 1959: 138, 12-3; Kronasser 1966:153). While it is possible to establish, with varying degrees of certainty, the Luwian origin of a number of these words, an attempt to identify all would become quite speculative. Moreover, among those forms determined to have originally been Luwian, it would often not be possible confidently to distinguish between unmarked foreign terms and true loanwords, the gender characteristics of which would, under some circumstances, carry greater weight than those of forms inherited from an earlier era. For the last-named reason in particular, it was felt that the only other words which could safely be set aside as probably foreign were those possessing Luwian inflectional forms. The effect of their elimination was negligible, for they numbered but three, all masculine. Since one has already been included among the Glossenkeil words, the resultant total of possibly genuine Hittite masculines is 178.
THE GENDER OF HITTITE i- STEMS
21
Besides being of interest in its own right, the question of semantics is of significance from the present point of view. It will be recalled that among the u- stems the association between masculine gender and animate referents was absolute, though in one direction only, of course. The same may well have been true of the much larger number of i- stems. Approximately one-third of the masculines have animate referents. As precisely as they can be given, the figures are fifty-nine to sixty-five among the total of 195 and fifty-six to sixty-one among the 178 remaining after elimination of the presumed foreign words. They contrast with one possible instance among the variable nouns and two among the neuters. The reason for variation in the figures given for the masculine is uncertainty concerning the meaning of six of the forms. It should be mentioned that, of the fifty-six possible Hittite words with meanings considered certain, or certainly animate, by Friedrich and his references, the animate nature of the referent in thirty-three instances is guaranteed by the use of a determinative. The one variable word with a referent conceivably animate is tuhalziwhich is presumed to represent a sacrificial rite or victim since it occurs preceded by the determinative S1SKUR. In the absence of other evidence, the closeness of the connection between animate referents and the masculine displayed by the other forms would seem almost a sufficient reason in itself for rejecting the designation of an animal as its meaning, particularly since the Hittite word is apparently a borrowing of Hurr. tuhalzi and, as a recent loanword, would be especially prone to conformity with established morphological-semantic patterns. Somewhat similar is the case of one of the two corresponding neuters, zariianalli-, a word of unknown meaning for which that of 'a bird' has been conjectured by Friedrich. In this instance no appropriate etymon is attested in one of the neighboring languages, but the semantic sphere of local fauna is one in which borrowing would be likely. The remaining neuter is the original adjective huelpi- 'young, fresh, unripe', which occurs as a substantive on four occasions in instructions for those employed on property attached to the temple (KUB XIII 4 IV 3, 39, 43, 49 apud Sturtevant and Bechtel 1935:162, 164). Friedrich gives the meaning of the noun as 'young (of animals)'. The word indeed seems clearly to refer to animals in three nearly consecutive passages in which the 'cowherds of the gods' and 'shepherds of the gods' are advised to bring promptly 'to the gods' the first newly born animals. However, in its first occurrence huelpiappears with equal certainty to refer to plant life. The persons addressed are in this case identified as 'farmers ("men of the plow") of the gods'.
22
PAUL W . BROSMAN, JR.
They too are instructed to bring huelpi- without delay to the gods. In the following lines the same persons are told of various types of deception concerning the productivity of the gods' lands, which they are advised not to practice. As in the case of the instructions concerning huelpi-, those dealing with deception have their counterpart in lines addressed later to the cowherds and shepherds. In the latter case the deceptive practices all involve animals. The corresponding instructions to the farmers mention only grain and seed. It thus appears that the noun huelpi- was broad enough in meaning to include edible substances both animal and vegetable in origin. The translation of 'first-fruits' adopted by Sturtevant (Sturtevant and Bechtel 1935:163, 165) nearly four decades ago seems as close a rendering as possible in English without resorting to periphrasis. It is therefore probable that the association between animate referents and masculine gender was absolute among the istems as well as those in -u- and certain that it was, at the least, extremely highly developed. Under these circumstances it seems pertinent to note that among nouns with inanimate referents the superiority of the masculines is reduced to that of 130-136 versus eighty-five to eightyseven when all forms are included, or 117-122 versus eighty-one to eightythree when the words considered foreign are discarded. Although the importance attached to the preceding figures will vary, among recent loanwords the effect of the semantic connection is clearer, for, as stated earlier in the case of tuhalzi-, it can be assumed with considerable confidence that borrowings made after the development of an association as well defined as that described above would tend to conform to the established pattern. Aside from tuhalzi- - the only instance among the variable nouns - there occurred thirty-two forms which can be reliably identified as loans. In determining reliability the criteria adopted as providing objectivity at the cost of a minimal arbitrary element were that words were accepted as borrowed only if precise potential etyma were attested in a neighboring language or if they occurred with an inflectional ending of presumed Hurrian origin. The reason for taking Hurrian endings to indicate Hittite words of foreign origin after earlier regarding forms with Luwian inflection as words still foreign is that the Hurrian endings were treated differently by Hittite. Unlike those of Luwian, they were modified to conform to the Hittite grammatical system. Nom.-acc.pl. -ta, for example, was changed from its function as a Hurrian directive suffix, while dat.sg. -ti presumably represented a change of the same ending in both form and function. It therefore seems reasonable to regard forms possessing these endings as Hittite. That the endings
THE GENDER OF HITTITE i- STEMS
23
themselves had been fully incorporated into the Hittite inflectional system is less certain, for their use had apparently not yet spread to words of other than Hurrian origin (Friedrich 1960:59-60). Thirteen of the thirty-two words accepted as borrowings on this basis, or that of an attested etymon, were neuter and nineteen, masculine. Of the latter, five or six had animate referents. Thus, among reliable loanwords with referents certainly inanimate, the number assigned to each gender was precisely the same. Another aspect of the figure for the neuters worthy of note is that over 15% of the eighty-three neuter i- stems accepted as genuinely Hittite can be explained with considerable certainty as borrowings received after the language had entered the area in which the texts were composed. In view of the large foreign element in Hittite, the scant attestation of Hattic and Hurrian and the lack of an etymology for a majority of the neuter /- stems, one can be fairly confident that the actual proportion of such loanwords was considerably greater, though any more precise estimate would be extremely speculative. Moreover, it appears probable that most of the thirteen neuters for which there is specific evidence entered the language during the final centuries of Hittite history, for at least ten are of Hurrian provenance. That the period of Hurrian influence largely coincided with that of the empire has been shown by Laroche (1966:355-8) and Güterbock (1954:386-91). Other words of possible or proposed foreign origin follow a pattern somewhat different from that outlined above. Borrowing has been suggested for only three other neuters, while twelve additional masculines, including four with animate referents, have been proposed as loanwords. Thus, the figures for the total number of forms considered by one scholar or another to have been loans are thirty-one masculine and sixteen neuter, and for those with inanimate referents alone, twentyone or twenty-two masculine to sixteen neuter. A plausible explanation for the contrast between these figures and those for words of more certain origin is that the much larger overall number of masculines simply afforded greater opportunity for speculation of all sorts concerning their source. However, even if the larger figures be accepted, indications would be that the neuter had held its own throughout the period that Hittite was in use in Asia Minor, since both pairs of figures for loanwords are approximately proportional to the corresponding pairs for all i- stems regardless of origin. At the other extreme, evidence concerning words of known original gender inherited from Proto-Indo-European is largely non-existent. Although a somewhat larger number of forms had possible Indo-Euro-
24
PAUL W. BROSMAN, JR.
pean connections, only in the case of two suffixes does there appear to be a question of an original i- stem. Pargasti- 'height', dalugasti- 'length' and palhasti- 'breadth' occur beside the adjectives parku- 'high', daluki'long' and palhi- 'broad'. That the suffix contained by the nouns corresponds in some manner to -sti- or -esti-j-osti- of Balto-Slavic has often been suggested and seems open to little dispute (Sturtevant 1951:76; Benveniste 1962:89-95; Kronasser 1966:208). Moreover, since all three adjectives have good Indo-European etymologies (Friedrich 1952:156, 161, 206) and the suffix appears to have been added directly to the root rather than to the derived adjectival i- or u- stem, it seems likely that the nouns were all inherited in their entirety. That lu(m)pasti- 'vexation' is similarly derived is much less certain despite Kronasser (loc. cit.), for it has neither an attested adjective beside it nor an Indo-European connection for its first element and appears preceded by a Glossenkeil in three of its four occurrences (Laroche 1959:64). In gender lumpastiis consistently masculine, pargasti- and dalugasti- are exclusively neuter, while palhasti- is variable. Since the related Baltic and Slavic forms are uniformly feminine, one must apparently agree with Kronasser (1966: 209) that the Hittite forms reflect a tendency to transfer the suffix from the masculine to the neuter, at least if one accepts the view that an inherited feminine gender has been absorbed by the masculine. A possible explanation for the presumed shift is that the much more common suffixes -essarj-esnas and -atari-annas which functioned similarly (cf. parkessar, pargatar 'height', palhessar, palhatar 'breadth') were exclusively neuter. It remains true, nevertheless, that the one certain instance of a tendency to shift the gender of an inherited i- stem was in the direction toward the neuter and that, as the existence of one or more relic forms suggests, the tendency may have been relatively recent. That the Indo-European suffix -ti- of action nouns also occurs in Hittite is more doubtful. Sturtevant (1951:76) has somewhat tentatively proposed that -ti- is contained as the second element in the productive Hittite suffix -uzzi-. It seems unlikely that such is the case since (a) -uzziis used to form nouns of instrument rather than of action, (b) the ending -uz(z)i is, as Kronasser (1966:241) has pointed out, common in neighboring languages, and (c) there is otherwise no visible source for the u of the Hittite suffix. With respect to the last point, Sturtevant's suggested explanation that u arose among forms containing the causative suffix -nu- receives little support from the words in which -uzzi- is attested, for the total of eleven includes only one apparently containing -nu- : annanuzzi- 'a part of the harness' (cf. annanu- 'train, break in'), and only two
THE GENDER OF HITTITE i- STEMS
25
others, kunkunuzzi- 'a stone' and lahhurnuzzi- 'sacrificial table (?)', in which the suffix is preceded by n. The only other possible instances of -ti- with a measure of plausibility are supplied by two forms, luzzi'villain labor' and tuzzi(ia)- 'army', both of which also end in -uzzi-, but in which the inherited suffix, if it occurs at all, has apparently been employed in the Indo-European fashion, i.e. appended to the zero grade of the root. The possibility that luzzi- is a cognate of Gk. lüsis 'solution' and that tuzzi(ia)- contains the same suffix combined with the root of Got. piuda, Lith. tautä 'people, nation', long entertained by Hittite scholars, is still taken seriously by some (Sturtevant 1951:75-6; Kronasser 1966:203-4) but rejected by others (Benveniste 1962:105-6, 122-4). The division of scholarly opinion is not surprising, for the paucity of the available evidence makes a definite decision difficult. Accepting that -ti- is inherited in either or both of the manners proposed, apparently would not conflict with the evidence of -asti-; indeed, though -tiformed feminines in Indo-European, Hitt. luzzi- and five of the words containing -uzzi were neuter. Tuzzi(ia)- and two nouns in -uzzi- were masculine, while two more of the uzzi- forms were variable. 3 Indications of a tendency to change the gender of words having other sources are not numerous. The figures of seventeen or eighteen variable nouns excluding or including words regarded as foreign do not seem remarkably large within totals of 278 or 300. The seventeen words written without Glossenkeile include inherited palhasti-, the two forms containing the possibly inherited suffix -uzzi-, and tuhalzi. That the latter was apparently a borrowing of Hurr. tuhalzi has already been mentioned. It is therefore not unlikely, in view of the previous evidence, that words with attested Hurrian etyma and inanimate referents were assigned to either gender with approximately equal frequency, that tuhalzi- was a recent loanword which had not yet acquired a definite gender. Although none of the remaining thirteen forms has a precise etymon attested in a neighboring language, it is probable that the same is true of several of them, for over half (eight) are written with one of the two determinatives NINDA 'pastry' and DUG 'vessel'. Though one of these forms, palhi'kettle' may originally have meant 'broad vessel' and thus may have had an Indo-European etymology as an adjective, it may be assumed that most, if not all, of the rest were borrowed after the language had entered the cultural sphere in which the texts were composed. The remaining five forms fall into as many semantic categories: musical instrument, part of the body, weapon, furniture and plant. Their number is so small number that they would constitute slight evidence
26
PAUL W . BROSMAN, JR.
of any general process underway throughout the period of composition of the texts. It cannot yet be said that the i- stems have been thoroughly examined from the point of view of gender. Questions of chronology and the gender characteristics of the several productive suffixes in -i provide at least two matters which still require consideration. However, it appears unlikely that more detailed study will dispel the impression produced by the broad outlines of the evidence, since the latter point with such consistency to the same conclusion. Indications of the gross figures that, among the istems, the neuter has lost none of its vitality, become more persuasive if attention is confined to words with inanimate referents. The number of variable nouns, most of which seem fairly certainly to have been recent loans, does not seem to imply an unusual amount of shifting of gender in either direction. The slight evidence concerning inherited forms, though perhaps more curious than significant, suggests shifting toward the neuter. Probably most convincing is the evidence that recent loans with inanimate referents and constant gender were as likely to be neuter as masculine. In summary, it seems that thus far all evidence indicates that the i- stems were subject to no process tending toward restriction of the neuter. Tulane University
NOTES 1
These and similar subsequent figures are based on the forms contained in the dictionary of Friedrich (1952) and its supplements of 1957, 1961 and 1966. /- stem forms mentioned in what follows will not be cited individually since each may be found in the alphabetical listing of the dictionary or one of the supplements. 2 The previous figures were 198, ninety-one, and twenty-three, respectively. 3 The two remaining uzzi- forms were of undetermined gender.
REFERENCES Benveniste, Emile. 1962. Hittite et indo-europeen. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve. Brosman, Paul. 1968. An aspect of Hittite use of the Hurrian suffix -ta. JAOS 88.526-8. —. 1971. The gender of Hittite u- stems. ΚΖ 85.33-7. Friedrich, Johannes. 1952-66. Hethitisches Wörterbuch. Heidelberg: Winter. —. 1960. Hethitisches Elementarbuch. 2nd ed., vol. 1. Heidelberg: Winter. Güterbock, Hans. 1954. The Hurrian element in the Hittite empire. Journal of World History. 2.383-93.
THE GENDER OF HITTITE i- STEMS
27
Kronasser, Heinz. 1956. Vergleichende Laut- und Formenlehre des Hethitischen. Heidelberg: Winter. —. 1966. Etymologie der hethitischen Sprache, vol. 1. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Laroche, Emmanuel. 1959. Dictionnaire de la langue louvite. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve. —. 1966. Les noms des Hittites. Paris: Klincksieck. Sturtevant, Edgar H., and George Bechtel. 1935. A Hittite chrestomathy. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania. Sturtevant, Edgar H. 1951. A comparative grammar of the Hittite language. 2nd ed., vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University.
AGON : AGEfRO A NEW R/N-ALTERNATION WARREN C. COWGILL
Anyone reading the Greek and Indo-European etymological dictionaries and handbooks of word formation from Curtius 1858:139 to Chantraine 1968:17 would get the impression that the etymology and formation of Greek agSn is perfectly clear and free from problems: it is derived, by means of a suffix -δη-, from the root of the Greek verb dg-ö Ί lead'. It would serve no useful purpose to list all the works I know of in which this analysis is presented; suffice it to say that all the standard handbooks present it as true, and needing little or no supporting argument, and none that I have seen refer to any alternative analysis, except those who, like Mette 1955 :col. 135, cite the opinions of the ancient Greeks themselves; opinions which, insofar as they do not derive agSn from dgö, are not worth refuting. There is however, a crucial difficulty in this etymology. The meaning of agön in the oldest Greek is 'assembly, gathering', as in the Homeric neon ag6n 'assembly of ships', theios ag6n 'assembly of the gods'; later, already in Homer, it begins to be specialized as an assembly gathered to watch (athletic) contests (so regularly in books 23 and 24 of the Iliad and 8 of the Odyssey, in which athletic contests are described); only in post Homeric Greek (one possible example in the Odyssey, 8.259) does it come to mean the 'contest' or 'struggle' itself; see Liddell-Scott-Jones 1925-40:18, Mette 1955 :col. 134, Leaf 1902:132, and note the information of the Β scholiast on Iliad 24.1, quoted by Leaf and Mette, that in Boeotia ag6n had the meaning of agorä 'assembly, assembly place'. Older scholars, such as Curtius, who ignored the earlier meaning of the word and translated it as 'Wettkampf', 'Wettlauf', 'lutte', or the like, evidently thought that it applied especially to racing, and so could be derived from dgö in the sense 'drive (horses)' which cognates of dgö have, e.g., in Latin, Icelandic, and Sanskrit. This shows up even in Schwyzer 1939:488 and Pokorny 1951:5. Scholars who know the word's basic meaning in Greek have either ignored the problem of how a word
30
WARREN C. COWGILL
meaning 'assembly, gathering' should come to be derived from a root meaning 'lead' - so Frisk 1960:18, Hofmann 1950:3 - or have come up with the feeble explanation that an agön is the result of an dgein, 'a leading'; so Mette 1955:col. 134, Chantraine 1968:17. But people are not ordinarily led to an assembly; nor are they driven or herded: they walk under their own power and of their own will. If we ask what Greek verb really describes the action that results in an agön, an assembly, the answer is clear: it is ageirö Ί gather, assemble'. An agön in its oldest sense is precisely a gathering, an assembly, and agön is in fact derived from the root of ageirö. This root is, in descriptive terms in Greek, ager-. One possible formation of a nomen actionis to such a root would be a suffixless root noun with lengthened o-grade, of the type of klöp-s 'thief' to klep- 'steal' orphör, also 'thief', topher- 'carry (off)', 1 or Lat. vox 'voice' to the Indo-European root *wekw- 'speak'. To ager- we would expect such a root noun to be *ag6r. That we instead have agön can hardly be explained by dissimilation; there was nothing to dissimilate the r from. Rather it seems that we have here an example of /-/«-alternation, of a type diiferent from any that has been observed before in Indo-European. Previously we have known /-/«-alternation within nominal paradigms, of the type Hittite watar 'water', weten-as 'of water' (cf. inter alia Gk. hiidör: gen. hiidatos < *iidrit-os «- *udn-os); in the 3d. plural verbal endings, where paradigms that had t in the 3d. singular had (e)nt in the 3d. plural, and paradigms that lacked t in the 3d. singular had (e)r in the 3d. plural - e.g., Skt. bhara-t-e 'he carries (for himself)', bhara-nt-e 'they carry (for themselves)' vs. duh-e 'she gives milk', duh-r-e 'they give milk'; and in derivation of the type masculine Gk. ptön, Skt. ptvän- 'fat', < *piH-won~, feminine Gk. pteira, Skt. ptvari < *piH-wer-iHz. A parallel //n-alternation is known in the word for 'sun', e.g., Gätha Avestan nom. huuard- < *suwel, gen. xv3ng < *suwen-s, and in the pair *an-tero-s 'the other (of two)', *al-yo-s 'another'. However the pattern seen in agön, in which a root noun ends in n, while the verbal derivative of the same root has r, is one that I have never encountered before in IndoEuropean, and of which I know no second example. Perhaps it will contribute something toward working out the phonologic environments which must have once, in the remote prehistory of Indo-European, governed the alternation of r (and /) with n; at the moment however these conditions are still largely obscure to me, although the 3d plural verb endings and the words for 'other' make it likely that a part of the
A NEW R/N-ALTERNATION
31
conditioning was that before */ the nasal alternant appeared of an *r or */ subject to alternation. The etymology of Gk. ageirö is itself obscure; the various possible outside connections mentioned by Boisacq 1916:7 have been wisely omitted by Frisk 1960:9 and Chantraine 1968:9. It would seem now that if the word is subject to the extremely archaic Indo-European process of rjn-alternation, it must be a word that Greek has inherited from the Indo-European parent language, despite the failure of convincing cognates to occur elsewhere. The formal difference of agSn from the root ager- quite naturally had two consequences. On the one hand, the meaning of ag6n was free to develop independently of ageirö, as in fact it did; on the other, to ageirö were created new nomina actionis keeping the r of the root, the most prominent of these being agord, which exists already in Homer, and possibly in Mycenaean. 2 The contrast of Boeotian agSn and Attic agord is thus bebetween an old word, with obscured relation to its verbal root, and a new word, transparently related to its underlying verb. 3 Yale
University
NOTES 1
True, these are nomina agentis, but it is typical of Indo-European root nouns that the same formation functions in some roots as nomen agentis, in others as nomen actionis. Cf., e.g., Wackernagel-Debrunner 1954:9,11. 2 See Morpurgo 1963:13. 3 I am grateful to Dr. James D. Ellsworth for calling my attention to the problem of agon's, exact meaning and etymology, and for providing me with a conscientious survey of previous scholarship on the subject in Ellsworth 1971. Dr. Ellsworth's own view is that the earliest meaning of agSn was 'assembly with games', rather than simply 'assembly'.
REFERENCES Boisacq, fimile. 1916. Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque. Heidelberg: Winter. Chantraine, Pierre. 1968. Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque, vol. 1. Paris: Klincksieck. Curtius, Georg. 1858. Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie, erster Theil. Leipzig: Teubner. Ellsworth, James D. 1971. Agon: Studies in the use of a word. Unpublished PhD. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley.
32
WARREN C. COWGILL
Frisk, Hjalmar. 1960. Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Band 1. Heidelberg: Winter. Hofmann, Johann Baptist. 1950. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Griechischen. München: Oldenbourg. Leaf, Walter. 1902. The Iliad, vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Liddell, Henry George, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones. 1925-40. A GreekEnglish lexicon. New Edition. Oxford: University Press. Mette, Hans Joachim. 1955. Article agön in Bruno Snell and Hans Joachim Mette, Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos, Erste Lieferung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Morpurgo, Anna. 1963. Mycenaeae Graecitatis Lexicon. Romae: In aedibus Athenaei. Pokorny, Julius. 1951. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1. Lieferung. Bern: A. Francke. Schwyzer, Eduard. 1939. Griechische Grammatik, Erster Band. München: Beck. Wackernagel, Jakob. 1954. Altindische Grammatik, Band 2.2: Die Nominalsuffixe, von Albert Debrunner. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
SUBGROUPING A N D RECONSTRUCTION ISIDORE DYEN
It is fitting that a controversial subject should be dealt with in a tribute to a man of broad vision. For then we honor not only the man, Archibald Hill, but also the breadth of his vision. But whether or not what is below is controversial, it is to be hoped that its argument will stimulate productive discussion. The purpose of this paper is (1) to study the relation between subgrouping and reconstruction, both implicit and explicit in various views of this relation, and (2) in view of this relation, to examine how lexicostatistics can be integrated in the investigative procedures in genetic (historico-comparative) linguistics. The contemplated integration can be regarded as important for linguistics as a whole, for it represents an important step in the mathematicization of linguistic science.1 The importance of subgrouping as a separate and special problem is now coming gradually to the fore in genetic linguistics. Subgrouping or subclassification is the area of comparative genetic linguistics in which one deals with the classification of interrelated languages. It is a branch of comparative genetic linguistics and as such is involved in inference rather than simple and direct classification. Put in another way the subclassification of a set of interrelated languages is dependent on the hypotheses or inferences regarding the different degrees of closeness in their interrelationships. The term RECONSTRUCTION is used here in the limited, technical sense that is customary in genetic linguistics. It refers to those inferences which deal with the attributes of a proto-language, the product of reconstruction. Subgrouping could also be regarded as a kind of reconstruction, namely that of a family-tree as a mapping of the history of a language family. This would, however, simply require us to develop a new term for the meaning now customarily assigned to the term reconstruction. The determination of the degree of relationship between related languages is similar in certain respects to the determination that lan-
34
ISIDORE DYEN
guages are related. The classification of languages into the same family follows directly from the hypothesis or inference that they at one time constituted one language. This language we call the proto-language of the family. Where this needs specification as against the proto-language of a subfamily, we will use the term PRIME-LANGUAGE for a protolanguage which is continued by all of the languages of a family. Analogously the classification of a set of languages into a subfamily of languages is dependent on a hypothesis that the languages assigned to the same subgroup are more closely related to each other than any is related to any nonmember of the group. Such languages continue a proto-language not continued by the other members of the same family. The proto-language of a subgroup is a secondary proto-language or specifically a MESO-LANGUAGE. The theory of the changes that languages undergo enables us to infer particulars of the historical events that have affected languages. The law of regular phonetic change (Dyen 1963:631) enables us to pick out French words that are continuations of Latin words, some Modern Greek words that are continuations of ancient Greek words, Modern Hindi words that are continuations of Sanskrit words, etc. The law was formulated because such relations were observed, but its generalization enables us to select words which continue known words of an earlier stage and those which do not, where this earlier stage is known. Furthermore, the operation of the law provides us with the fact that cognate words have systematically corresponding phoneme sequences to the extent that they are not affected by analogic changes nor by having been borrowed from another dialect. On this basis one can see how the reconstruction of the phonological system of a proto-language proceeds. Hoenigswald (1950) has shown that the sets of corresponding phonemes in related languages as well as the corresponding phonemes themselves satisfy the condition of being systematically mappable from the phonemes of the proto-language.2 In fact it is this relation that enables us to formulate the phoneme sequences of the proto-language in such a way that the cognates of the daughter languages can be systematically mapped from them. It is thus a knowledge of the theory of linguistic change that enables us to develop a strategy of investigation and inference. In such an investigation it becomes important to determine what type of results can be based directly on our knowledge of the theory and which ones on other results. If we are interested in the reconstruction of the phonology, the morphology, the syntax, and the lexicon of earlier stages of a lan-
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
35
guage, what must we do as the steps in the inference? Must the subgrouping of the related languages be known before phonological reconstruction is attempted ? Must the subgrouping of the related languages be known before an attempt is made to reconstruct morphological features, syntactic features, the lexicon? Or is the situation reversed? Must one or more of these various types of reconstruction be known before dealing with the subgrouping ? It is fair to say that traditionally comparatists have believed, or have been inclined to believe, that one must have done all or a considerable part of the formal reconstruction of the proto-language before subgrouping can be approached. It can be demonstrated that as far as the theory is concerned, phonemic reconstruction can be carried out in strict independence of any knowledge of the subgrouping. Since the proto-phoneme sequences are formulated so as to map systematically the phonemes of the cognate sets of the daughter languages, the reconstruction of the proto-phonemes appears to be independent of any knowledge of the subgrouping. There can be no doubt that there is complete independence if only cognate sets are considered in which there is a cognate for each language compared. A cognate set in which there is a cognate for each language compared is a COMPLETE COGNATE SET. Often enough, however, cognate sets are INCOMPLETE. A S long as the interpretation of the incomplete cognate sets is not needed to advance the phonemic reconstruction, as might be the case when a large number of complete cognate sets are available, the incomplete sets are unnecessary and can be ignored. But in some cases we are dealing with reconstruction over great time-depths and we can expect the number of complete cognate sets to be inversely proportional in an approximate way to the magnitude of the time-depth. It takes the loss of one cognate in one language to produce an incomplete cognate set. As the number of complete cognate sets decreases, the need to employ incomplete cognate sets increases. Certain incomplete cognate sets have implications for reconstruction. When a language exhibits a phonemic contrast in complete cognate sets that is UNCONDITIONED (i.e. the contrasting sets of correspondences are not complementarily distributed according to other correspondence sets), the members of the contrast are inevitably assigned to different proto-phonemes. Even where the cognate sets are incomplete, but overlapping and not too few, such an assignment can often safely be made.
36
ISIDORE DYEN
Except for cases of phonemic contrast a subgrouping is necessary to interpret incomplete cognate sets. It seems only natural to demand that reconstructive inferences be made from linguistic material which continues from the target proto-language. Without a subgrouping, it is possible to be sure of this attribute only in complete cognate sets. For even if only one language is unrepresented, we cannot know without a subgrouping hypothesis that that language alone is not coordinate with all the rest taken as one group. If it were coordinate in this way, the incomplete cognate set would not necessarily continue linguistic material from the target proto-language. Phonemic reconstructional hypotheses are thus independent of subgrouping hypotheses only to the extent that they are independent of incomplete cognate sets. In the reconstruction of the phonetics, a greater dependence on subgrouping appears. The inference that PIE had a bilabial voiceless stop is inescapable if one simply lays out a typical correspondence table for Proto-Indoeuropean ρ: ΟΙ Ρ
Gk. Ρ
Lat. Ρ
Goth. f,b
Lith. Ρ
Celt. 0
Arm. h,w
If the seven bits of evidence are equal-valued, then there is at least four times as much evidence here that the PIE phoneme was a voiceless bilabial stop as there is that it was anything else. It will be seen here that Occam's razor is applied, for the hypothesis of any other discriminating phonetic bundle would demand more phonetic changes. At the same time it should also be recognized that we are seeking the hypothesis with the highest probability. The phonetic inference above must necessarily be regarded as probabilistic and dependent on the evaluation of the evidence that the particular subgrouping offers. If there were many more equal-valued bits of evidence to be considered, say from newly discovered languages, the conclusion might be different. This point is easy to see if one only considers what conclusion would be reached if only Gothic, Celtic, and Armenian had persisted. We would erroneously reconstruct a bilabial spirant at best. Such experiments in reduction suggest consideration of what might happen if the subgrouping hypothesis is changed. If Gothic, Celtic, and Armenian are each regarded as coordinate with a subgroup containing all of the remaining languages, the evidence that the PIE phoneme was a bilabial stop will have been seriously reduced.
37
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
Let us consider what phonetic inference to draw when all that is relevant is the following unconditioned correspondence: Li U U U
Ν Ν /g/ /g/
[k] [k] [g] [g]
under the different subgroupings: Subgrouping a
Subgrouping b
Li
L.2
L3
L4
Li
L2
L3
L4
Ν
Ν
/g/
Is/
Ν
Ν
Is/
Isl
In subgrouping (a) the evidence for a voiced stop is the stronger and in subgrouping (b) the evidence for a voiceless stop is the stronger. It can thus be demonstrated in a simple way that phonetic reconstruction shows a dependence on the subgrouping. One apparently assigns to the proto-phoneme the common features that are found most widely distributed among the immediate daughters of a proto-language, with uncertainty wherever the distribution between competitive phonetic features was equally wide. But this is not to say that all considerations in phonetic reconstruction are dependent on the subgrouping. Actually there is another important consideration in phonetic reconstruction: that of CONTRAST. We cannot assign the same total phonetic complex to different proto-phonemes. Thus, if two proto-phonemes share some common features in the daughter languages one could hardly escape attributing the difference between them found anywhere to the proto-language. Thus given the unconditioned correspondences: Ik/ /g/
Li
[k] [g]
: :
L2 /k/ [k] /k/ [k]
: :
L3 /g/ [g] /g/ [g]
where nothing else is relevant, it would be difficult to avoid concluding that Li retains the distinction of voicing of the proto-language regardless of what the subgrouping may be. It appears to follow that within the
38
ISIDORE DYEN
bounds set up by contrasts, the subgrouping selects one or another phonetic attribute as more probably associated with the phonemes of the proto-language, wherever the distributions vary in extent. The argument from contrast is necessarily involved in the evidence for subgrouping that involves agreement in mergers. Wherever the argument of contrast appears, the languages not exhibiting the contrast may share a merger. The degree of dependence of subgrouping upon such mergers will be dealt with later. On the whole the role of subgrouping in reconstruction outside of phonology can be expected to resemble that within phonetics, but with perhaps even greater dependence on the subgrouping. In morphology, syntax, and lexicon the evidence that two different forms, no matter how similar, existed in the proto-language is dependent on the argument that they contrasted. In these fields, however, the establishment of contrast is difficult unless the contrast is found under conditions in which borrowing could be excluded, for otherwise they could be regarded as dialectal variants which had come to contrast through borrowing. Aside from instances of contrast, however, a subgrouping hypothesis is necessary to insure that a particular feature found in a daughter language is properly attributed to the proto-language rather than regarded as an innovation. In the realm of morphology, syntax and lexicon we are dealing with the probability that a meaningful sequence occurred in the proto-language and that it occurred in the meaning or function attributed to it. This will be true whether we are dealing with the function of an affix, or a construction, or the meaning of a word. A subgrouping is obviously a prerequisite to being able to attribute the form to the proto-language in the first place and is further necessary to determine the function or meaning. Analogic change can be presumed to be constantly operative to create new combinations of meaningful elements and thus to shift the function and meaning of words. In its latter function it is often called semantic change. It is to be expected that two languages may make the same analogic change independently, but on the whole this event should be expected to be rare. A correct subgrouping hypothesis enables us to maximize the chances that features resulting from shared changes postdating the target proto-language will be discovered and excluded from the reconstruction. Similarly the influences in grammar and lexicon from neighboring languages can be extricated once one has a knowledge of the subgrouping.
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
39
We can now turn to the question as to whether a subgrouping can be obtained independently of reconstruction. At first we may be inclined to agree with many traditional comparatists that it cannot, but let us review the situation. It seems self-evident that the principal evidence for membership in the same subgroup would be restricted to the particular languages concerned and found in all of them. If the evidence is not unitary, it must have the same distribution. If related languages belong to the same subgroup, they are SUBRELATED. At the same time membership in a subgroup is a transitive relation; if two languages are subrelated to the same language, they are subrelated to each other. It is thus possible for a subgroup to contain more than two members without appeal to universally distributed evidence. Nevertheless the basic evidence for membership in the same subgroup is that which has the same distribution. In principle a complete subgrouping of a set of related languages is the family tree or branching system which will account in the best manner possible for features shared by different related languages as commonly inherited features. The term INNOVATION is applied to any feature of a later stage that is the result of a change from what is found at an earlier stage. Brugmann (1884:1,253), one of the great comparatists of the end of the 19th century, is the author of the following statement: "It is not a single or a few linguistic phenomena appearing in two or several areas at the same time that furnish a proof of closer community, but only a large mass of agreements in sound, flectional, syntactic, and lexical innovations, the large mass of which excludes the thought of accident." The method implied in Brugmann's statement is conservative in at least the sense that if it is carried out, the subgroups that are found will be well-justified and unlikely to be changed except by the consideration of previously unavailable evidence. It further wisely implies that all possible subgroupings should be scanned. Finally, if the only way to discover an innovation is first to reconstruct what is not an innovation, namely the prime-language, then Brugmann's statement agrees with the view of many comparatists that subgrouping is entirely dependent on the reconstruction of the prime-language. Brugmann's aim is to have subgroups based on evidence so great as to exclude the possibility that chance has played a role in the evidence. In the treatment of Indoeuropean there is thus little doubt that the Celtic languages belong with each other, that the Romance languages
40
ISIDORE DYEN
belong with each other, that the Germanic languages belong with each other, that the Slavic languages belong with each other (if they do not constitute a chain of dialects), that the Baltic languages belong with each other, that the Iranian languages belong with each other, and that the Indie languages belong with each other. It is generally accepted likewise that at a higher level the Indie and Iranian languages belong with each other and that the Baltic and Slavic languages belong with each other. These subgroups are based on hypotheses constructed in Brugmann's terms to explain the large numbers of agreements in innovations in all phases of the languages concerned so that the thought that the subgroup has been determined by chance effects in the innovations is excluded. Nevertheless it must be pointed out that Brugmann does not deal with a number of problems involved in subgrouping. For example, he fails to deal with the problem of transitivity. It is not only the fact that two languages share a "large mass of agreements in ... innovations" which allows us to subgroup them together, but also the fact that even if they do not share the requisite 'mass', they must be subgrouped together if they are separately subgrouped with the same language. Thus Brugmann should be regarded as dealing only with the primary step in the subgrouping of languages. To apply the second step we are forced to compare different 'large masses' with each other and necessarily with as accurate a measurement of the difference between 'large masses' as possible. For the moment we will consider only the primary step. It must be granted that the "large mass of agreements in ... innovations" must be great enough to exclude the factor of chance or 'accident'. It seems reasonable nevertheless to entertain the question whether the 'large mass' can have a CRITICAL SIZE, defined as the smallest possible size. The importance of this critical size can be expected to grow as interest in the precise subgrouping of a family grows. For example, if there is an interest in the reconstruction of the proto-languages of a family, and this reconstruction is even partly dependent on the subgrouping, then there is an interest in having the subgrouping as accurate as possible. In Brugmann's statement the size of the number of innovations needed to establish a subgroup is left indeterminate except that it must be large enough to exclude chance as a factor. Some like innovations are indistinguishable from common innovations, but are nevertheless independent. An example of this in the standard hypothesis is the independent merger of aspirated and nonaspirated voiced stops in ProtoBalto-Slavic (PBS) and Proto-Iranian (PIr) as exemplified in PIE d, dh ->• PBS, PIr d.3 Aside from chance resemblances which could not be
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
41
considered as possibly common innovations, it is undoubtedly such independent innovations as might at any time be taken to be common innovations, except that they do not conform with the subgrouping, that Brugmann regarded as elements in ACCIDENT. Such independent innovations are here called COINCIDENT INNOVATIONS. Innovations are thus (1) common, (2) coincident, or (3) irrelevant (even if resemblant). [It has been proposed that there are structurally determined independent shared innovations, sometimes assigned to DRIFT; we call such innovations CONVERGENT INNOVATIONS. Strictly speaking, convergent innovations are conceived of as independent only in being accomplished after, but not long after, the separation of their respective languages. They are regarded as not independent in their frame of occurrence; they are said to coincide because the structural framework of the recently separated languages remains essentially the same, at least with reference to the shared innovations. [The notion of a causal relation between structure and linguistic change is introduced here. This involves the concept of a hypothesis regarding linguistic change which claims that at least some changes are more dependent on the structure of a language than others. (It would be of little use to claim that all or some changes are equally dependent on the structure of a language, for, even if the proposition should be true, it would not aid in either reconstruction or subgrouping.) However, this avenue of argument, except by mere assertion, or intuition, does not seem to lead anywhere except to provide another way of explaining at least some independent shared innovations. If some independent shared innovations must be regarded as convergent rather than coincident, the reduction achieved can hardly be regarded as significant. Furthermore, there appears to be no essential difference claimed for convergent innovations as opposed to coincident innovations unless one regards as essential the difference in the length of time that has passed since the separation of the languages in which the respective innovations have appeared. For this reason convergent innovations are here not treated as a special class different from coincident innovations.] It can be shown that in at least certain instances a single recognized common innovation is not regarded as sufficient to establish a subgroup. Examples of such common innovations are the assibilation of palatal stops which distinguishes the satem from the centum languages and the oblique plural endings with *m versus those with *bh. These common innovations are assigned to dialectal developments within Proto-Indoeuropean rather than to separate Indoeuropean subgroups because of
42
ISIDORE DYEN
their unique distribution over languages which are posited to have been neighbors. There is a hypothesis that the Indoeuropean dialects were in a contiguous arrangement such that each held more or less the same reciprocal geographical relation shown today by the different languages that continue the dialects. This hypothesis plays a role of some significance in permitting the identification of features of the dialects of the prime-language. It has the advantage of the simplicity of its migrational scheme, but at the same time it should be observed that this hypothesis lies behind the interpretation of certain agreements distributed over languages which are posited as noncontiguous as reflecting a feature of the prime-language (and not of a prime-dialect). The appeal to the hypothetical contiguity of the languages exhibiting a uniquely distributed common innovation serves to reduce the number of coincident innovations that would follow from the currently accepted Indoeuropean family tree and is therefore justified. At the same time it becomes clear that in considering a subgrouping, it is not sufficient to consider only the 'accident' that might be involved in the establishment of the individual subgroups, but one must consider all the coincidence that each possible subgrouping entails. It is therefore a matter of some importance that the PBS and PIr mergers of aspirated and nonaspirated voiced stops can be regarded as a single innovation involving the loss of a phonetic distinction rather than the merger of individual pairs of phonemes, for this greatly reduces the number of coincident innovations that needs to be considered. However, there are more sources of coincidence in a subgrouping than coincident innovations. It is possible that the subgroups reached by Brugmann's method are sound enough, but that the entire subgrouping is implausible. For example, the conclusion that no further subgrouping among the Indoeuropean prime-subgroups could be taken to imply that they were coordinate and therefore split simultaneously, a result which involves an intolerable amount of coincidence. The corrective of regarding a coordinate subgrouping as implying only an indeterminable sequence of branchings is therefore salutary, but does not make Brugmann's aim equivalent with that of considering the totality of coincidence in a subgrouping. In view of the proposal to use the "totality of coincidence" in subgrouping, rather than the "large mass of agreements in ... innovations", it is interesting that an argument can be developed that a critical mass of such agreements is not a useful concept. In such a critical mass there are inevitably at least the factors of NUMBER and of what we will call
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
43
We can regard two innovations as differing in weight if they differ in the probability that they are common innovations. It seems obvious that if some innovations are more probably common innovations than others, they should be given more weight in subgrouping. Let us consider, for example, the regular metathesis of the sequence */—s to s—t in Ilocano (Ilk.) and in Kankanay (Knk.), two languages of northern Luzon: WEIGHT.
*tastas, Tagalog tastas 'rip off', Ilk. satsat 'to rip', Knk. satsat 'shredded'. *teRas, Tag. tigas 'hardness', Ilk. sagat 'a hardwood tree, molave', Knk. segat 'kind of tree'. *Ratus, Mai. ratos, Ilk., Knk. gasut 'hundred'. *Retas, Mai. retas 'come apart', Ilk. gessat, Knk. gesat 'to snap, break'. A similar example is presented by the regular distant dissimilations in Ngaju-Dayak (NgD.) of southern Borneo and in the distant Iban of Sarawak in northern Borneo. We find a dissimilation of *s—s to t—s and *c—c to NgD. t—s, Iban t—c. Thus we find: *sisik, Mai. siseq, NgD., Iban tisik 'fish-scale'. *susu, Mai. susu 'milk', NgD., Iban tusu 'breast'. *cecak, Mai. cecaq, NgD. iasak, Iban ticak 'gecko'. *ci(n)cin, Mai. cincen, NgD. tisin, Iban tincin 'fingerring'. The cases of regular metathesis and distant dissimilation presented above cannot be regarded as having no more than the same probability of being common innovations as the PIr and PBS merger of voiced stops. The shared innovations in the Austronesian languages seem virtually by themselves to assure the subrelationship of the pairs of languages involved, whereas the mergers in the Indoeuropean languages do not have this effect. It will not change the situation if appeal is made to the different investigative conditions (i.e. the conditional probabilities) of the innovations in the two families, for the fact that their probabilities vary because of this difference will merely emphasize the point that is being made here. On the other hand, it is hardly likely that the Austronesian and Indoeuropean shared innovations would be assigned equal initial probabilities in any case. The initial probabilities would have to be assigned in terms of the frequency of occurrence and it seems only reasonable to regard the fact that the cited Indoeuropean shared innovations are regarded as coincident only because the initial probability
44
ISIDORE DYEN
that they were common innovations was relatively low in the first place. Coincident (i.e. non-common) changes of the particular type involved either actually occur relatively frequently or are reasonably regarded as occurring relatively frequently. The same can hardly be said of the systematic metathesis and distant dissimilations of the Austronesian languages. Even though one of the reasons that little weight is given to the merger of the voiced stops is that, though five sets of stops are involved, the merger is obtained by the loss of only one distinctive feature, the aspiration, recognition of this fact will simply strengthen the view that shared innovations differ in their respective probabilities of being common innovations. Thus the generalization seems to suggest itself that (1) A PLAUSIBLE SUBGROUPING IS ONE THAT ENTAILS NO GREATER THAN A TOLERABLE COLLECTION OF COINCIDENCES a n d (2) IF TWO PLAUSIBLE SUBGROUPINGS ARE DISTINGUISHABLE IN HOW CLOSELY THEIR RESPECTIVE COLLECTION OF COINCIDENCES
APPROACH
THE CRITICAL POINT
OF TOLERANCE,
THEN
is SUPERIOR. We can refer to the closeness to the critical tolerance as the DEGREE OF COINCIDENCE. In this use the degree of coincidence functions like an inverse measure of simplicity. Thus there appear to be the following criticisms of Brugmann's view: (1) it does not deal with the problem of distinguishing innovations from reflexes of prime-language features, if the determination of an innovation depends on what has been assigned to the prime-language; (2) it does not deal with the critical weight of agreements among innovations; (3) it does not deal with the problem set by the difference in weight between different agreements in innovations; and (4) it does not lend itself to dealing with the problem set by the transitive relation between members of the same subgroup. The preceding discussion seems rather naturally to suggest that perhaps our difficulty with the traditional view is that subgrouping is made entirely dependent on innovations which are by definition not discoverable before the reconstruction of the proto-language. It might seem therefore advantageous to avoid using the term innovation in this sense within the argument. Brugmann's statement, however, regardless of any attempt to defend it, can perhaps be seen as leaving it somewhat unclear as to whether the term INNOVATION there is to be regarded as necessarily implying an innovation determinable as a variation from an earlier stage. The contrast between PHENOMENA and INNOVATIONS, although it is interpretable
THE MORE DISTANT ONE
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
45
as intended to emphasize innovation in the above meaning, need not be so interpreted. It seems also conceivable that Brugmann might have been arguing against using mere resemblances (PHENOMENA) that might be due to chance, and thus irrelevant, and favoring the use of such as could only be interpreted as innovations if they could be assigned to a period after the prime-language, whether in fact they had been so identified or not. It is generally recognized that in some instances it is possible to subgroup languages without difficulty. It would be difficult to believe that one would not put Rumanian together with Western Romance as against any other related language merely upon inspection. Such cases, as problems in subgrouping, are perhaps reasonably regarded as uninteresting in themselves, however useful they may be in casting light on how to attack more difficult problems in subgrouping. But the example makes it inescapably true that subgrouping can be carried out in at least some cases without distinguishing innovations from inherited features or even from chance resemblances. To be sure, common innovations are necessarily involved and are being utilized, but the fact that they are not distinguished makes it clear that what are common innovations need not be specified as such in all arguments concerning subgrouping. In this sense there are then some subgroupings that do not depend on the prior determination of common innovations. Although this observation may at first appear innocuous, it does raise the question whether in fact common innovations as a residue from inherited features are what is heuristically decisive in subgrouping. We will therefore consider a somewhat different possibility. Evidence for reconstruction and for common innovations involves associable (usually similar) features in related languages which together are attributable (whether they are so attributed or not) to inheritance from some common earlier stage. Such features are SHARED FEATURES. Instead of making the determination of a subgrouping dependent directly on common innovations regarded as determinable only after reconstruction, the determination of subgroups can be made directly dependent on identically distributed shared features. Wherever such identically distributed shared features are sufficient for the purpose, a primary subgroup will be established and the rule of transitivity will then be applied. Some shared features in their respective languages are continuations of the same feature in a common earlier stage of their languages. Such shared features are COMMON INHERITANCES. A shared feature that is a
46
ISIDORE DYEN
common inheritance under some subgrouping or family tree F i and not under another F2, is a COINCIDENT SHARED FEATURE in F2. Any association of feature which does not constitute a shared feature (i.e., is not a common inheritance under any subgrouping) is an ACCIDENTAL ASSOCIATION or, where a similarity is the basis of the association, an ACCIDENTAL RESEMBLANCE.
Shared features which constitute a common inheritance from the prime-language constitute a PRIME-INHERITANCE. Shared features which constitute a common inheritance from a meso-language are a MESOINHERITANCE. Shared features that constitute a common inheritance from a prime-dialect are a PRIME-DIALECT-INHERITANCE. Shared features that constitute a common inheritance from a meso-dialect are a MESODIALECT-INHERITANCE. Shared features that constitute coincident shared features are COINCIDENT INNOVATIONS. It is possible that some inherited features stem from a dialect which was coordinate with the proto-dialect represented in the proto-language, termed a PROTO-CO-DIALECT, as distinguished from a dialect which arose as a result of a new isogloss within the proto-dialect, termed a PROTOSUBDIALECT.
The proto-isogloss which separates the centam-languages from the 5atem-languages, lends itself rather simply to the hypothesis that it developed secondarily from a phonetic characteristic that was relatively uniform in a proto-dialect in which all the palatals concerned were stops. The difference between centum and satem PIE dialects is regarded as one between PIE subdialects. The proto-isogloss which separates IE languages with plural oblique endings in *m from those with like endings in *bh can be regarded as of a different sort. Here the difference is perhaps best viewed under current hypotheses as one that arose at the time of the formation of plural oblique endings, for it is difficult to imagine how *m could have come to replace *bh secondarily or vice versa. In that case the isogloss separates co-dialects of PIE regarded as a prime-dialect (i.e. dialect of the primelanguage), for this dialect difference was then always present in primeIE, though the PIE adumbrated in the reconstructions may have been predominantly from the *bh area. [This conclusion would not hold if the *m could somehow be connected with the *m of the *-sm- endings in demonstrative inflections by some analogical change.] Shared features differ in their distribution in such a way as to affect their interpretation. Universally distributed shared features must inevitably be interpreted as prime-inheritances. Some non-universally dis-
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
47
tributed shared features can be expected to end up being treated as common inheritances and others as coincident innovations. Furthermore some non-universally distributed common inheritances will be treated as prime-inheritances, others as meso-inheritances. Some non-universally distributed proto-inheritances, on the other hand, will be treated as protodialect inheritances, subdivided where possible into proto-co-dialect inheritances and proto-subdialect inheritances, though most will not be so distinguished. The consequence is now that in effect ONLY THOSE NON-UNIVERSALLY DISTRIBUTED SHARED FEATURES ARE ASSIGNED TO THE PRIME-LANGUAGE WHICH DO NOT SHARE THE SAME DISTRIBUTION AS ANY COLLECTION OF OTHER NON-UNIVERSALLY DISTRIBUTED SHARED FEATURES SO AS TOGETHER
το BE SUFFICIENT το ESTABLISH A SUBGROUP. This implies that all shared features are first examined for common distributions sufficient to validate a subgrouping BEFORE assignment of non-universally distributed features to the prime-language occurs. Thus the inference of features of the prime-language from shared features is regarded as having at least two steps: (1) the inference from universally distributed shared features and (2) the inference from nonuniversally distributed shared features not assigned to a meso-language as common innovations. In this sense at least reconstruction is dependent on subgrouping and not the reverse. A slightly different view, which has certain advantages, is also available. Different subgroupings, all of which assign shared features to one hypothesis or another, might be compared for the degree of coincidence (including coincident innovations) that they entail. In such a treatment subgrouping and reconstructions, except where complete cognate sets are concerned, might be regarded as being juggled together at the same time (regardless of any actual order of discovery). In this view subgrouping and reconstruction are interdependent since both are being simultaneously determined in terms of each other. The fact that different types of coincidence are in fact weighed against each other in connection with both subgrouping and reconstruction appears in the following. The merger of voiced stops in PBS and PIr can be explained in another way, as resulting from a change in a PIE dialectal area (a reconstructive step), the resultant isogloss thereafter persisting in Proto-Indo-Iranian (Pllr). A difficulty arises from the resultant coincidence that PIr would then be wholly from the merging dialect area and PI (Proto-Indic) would then be wholly from the nonmerging dialect area. This may appear
48
ISIDORE DYEN
to be too much of a coincidence to some, but it is not essentially different from the demand that we accept the hypothesis that Proto-Germanic is wholly from the centum-axta. whereas Pllr is wholly from the satemarea. There is a suggestion that in the standard view there is a tacit ASSUMPTION of the uniformity of the meso-language which would be a direct consequence of the explicit ASSUMPTION of the uniformity of a reconstructed proto-language (Dyen 1969, particularly 507fF.). The assignment of the merger to a PIE dialect area would follow rather closely the model of assignment that is practiced in the case of uniquely distributed features whose limits coincide with subgroup boundaries. The difference here is that an isogloss of the prime-language would be regarded as persisting through at least one meso-language. There would, however, inevitably follow the difficult question as to how many more meso-languages than one could an isogloss reasonably be expected to persist through, even if one were ready to grant that an isogloss could persist through one. One can of course recognize that the probability of the persistence of an isogloss decreases with each mesolanguage that it must have passed through. We are thus forced to compare the probability associated with independent mergers under the hypothesis that the PIr merger postdates ΡΠΓ with the probability that PIr continues a PIE isogloss. Both probabilities are inevitably dependent on the probability that the shared features involved are a common inheritance. As that probability is low, the probability that the merger postdates Pllr is correspondingly high, and as it is high, the probability that the PIr merger postdates Pllr is correspondingly low. Interpreted in this way the consensus of scholars is that it is low. Most important of all, it must now be seen that the Pllr subgrouping was chosen, despite the coincident innovation that it entailed, because the coincidences (including mergers) entailed by not making this subgrouping would presumably have been greater in degree if not intolerable. In any case there is some merit in the proposition that A FAMILY-TREE OR BRANCHING SYSTEM OF A FAMILY OF LANGUAGES IS AN INFERENCE WHICH IS SUPERIOR TO ANY COMPETITIVE HYPOTHESIS IN
EXPLAINING
THE SHARED FEATURES OF THE DAUGHTER LANGUAGES WITH THE LEAST WEIGHT ALLOWED TO COINCIDENCE.
The total coincidence of a family-tree consists of (1) the total weight of its coincident innovations together and (2) the total weight of other coincidences. One way of measuring the amount of coincidence in a coincident innovation is by the probability that the coincident innovation
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
49
reflected a feature in a common early stage. In principle, at any rate, such a probability could be derived from the frequency with which such shared features develop independently as well as that with which they reflect a common earlier feature. If this could be done, then the total weight of the coincident innovations of one subgrouping could be regarded as inversely proportional to the sum of the probabilities that these innovations were common. One can then hope that at least ultimately a weight could be assigned to all other coincidences possibly resulting from a subgrouping. What has been presented before is an argument for replacing Brugmann's approach to subgrouping by a scheme of probabilistic comparison of subgroupings. The traditional approach can be seen as one which merely minimizes coincident innovations; it will, however, necessarily fail when a choice must be made between different coincident innovations. Innovations can involve the phonetics, phonemics, morphology, syntax, and lexicon by way of regular phonetic change, phonemic change, analogical change (including semantic change), and borrowing. Weighing the different kinds of innovations against each other is difficult in the absence of commensurability between innovations in different parts of a language. Consequently, the probabilistic scheme delineated above cannot, strictly speaking, be put into effect as yet because there is no way to assign probabilities at present except perhaps on an intuitive basis and this has not been tried. Nevertheless, such a scheme of intuitive probability estimates can be seen as necessarily lying behind the study of shared features. Sometimes the non-universal shared feature is of such an unusual nature that one is inclined to regard them almost as necessarily having a common origin; this would only mean that the probability that they reflect a common innovation is regarded relatively high as compared with the probability that they are coincident innovations. One of the disadvantages of the new proposal is that it cannot be applied immediately to a poorly known language. It constitutes rather a formal framework within which interpretation of investigative results can be carried out. Although superior in scope to the traditional approach, it shares with the traditional approach the limitation that for a reasonable first approximation a large amount of data is required from at least relatively well-studied languages. Neither is adapted to the needs felt in the early stages of investigating a family of languages. To follow either approach in these stages could very well lead to the application of more intuition than scientific reasoning.
50
ISIDORE DYEN
A more rigorous approach to subgrouping is offered by lexicostatistics. The method is simple. A standard relatively long list of glosses or meanings is employed and the common equivalents in each of the related languages is found. The glosses are selected as being highly frequent and universal and are most commonly called BASIC VOCABULARY LISTS. After the lists are filled out, the percentage of probable cognate pairs is determined. The reason for the feature of universality in the meaning is to give each language an equal opportunity at having cognate pairs. The reason for selecting meanings of high frequency is to assure relative stability of the words. Although relative stability in the words is a desideratum, it is obvious that if all the words were absolutely stable in the meanings, they could not be used to develop a subgrouping. Fundamental to the use of the lists is the belief that the instability of languages expresses itself in the replacement of vocabulary for any given meaning. Since the frequency of recurrence of the words for meanings in the list is high, there is a strong tendency in any family for the rate of replacement in a meaning to be constant over time. This is the basis of the use of basic vocabulary lists for glottochronological purposes. But that is not our concern here. For any pair of languages the resultant percentage of cognates is a sum of the percentage of cognate pairs inherited from the primary protolanguage and the percentage of any cognate pairs retained from any later period of community. If there are cognate pairs retained from a later period of community the sum of the two percentages, that is, the actual percentage, will tend to bulk larger than the respective percentages of either member of the pair with other languages. In effect then the cognate percentage is as it were a trap for common lexical innovations which, without their being distinguished from inherited lexical items, are reflected in the differences in the various percentages that a particular language shows with different languages. At the same time, it must be admitted that to the degree that the systematic correspondences of the different languages are not known precisely, accidental resemblances as well as unobserved cognations will play a role in the resultant cognate percentages. Furthermore, intimate borrowing, where it is not determinable beforehand, can add its contribution to the error in the raw cognate percentage. However, by using only significant differences in the percentages as indicative of a meso-language, we can obtain an approximation of the subgrouping of families with large membership even where the data is relatively small and poor. Such a classification should not be regarded as foolproof any more
SUBGROUPING AND RECONSTRUCTION
51
than any traditional or other classification. A genetic classification in linguistics is based on a hypothesis and its durability is the durability of the hypothesis. Once a lexicostatistical classification has been achieved, the hypothesis on which it is based is subject to the same testing criticisms and corrections as any hypothesis. The traditional method of investigation or the modification of it that has been presented above can be applied to the same languages that have been subgrouped lexicostatistically as soon as the necessary data is available; the original hypothesis can then be tested for its ability to deal with the new conclusions. The results obtained by the more simply applied lexicostatistical method can and should be tested by the more complicated, detailed, and extensive studies of shared features. Similarly subgroupings obtained by traditional methods can be tested by a study of the lexicostatistics associated with the subgrouping. Where the lexicostatistical study confirms the relatively independently developed subgrouping, the original hypothesis is inevitably the stronger for it. Where the lexicostatistical results are at variance, all the evidence, nonstatistical as well as statistical, should be reinvestigated and reassessed. The end can only be more durable hypotheses. It would be difficult to maintain that lexicostatistical subgrouping depends on reconstruction. Lexicostatistical subgrouping can be applied long before any clear notion of the reconstruction of the prime-language has been achieved. It does require an understanding of the law of regular phonetic change, but that is the fundamental basis of all comparative genetic inference. There is reason, therefore, to claim that the procedure of lexicostatistical subgrouping is independent of the procedure of reconstruction and that it is for this reason that it can be applied immediately. The nonstatistical procedures in subgrouping hitherto used can be independent of reconstruction to the extent that identically distributed shared features are employed to establish subgroups and the difference in weight of entailed coincidence is regarded as decisive for the selection between alternative subgroupings. Reconstruction is independent of subgrouping in that (1) phonemic reconstruction can be accomplished on the basis of complete cognate sets, (2) phonemic and phonetic inferences can be drawn directly from instances of contrast, and (3) universally distributed shared features can be immediately inferred to be proto-inheritances. It appears, however, that any other reconstructive inferences are dependent on or interdependent with subgrouping. Yale
University
52
ISIDORE DYEN
NOTES This article constitutes a partial result of research supported by National Science Foundation Grant GS-28094. The author wishes also to express his appreciation to the School of Pacific Studies of the Australian National University for facilities extended to him. 2 H. Hoenigswald does this by stating the conditions under which proto-phonemes are to be reconstructed. He goes too far, however, in demanding that different correspondences assigned to the same proto-phoneme must share one component; i.e. have the same phoneme in one of the languages (358). The essential criterion is merely that no other association of correspondences should be equal-valued; such a difference in probabilities might be achieved in the extreme case, by the phonetic similarity of the phonemes involved in the different but complementarily distributed correspondences. 3 This point and some others in the following text are discussed, though with differences in point of view, by Hoenigswald (1960:153-55). 1
REFERENCES Brugmann, K. 1884. Zur Frage nach den Verwandtschaftsverhältnissen der indogermanischen Sprachen. Internationale Zeitschrift für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft 1.253. Dyen, 1.1963. Why phonetic change is regular. Lg. 39.631-37. —. 1969. Reconstruction, the comparative method, and the proto-language uniformity assumption. Lg. 45.499-518. Hoenigswald, H. 1950. The principal step in comparative grammar. Lg. 36.357-64. —. 1960. Language change and linguistic reconstruction. Chicago: University Press.
FROM PROTO-TUPI-GUARANI TO MODERN G U A R A N I : PATTERNS OF CHANGE IN A NATIVE AMERICAN PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM CHARLES L. EASTLACK
Our purpose here is to account as completely as possible for the forms of those modern Guarani morphemes and words whose Proto-TupiGuarani etymology has been established with reasonable certainty. For PTG our source is the list of hypothetical forms reconstructed by Miriam Lemle (1971). Our information on the forms of modern Guarani comes from Emma Gregores and Jorge A. Suärez, 1967. Whereas Gregores and Suärez describe the Guarani of Paraguay, Lemle's reconstructed forms for PTG are derived from a comparison of the basic vocabulary of ten speech communities located in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru. Following the lexicostatistically based classification of the Tupi language stock published by Rodrigues (1958), the languages which provide Lemle's data can be characterized as follows: 3 dialects of the Tenetehara language: Asurini, Guajajara, and Urubu; 3 dialects of the Tupi-Guarani language: Guarani, 1 Tupinamba,2 and Guarayo; 4 other languages: Kawaib (Parintintin dialect), Kamayurä, Kokama (Kokama dialect), and Siriono In his classification Rodrigues followed criteria suggested by Swadesh, whereby dialects of one language have at least 81% cognates on the 200-word basic vocabulary list, and languages belonging to the same family have at least 36% cognate vocabulary on this list. Since the languages examined by Lemle are all members of the Tupi-Guarani language family, it follows that they share a minimum of 36% of their basic vocabulary. Granted that the Rodrigues classification is founded exclusively on lexicostatistical evidence and may contain errors of detail, it nevertheless gives a useful idea of the general degree of relatedness of the languages and dialects which provide the data from which Lemle's hypothetical PTG forms are derived. The consonant system reconstructed by Lemle for PTG is as follows:
54
CHARLES L. EASTLACK
*p
*t
*k *c
*m *b
*n
*η *r
This is quite similar but not identical to the Guarani system in the analysis of Gregores and Suärez (in the chart below we use h for χ and g for γ as suggested by Gregores and Suärez, p. 117): labial dental alveolar velar labiovelar glottal ? voiceless stop ρ t k kw voiceless spirant s s h nasal stop m η V Vw sonorcmts ν I y g gw r Both the vowel system reconstructed by Lemle for PTG and that proposed by Gregores and Suärez for Guarani consist of six segmental units, each of which may occur with or without nasalization: i e
i a
u ο
The following correspondences account for the relationship of most of Lemle's hypothetical PTG forms to those actually observed by Gregores and Suärez: (1) *k, *r, *b 0 / # i.e., word-final *k, *r, and *b drop. Examples: *yo ?ok 'dig' yo 'to make a hole, dig, deepen' *pab 'all' ρά 'to end, to come to an end, to cease / thoroughly, all' *momor 'throw' -> momö 'to throw, send' (2) *Vm, *Vn, *Vrj Ϋ/ # i.e., word-final nasal stops drop, and the vowels which precede them become nasalized. Examples: *cam 'string' ->· sa 'string, rope' *aman 'rain' ama 'rain' *kaq 'dry' -> ka 'to be dry, to get dried' (3) *kuw, *kw, *pw kw3 Examples:
FROM PROTO-TUPI- TO MODERN GUARANI
55
'know' ->• kwad 'to know' *pwä 'finger' -»• kwa 'finger' *pwer 'past tense' -»· -kwe 'former, past' *pwerab 'heal' kwerd 'to cure oneself, to recover' *kwar 'hole' -> kwa 'hole' (4) In all environments except those specified in rule (3): ijw / nasal microsegment4 *w gw / non-nasal microsegment4 Examples: *wira 'bird' ->• gwird 'bird' *we?en 'vomit' -»• ijwei9 'to vomit' *kuwaab
- >
(5)
*py^s
Example: (6)
*epyak
'see' -> hesd ' t o s e e '
*Vy
Vi /
#
Example: *bebiy 'float' (7)
vevii
'to be light (of weight & touch)'
s, s, h, 0
Examples: see discussion of modern Guarani reflexes of *c below. (8) Except as specified in statements (l)-(7) above, all PTG sound segments can be mapped one to one on the corresponding modern Guarani segments, e.g.: *P Ρ *m m *b -> ν *t -»· t
and so on. The eight rules given above account for the observed differences between the vast majority of the PTG forms listed by Lemle and the corresponding modern Guarani forms. There are, however, two problems evidenced by the existence of certain classes of data that these rules do not fully explicate. The first problem has to do with the modern Guarani reflexes of PTG *c, as attested in the following correspondences: data group
(a)
'play' yemosardi 'to play' 'string' -> sa 'string, rope' 'flow' siri 'to flow'
*yemocaray *cam *cirik *(i)ce *kice
Τ
'knife'
-> se Ί , m e '
->· kise 'knife'
56
CHARLES L. EASTLACK
*tubicab 'large' *yaci 'moon' *ci 'mother' *acu 'left hand' *cu?u 'bite' *eca 'eye' *cebo?i 'worm'
tuvisä 'to be big, to be great' yasi 'moon' si 'mother' asu 'left, left hand' su^u 'to bite' -esd 'eye(s)' sevo 'worm'
data group (b) *cun 'black' * CO go *picäpe 'claw' *yocey 'wash' *picacu 'new' *pociy 'heavy'
+ hu 'to be black' • h6 'to go' •> piapi 'fingernail' •» yohei 'to wash' + piahu 'to be new' * pohii 'to be heavy, to be thick (a liquid)' *kwaraci 'sun' •» kwarahi 'sun' •> mohapi 'three' *mocapir 'three' It appears that the data in groups (a) and (b) can only be accounted for by establishing two hypothetical phonological units, * a and *c2, corresponding to Lemle's *c. Then rule (7) is replaced by the following statements : (7a)
*ci
(.s I *i \s / elsewhere [0 /»___
(7b)
*c2
\h j elsewhere
The second problem is the apparent 'spontaneous generation' of morpheme-initial h, gw, and ν in modern Guarani forms deriving from vowel-initial PTG forms, as observed in the following correspondences : data group (c) *enöy 'call' *etun 'smell' *e 'scratch' *a?e 'he' *u?tb 'arrow' *eta 'many' *enub 'hear' *epyak 'see'
henoi 'to call' hetu 'to smell; to kiss' he m 'to scratch' ha^e 'he, she, it, they / it is' huH 'arrow' hetd 'much' henu, 'to hear' hesä 'to see'
FROM PROTO-TUPI- TO MODERN GUARANI
data group (d) *t 'water' *Pu 'drink' *ok 'house' *ar 'day' *ipa?ü 'island' *iupab 'lake'
Η 'water' ?Ρύ 'to drink (water)' 9 0ga 'house' ? dra 'weather, day' Η 'water' & pa 'middle' Η 'water' & -upd 'bed'
data group (e) *ata 'walk' *aib 'bad' *api 'burn'
gwatd 'to walk' vai 'to be evil, ugly, bad' hapi 'to burn'
57
These forms must be considered in the context of other correspondences, where no such initial element is generated: data group ( f ) *apititt 'tie' *ibak 'sky' *ore 'we (excl.)' *ita 'rock'
-> apiti 'to tie, to fasten' ->· ivdga 'sky; heaven' ore 'we (exclusive)' itd 'stone'
data group (g) *3y 'tooth' *emireko 'wife' *ob 'leaf' uppa 'egg' *ab 'feather' *uway 'tail' *Pe 'intestines' *obt 'green'
-ai 'tooth' -emireko 'wife' -ogwe 'leaf' -upPd 'egg(s)' -agwe 'hair, feather' -ugwdi 'bottom; tail' -i.e 'belly, womb' -ovi 'to be blue'
data group (h) *ur 'come'
ύ 'to come'
Data group (g), which includes mainly stems designating 'inalienable' substantives such as the names of parts of the body and kinship terminology, consists of bound forms, and thus constitutes a separate class which can be disregarded in the remainder of this analysis. Four of the six items in group (d) involve the morpheme 'water'. The remaining two items also are stems which presumably had an initial stressed vowel in PTG. The data in group (d) can therefore be accounted for by the following statement:
58 (9)
CHARLES L. EASTLACK
*V —»
/ #
In the data to which we have access, it appears that the only exception to this rule is the single item listed in data group (h) above. Had the PTG item *ur undergone the regular phonological change indicated by rule (9), the resulting form would have been homophonous with the verb ?w 'to eat, to drink'. A more convincing example of the suspension of a phonological rule because of its negative morphological consequences would be hard to find. The data in groups (c) and (f) motivate the following three additional rules: (10)
* e ^ h e / #
(11)
Except as specified in (10) and (11) above: (12)
Ϋ /#
The only exceptions to (10), (11), and (12) are given in data group (e). We see, then, that the PTG forms reconstructed by Lemle and the modern Paraguayan Guarani forms observed and recorded by Gregores and Suärez show a remarkably consistent pattern of correspondences. This is truly encouraging when one takes into consideration the poor quality of the data upon which genetic classifications of the indigenous languages of South America have often been based in the past, and can be taken as a sign that the next decade will see a substantial increase in our knowledge in this area. University of California, Santa Barbara NOTES 1
The data for Guarani were gathered in Laranjeiras do Sul, Parana state, Brazil. Tupinamba or Old Tupi is the form of Tupi spoken along the coast of Brazil some three centuries ago. 3 Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that *kuwV kwV: with compensatory lengthening of the following vowel. For instance: *akakuwab 'grow' -*• kakwaa 'to grow, to grow up; to be an adult' 4 For a definition of nasal and non-nasal microsegment, see Gregores and Suärez 1967:65-71. Note also the following unexplained exceptional correspondence *w g: *kawi 'corn drink' -*• kagl 'a fermented drink' 2
REFERENCES Gregores, Emma, and Suärez, Jorge A. 1967. A description of colloquial Guarani. The Hague: Mouton and Co.
FROM PROTOTUPI- TO MODERN GUARANI
59
Lemle, Miriam. 1971. Internal reconstruction of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family. Tupi studies I, ed. by David Bendor-Samuel, 107-29. Norman, Okla.: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Rodrigues, Arion D. 1958. Classification of Tupi-Guarani. IJAL 24.231-34. —. 1964. Α classifica^äo do tronco lingüistico tupi. Revista de Antropologia 12.99-104. S. Paulo.
GERMANIA VI, 10: A GERMANIC CAVALRY MANOEUVRE ERNST A. EBBINGHAUS
In chapter vi of De Origine et Situ Germaniae1 Tacitus concerns himself with questions of armor and of military tactics. Among other things he reports the following about the Germanic cavalry: (10) Equi non forma non uelocitate conspicui. sed nec uariare gyros in morem nostrum docentur: in rectum aut uno flexu dextros agunt ita coniuncto orbe ut nemo posterior sit. There has been much debate regarding the exact meaning of these words but no consensus has been reached so far. Three different explanations have been advanced, one of them including a textual change. I intend to show that none of these explanations are tenable, that any textual changes are unjustified, and that it appears possible to interpret Tacitus' words exactly as they have been transmitted. First, however, it is necessary to discuss what must be considered an oddity in the transmitted text. The word coniuncto which in accordance with almost all editors I accept as the original reading rests on inferior manuscript authority. The better mss. have cuncto instead. We find coniuncto in ρ, χ, k, φ against cuncto in Χ, Δ , L, v, r, s and concto in I. In Μ, V, Ε, ο we have coniuncto with superscribed cuncto while Ν has the reverse; d has coniuncto orbe aV cuncto and Halm 1857:xxx has iuncto. Robinson 1935:281 fn. has accepted coniuncto "with much hesitation" for the simple reason that cuncto would "force orbe into a meaning apparently not found elsewhere". While that seems already a strong argument to decide here against the better mss., a further factor in favor of coniuncto has been adduced by Hammerich 1956:289. He observes that Tacitus uses only plural forms of cunctus with the exception of Annales xiv, 31, 7 where, however, the entire passage quasi cunctam regionem muneri accepissent is highly suspect and very likely must be explained as a marginal gloss that got into the text. Hammerich also gives a hint as to how an original coniuncto might have become cuncto.
62
ERNST Α. EBBINGHAUS
An abbreviated coniuncto he thinks could have been resolved erroneously as cuncto in the 15th century. That is indeed quite possible since ciücto or oiücto are palaeographically quite close to cücto. It is even possible to ascribe the error to an earlier stage and to assume that ciücto/oiücto became cücto. In either case we would have to deal with nothing more serious than a scribal error of the most common type: in a sequence of similar or identical shafts (iu in this case) one of the shafts was omitted in copying. This and the reverse mistake are altogether too well known to the student of palaeography to deserve any further comment. All these points considered there can hardly be any doubt that coniuncto represents the original reading. Else the text appears flawless and we can turn to the question of its interpretation. After remarking briefly that the horses of the Germanic people were neither particularly shapely nor particularly fast, 2 Tacitus describes two specific manoeuvres of Germanic horsemen which he introduces with a reference to certain movements of the Roman cavalry. Uariare gyros, i.e. uarios gyros flectere, can mean a number of different movements all of which have it in common that they are essentially circular. It can simply mean the execution of a full circle to the right or the left of the line of progress, or it can refer to the rather complex exercises of, e.g., the lusus Troiae. In military usage it means the wheeling about of a body of cavalry in attack. Since Tacitus is not concerned here with exercises that might be performed in an arena or a riding school, but with military matters, uariare gyros can only refer to cavalry manoeuvres; and it is obvious that Tacitus thinks of the wheeling about of attacking Roman cavalry. Such movements, he says, were not performed by the Germanic horsemen, and he then proceeds to describe what specific movements they performed instead. The first part of the following paragraph has caused little discussion. They rode in rectum, i.e. straight ahead. The following words, however, have been interpreted in a variety of ways. The most widely accepted interpretation seems to be the one proposed by Müllenhoff and Much. Much 1936:96 following Müllenhoff 1900: 173 begins with a conjectural emendation. He thinks it "ganz töricht auf Grund dieser Stelle zu glauben, dass die germanischen Reiter nur nach rechts hätten schwenken können, daher das handschriftlich überlieferte dextros wohl ... als Verderbnis für dex(tros vel sinisjtros zu betrachten ist". This emendation was one of the more unfortunate ideas proposed by Müllenhoff and Much, and it is deplorable that it has been accepted into the new edition of Much's book (Much 1967:147), al-
A GERMANIC CAVALRY MANOEUVRE
63
though Robinson 1935 and Anderson 1938 rejected it. Anyone accepting Müllenhoff's and Much's reasoning must needs emend among numerous other passages the preceding clause sed nec uariare gyros in more nostrum docentur, for it would be "ganz töricht auf Grund dieser Stelle zu glauben" that the Roman cavalry had been able to proceed only in circular movements. However, Tacitus does not speak about generalities here. He has something specific in mind, and that is something which obviously contrasts with the uariare gyros of the Romans and differs from the movement in rectum mentioned before. The Germanic cavalry did not wheel to the right and/or left, rather they executed a rightward movement which ended in a circle in such a way that no one stayed behind. The emendation proposed by Müllenhoff and Much must be categorically rejected. The movement itself is described by Müllenhoff 1900:172, Much 1936:96, and others as a kind of radius-vector movement; a rank of horsemen performs the movement of the hand of a clock with the rider at the extreme right acting as the pivot. Against this interpretation one has to raise two immediate objections. The first is based on the alleged use of coniunctus. Much tries to explain: "Aber nicht der Kreis oder Kreisteil, der dabei von den Reitern beschrieben wird, ist zusammenhängend (conjunctus), sondern ihre Linie, der radius, nicht der orbis, von dem Tac. versehentlich, weil ihm jene Kreisbewegung vorschwebte, oder sich flüchtig ausdrückend redet." (Much 1936:96; Much 1967:147). It is, of course, absurd to claim that Tacitus wrote "flüchtig". He wrote with utter conciseness which on occasion leads to abruptness, but never was he "flüchtig" in his writing. Moreover it is quite hazardous to guess what it was that "ihm vorschwebte" when he wrote this particular sentence and to build a theory on this guess. It is in fact quite certain that Tacitus here as elsewhere relied heavily on Pliny (Norden 1959:214 fn. et pass.). Pliny at least in his younger years was keenly interested in horsemanship; he had published on equestrian matters, and we can be reasonably certain that his information concerning a special cavalry evolution that was obviously alien to the Romans was detailed and accurate. It is impossible to think that Tacitus should have obscured this information through carelessness. The other objection against Müllenhoff and Much is a purely military one. What kind of tactical value could such an exercise have ? Decidedly none. A third objection against the radius-vector theory has been raised by Hammerich 1956:287. He thinks that an exercise as the assumed radiusvector movement is exceedingly difficult to perform - an opinion which
64
ERNST Α. EBBINGHAUS
he had confirmed by a cavalry officer and which I can confirm myself from experience. The movement demands excellent control of the horse and, if the rank of horsemen exceeds ten, it demands considerable speed of the outer horse(s) to keep the line unbroken. Thinking of the fact that Tacitus mentions earlier, viz. that the Germanic horses were not particularly fast, Hammerlich's argument is serious enough and in conjunction with the other arguments makes the interpretation proposed by Müllenhoff and Much quite untenable. Another interpretation was proposed by Schneider 1900. His translation of the passage shows best what he means: "Geradeaus oder mit der einzigen Schwenkung rechtshin reiten sie in so enggeschlossenen Haufen (Quarrö), dass keiner zurückbleibt." (Schneider 1900:256). Schneider thinks as is only reasonable that Tacitus is describing attacking cavalry. He interprets Tacitus' words as referring to (the?) two methods of attack used by Germanic horsemen, the frontal attack (in rectum, geradeaus) and the oblique attack (uno flexu dextros, mit der einzigen Schwenkung rechtshin). So far his interpretation seems flawless, but when he translates orbis as 'Haufen, Quarre' one looks in vain for any justification. In military usage orbis never has any meaning other than circle (as any Latin dictionary will confirm) and it refers, of course, exclusively to a defensive formation. Therefor Schneiders explanation must be rejected. In recent years an older interpretation has been revived by Hammerich. Hammerich thinks that the movement described is nothing but a riding in a circle. The words ut nemo posterior sit which would be fatal to such an interpretation are being explained as referring to the equal spacing of the individual riders (Hammerich 1956:293 et pass.). The purpose of this manoeuvre, and that is new in Hammerich's thesis, is purely ritual, and he adduces numerous examples of a rightwise circuit on horseback to back up his interpretation (Hammerich 1956:294ff.). It needs only one remark to show that this theory is equally untenable. Ut nemo posterior sit means '(so) that no one remains behind' and nothing else. In order to describe the assumed equal spacing of the horsemen, one would have to say something like paribus spatiis. There are, of course, other arguments against Hammerich's idea. Tacitus at this point is concerned solely with military matters and not with ritual. Also there is no proof for such circular riding for ritual purposes among the Germanic people for the time in question (cf. Philippson 1957:660f.). Clearly Hammerich's theory must also be rejected. If one approaches the crucial passage without prejudice, it should be
A GERMANIC CAVALRY MANOEUVRE
65
obvious that it poses not the slightest problem and translates easily. The problem is rather to imagine a cavalry evolution that fits the words of the author. If one assumes the passage to mean that the horsemen ride single file into a circle, it would be impossible for any one horseman to remain behind, because in a closed circle no one can remain behind by definition. However, one can assume that the horsemen riding single file break clockwise into a circle and then face inward as soon as the circle is closed. In such a manoeuvre anyone who remains outside the line of the circle would indeed be posterior. What Tacitus describes seems to be a very simple movement. A body of cavalry approaches a given object single file, encircles it clockwise with each individual horseman turning to face the centre of the circle as soon as the encirclement is completed; the entire manoeuvre is executed uno flexu dextros. Such a manoeuvre would probably have been worth mentioning, for as far as I can see it is entirely un-Roman; the authorities on Roman tactics, specially cavalry tactics do not seem to mention anything like it. Pennsylvania State University
NOTES 1
On the question of the correct title of Tacitus' book, cf. Georg Wissowa, Neue Jahrbücher 1927.27; Norden 1959:512. 2 One recalls here Caesar's remarks on the Germanic horses, Commentarii de bello Gallico iv, 2. Although the common practice of interpreting Tacitus' information on Germanic matters with remarks by Caesar and vice versa usually leads to wrong conclusions, in this particular case palaeozoological observations bear out both authors. The horses were indeed small and shortlegged in Caesar's as well as in Tacitus' times.
REFERENCES Anderson, J. G. C. 1938. Cornelii Taciti De origine et situ Germanorum. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Halm, K. 1857. Cornelii Taciti libri qui supersunt. 3rd ed., vol. 3. Lipsiae: Teubner. Hammerich, L. L. 1956. Ein Reiterstück. Fragen und Forschungen im Bereich und Umkreis der germanischen Philologie - Festgabe für T. Frings, 283ff Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Müllenhoff, K. 1900. Deutsche Altertumskunde, vol. 4. Berlin: Weidmann. Much, R. 1936. Die Germania des Tacitus. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. —. 1967. Die Germania des Tacitus. 3rd ed. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Norden, E. 1959. Die germanische Urgeschichte in Tacitus Germania. 4th ed. Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner. Philippson, Ε. A. 1957. Review of Fragen und Forschungen im Bereich und Umkreis der germanischen Philologie - Festgabe für T. Frings. JEGP 56.657ff.
66
ERNST Α. EBBINGHAUS
Robinson, R. R. 1935. The Germania of Tacitus. (APA, Philological Monographs 5) Middletown, Conn.: American Philological Association. Schneider, Η. 1900. Zu Tacitus Germania VI, 6. Blätter für das Gymnasialschulwesen 36.238fr.
THE MEANING OF THE SLAVIC WORDS FOR 'STILL' A N D 'ALREADY' HERBERT GALTON
The basic meaning of the adverb 'still' is temporal and emerges from examples like ostani uste deneska1 'stay another day'. Here we are very obviously dealing with a temporal extension; there is a reference point, the present, say the moment of utterance, beyond which I wish the person's stay to continue for another day. The direction of the extension is from the present to the future, but since the point of reference by no means coincides with the present in all instances, we may say more generally that the direction indicated for the extension is from the past to the future and is independent of the ACTUAL present that supplies the dividing point between the past and the future. What matters is not the relation to the particular PRESENT point along the time axis, but the direction, and in order to establish the direction indicated by 'still', we have to agree on one for the time axis itself. Thus the need arises to polarize the time axis, that is to say, provide this pure dimension with a direction, very much as we provide the three spatial coordinates with a center from which they issue forth and in which we conveniently place our own ego. Now since in our experience future moments have become and do become past, whereas the past never becomes the future, it seems more appropriate to make time 'flow' from the future into the past and to polarize it by means of an arrowhead in the direction of the past. In the following diagram of the time axis, the position of the present, as being irrelevant, has been left out: «
1
PAST
1
point of ->· point indicated FUTURE reference by 'still' The direction indicated by 'still', then, runs contrary to that of the time axis. The extension proceeds to the right from a reference point that may be explicitly given or else implied; in our first example, it is supplied by the point in time at which a particular action may be expected to take place, here the departure. Cekaj uste malku 'wait a little' implies that
68
HERBERT GALTON
you might reasonably be expected to be leaving now, yet I entreat you to stay beyond this time into the future. The reference point is clearly not the present in (Czech) Potom prisla zpräva, ze se pojede jeste az za ctyri hodiny 'Then came the report that they would leave only after four hours'. Here, the departure might reasonably have been expected to take place at the time the report came, but was put off for another four hours. In (Bulg.) I neka se uveri, ce go obica oste 'Let him rest assured that she still loves him', there is but a vaguely adumbrated reference point in the past, when she might be thought to have ceased loving him, but 'still' projects that state beyond that point, against the flow of time. While claiming that basically 'still' reflects a temporal concept as outlined, I by no means wish to deny that this basic meaning may sometimes be relegated to the background: Za da mozat da go spustat sandakot uste poslednite pet-sest skalila ... 'To be able to lower the coffin over the last five or six steps ...'. The last few steps have to be added to the preceding series, whose end provides the reference point. The temporal meaning is faded, it has been ousted by the series concept; time, of course, is nothing but a purely immaterial series consisting of point added on to point along one irreversible dimension. Any series has this essential character in common with the time concept. But the purely temporal element may recede still further: (Bulg.) Oste ν tova si sbcinenie toj iznese i drugo edno tblkuvane, 'Still in the same work, he also put forward another interpretation'. Here, while time still enters into the picture and also the unexpected element, a frequent ingredient in the meaning of 'still' is still there, the emphasis is rather on the purely additive aspect of the matter. The reference point is the first interpretation, while the second is seen as a serial continuation in a relationship of succession to it. (Serb.) Zar se taj Nikaragua jos meSa u nase porodicne stvaril 'Is that man N. also interfering in our family affairs?'. There is an implied series of events here with which interference takes place, and the question refers to the possible continuation of that series by yet another term - the family affairs. The element of surprise is clear, but time has only bequeathed its serial nature to this particular usage. 'Interference beyond a point causes the pained question; the questioner feels that a limit has been reached. In (Serb.) Jos kako smo se prevarili! 'And how we were mistaken/', deception might have been thought to have reached its limit, but even this point is left behind by events. Jos precisely projects the event even beyond that point. This shades into phraseological usage, as in the
SLAVIC WORDS FOR 'STILL' AND 'ALREADY'
69
Russian idiom Esce by ne uzas 'how should this not be a fright'. There is, after all, a limit up to which there might be some reasonable doubt as to whether something constitutes a fright or not; beyond this point, there can be no doubt at all; it would be most surprising if this were no fright. The extension indicated by esce takes place beyond an implied reference point, the limit of the series of possibly questionable frights. Also this series is modeled on the image of the temporal series, the model series of our mind. Essentially the same explanation, i.e. borrowing the image of the temporal series, in which an extension is projected beyond a certain point of reference, also applies to the use with the comparative; e.g., Uste potivko izlegovme 'We walked out still more quietly'. The reference point is supplied by the comparative degree, and we get a very obvious series 'quietly - more quietly - still more quietly'; nor is the connection with the time series, which would normally elapse in such a gradation, particularly far-fetched. Elliptic usages, in which part of the entire train of thought is not given explicit expression, but only implied, constitute an important sector of the operational field of 'still'. (Russ.) ... i segodnja by posadili, naverno daze, mozet esce i posadjat segodnja '... and to-day they might arrest (me), indeed surely, they may still arrest (me) to-day'. Now strictly speaking it is not the action of arresting which thus gets extended by the esce, but the temporal background of the present against which Raskol'nikov reasons: they may do this to him while the present still lasts. The point of reference, left rather vague, would be supplied by any event clearly marking 'to-day'. The unexpected element comes out rather clearly in the next example: uste istiot den, koga se sprijatelivme, vek'e se skaravme 'still the same day when we had become friends, we already fell out.' That means: while the same day still lasted, that unexpected event took place; this also supplies a typical example for the basic meaning of 'already', as I hope to show. Jas uste vcera znaev za toa = while yesterday was still in progress, I learnt of it. Since 'still' basically orients an event in reference to the preceding stretch along the time axis, it implies nothing itself about the recent or else remote character ofthat event in relation to the present; I poaintain that this is basically done by lexical means. For instance, (Serb.) Jos u XVIII veku, prosvecena Evropa smatrala je Sveto Pismo kao temelj svakog obrazovanja 'as recently as the XVIII century, enlightened Europe deemed the Scripture the foundation of all education', but literally rather 'while that century was still in progress'. In this context, however,
70
HERBERT GALTON
that period is considered recent. The unexpected note is there. But in the overall context of the sentence, the effect may also be 'a long time ago', if the temporal background which still proceeded when such and such an event occurred, is known to have existed a long time ago; still itself really says nothing about this. It merely extends that still-going-on duration. A case in point would be (Russ.) Za nim xodil policejskij, esce s ulicy 'behind him there walked a policeman, all the time from the street' = (again somewhat unexpectedly) his progress through the street had been extended long enough to attract the attention of the policeman. The net result of the sentence as a whole, however, is to bring out the long duration of the policeman's attentions, but strictly speaking this is not due to still. We must distinguish the paradigmatic meaning, if I may say so, of still, which sets it off from other temporal adverbs, notably its opposite already, and the syntagmatic effect of the sentence in which it is embedded, as a whole. (Czech) Jeste ν epose cyrilometodejovske clen neexistoval 'at the time of Cyrill and Method, the article still did not exist'; but that epoch is known to have been a long time ago. It cannot, however, be extended long enough to meet the genesis of the definite article. As a matter of fact, the position may be even more obscure - apparently - because there does not seem to be any reference point beyond which the (basically temporal) series is extended. (Russ.) Vprocem esce Avgustin ukazyval ..., in English: 'Incidentally, already St. Augustin pointed out ...'. The overall effect is no doubt 'as long ago as his life', but this is not viewed from the present, projecting a long stretch of time into the past; rather, it is viewed from some implied reference point in the distant past, or rather a framework, which is made to extend long enough to comprise STILL the saint. The impression of a continuing state is reinforced by the imperfective aspect of the verb. Now we may understand, I think, an example like the following: (Russ.) ... na epiceskom sanskrite, kotoryj byl mertvym jazykom esce bolee dvux tysjac let tomu nazad '... in classical Sanskrit, which was an extinct language more than 2,000 years ago'. The total effect is 'as long ago as', but esce contributes to this by approaching the tempoial locus of Sanskrit as a dead idiom not from the present, but from the past. Sanskrit had been alive, and the limiting point of its existence is set here as over 2,000 years ago - up to that point it persevered along the past stretch of the time axis. The reference point - rather an ideal one - is the limit up to which it might have been expected to be a living language. Add to this one more stretch of time, indicated precisely by esce - and it is dead. Remoten ess from
SLAVIC WORDS FOR 'STILL' AND 'ALREADY'
71
the present is, as I said, a lexical matter - it emerges from the figure of 2,000 years given, or more. We will, therefore, not be surprised to find that a relatively remote event can be introduced either by the one temporal adverb or the other, according as the event is seen as the concluding event of a preceding series or the beginning point of a new one; the temporal direction, of course, gets reversed, so that in the former case it goes against the direction of the time axis as postulated by us (from beginning to end), in the latter with it (from end to beginning). We find, thus, on the one hand (Bulg.) Seriozni vbzrazenija oste u St. Romanski ... 'Serious objections (are given) by Romanski already ...', but the literal meaning is only, that that author, who is known by us to have lived some time ago, lived in any case long enough to be still able to raise objections; on the other hand, we have (Russ.) ... dogma prinimalas' daleko ne vsemi. Uze O. Jespersen vozrazal ... 'The dogma was not accepted by everybody, far from it. Already Jespersen objected ...'. The already means 'even earlier than might otherwise have been expected' and pushes the event back from the present in the direction of the past. There is really nothing surprising about this, since any point on the time axis can obviously be approached from two opposite directions and serves as the junction of two stretches of time; even if its remoteness from the present is to be brought out, it can, at least in Slavic, be approached also from the anterior past period, which by its known temporal location serves the same purpose, but may bring out the limiting element better. An identical point in time is very visibly approached from two different directions in the example (Russ.) Esce pjaV casov toVko, a uz kak temno na dvore 'it is still only five o'clock, and how dark it is already outside'. From the preceding stretch of time, I have reached the limiting point of five o'clock; only (toVko) five o'clock; no matter how I may want to extend my reckoning {esce), I am unable to reach more than five o'clock, and already it is dark.... Five o'clock is exactly at the meeting point of the two temporal extensions, the one from the past to the present limit which I fail to surpass, and the other one from the future where the darkness has in my opinion its justified existence. I did not expect it yet. The toVko is an essential ingredient in the overall effect, because it indicates the failure of any further extension and thereby cuts off the thrust, as it were, of the esce into the future; at exactly that point, the uze impinges on it. I would now like to deal briefly with the negation, corresponding in English to 'not yet': No togas uste nemase mladinska organizacija
72
HERBERT GALTON
'but at that time there was not yet a youth organization'. At the particular point in time explicitly referred to by togas 'then', that further point at that time still in the future, to which 'still' points - had not yet been reached; actually this sentence does not tell us whether it would ever be reached. The verbal action in itself is neither confirmed nor denied, only its realization at a particular stage, which serves as the reference point. The negation brings out its non-coincidence with any future point at which such an organization might be set up or have been set up. The actual present again is irrelevant here. A curious reduplicated use, one positive, one negative, is offered in the following example: (Serb.) Zar jos sad, pa jos nije sezonal 'What, still now, it is, after all, not yet the season?'. The first jos envisages an extension of the present, that is to say, a certain event is supposed to take place while the present still lasts; on the other hand, it is unexpected, because the proper season for it has not yet arrived. Strictly speaking, the two occurrences do not fall within the same frame of reference except by external coincidence. That my interpretation is correct, is shown, I think, by the fact that each half of the compound sentence can be made to function independently, minus the connecting pa. On the other hand, we feel instinctively that already must be the opposite of still, and I think that this feeling is borne out by an analysis of the temporal relationship involved in it. A good example is supplied by Gor'kij: (Russ.) ... celovek, uze sedoj, nesmotrja na svoi sorok let a man, grey already, despite his forty years'. That is to say, the event referred to (greyness) may reasonably be expected to take place only later, but as against this reference point - albeit a rather vague one - it appears shifted forward in time, i.e. in the direction of the past. This is in the direction of the time axis as postulated by us, but anticipates its movement, as it were:
Andolikö (so 1819); 3) the form (ίο) etolikön, with the vowels e-o transposed to o-e, could produce and, I suggest, has produced to *otelikön, which in juncture with the article was simplified into to telikö; 4) the latter, crossed folketymologically with Anatolikö, easily produced andelikö (in Greek script written and here transcribed AntelikÖ), i.e. yinfatoliko -{-\telik0.11
78
DEMETRIUS J. GEORGACAS
A still more simplified formula for the interpretation would be a blend ^«[atoliko + e]tolikö — Antolikö /andoliko/ (above no. 2) and for the second and present form the blend Λ/ifatoliko + d\telik0 (above nos. 3 and 4); finally, the possibility of the blend yin[atoliko -\-\etolik0 should not be excluded: it could, with allowance for the local northern vocalism (e -»> i, ο -» u, i -> 0), lead to anitulkö and andulkö, which, through the interference of the common speech, would be restored in the form andolikö, and anitulkö -*• anutilkö -> andelkö would be restored in the form andelikö. Over seventy years ago a Greek author of a descriptive geography of Greece stated that it was unknown why Anatolikön was renamed Aitolikön (Nouchakis 1901:252). The reason was not obvious but this is one of the rare cases, I think, where the new name made some sense. I suggest that originally the islet was called Aitolikön nesion, pronounced in postclassical times /etolikon nisin/, whence the folk-etymological name Anatolikön, etc. derived. By the same token, I believe the modern name Andelikö should be restored because it is the genuine name with real citizenship rights as rooted in the speech of the local Greek speakers. The mania of the phantom-purists must some day be stopped and national life be left to its natural course. 12 University of North
Dakota
NOTES * I am indebted to my friend Dr. John A. Thomopoulos for his kind request for help to Mr. Panagiotis Ph. Christopoulos, Librarian of the Library of the Greek Parliament (Athens), who in turn earned my gratitude by generously sending me several items xeroxed, checking bibliographical points, and verifying certain references. His gracious help rendered the final version of the present paper more substantial than it originally was. I am likewise thankful to Miss Anthoula Goulousi, a graduate of the Philosophical School at Ioannina and later Research Assistant at the Modern Greek-English Dictionary project (University of North Dakota), for verifying some other references for me while she was still in Athens. 1 For the name Aitolikön, officially used in the modern Greek state for the town, the community, and since 1946 for the demos of Aitolikon, see Stoicheia 1961:168f. 2 The first of the community Melisson, the second of that of Aghios Dimitrios, and the third of that of Aghios Loukas; Demertzis 1964:240, 222, 223 (in the order given for the names). 3 The listing is not intended to be exhaustive. 4 The site of Calydon is some 15 miles SE of Anatolikon (now Aitolikon), while Pleuron was nearer; see Woodhouse 1897:11; cf. Diller 1970:40. 5 Record of vital statistics, 11 Dec. 1834, by the priest Meletios. 6 Mr. P. Ph. Christopoulos independently noted for me the locally used forms
AITOLIKON - ANATOLIKON - ANDOLIKO - ANDELIKO
79
Andeiko, Andilkö (per letter dated 27 April 1972). Varelas 1962:1.259f. On two maps of the Peloponnesus and West Sterea the name is given as Aitolikd. The author notes the form Antilikö (p. 259) in Greek script which means /Andilyiköf, but actually the strict local vocalism is Andilko. 7 Palamas (1923:2) mentions the learned plural forms Etolikyöte (and hence adj. etolikyotikos) and Anatolikyöte 'inhabitants of Anatoliko'. 8 Kremos 1880:141 and 5, respectively (these represent fields, not inhabited places); cf. also Miklosich 1887:146 (year 1611) and 150 (year 1798) (both of these latter ones refer to one and the same toponym.) 9 The spelling Anatölikon, used by Anastasios Gordios (end of 17th cent.) and its explanation by the same author by linking it to And Aitölia (Gordios in Sathas 1872: 424), both adopted by Athenagoras (1928:130), are irrelevant because phonological considerations that are for us of paramount significance could not possibly be utilized in Gordios' prelinguistic time. In fact, we know no form Andtölia or Anaitölia or Andaitolikon. 10 I do not suggest dialectal ane- and ani-, which indeed do occur for compounds with prefix ana- in other parts of the Greek speech territory, because these forms are unknown in Sterea Ellas. 11 We cannot discard the form Angeliko (1791, 1820), but explain it as a folk-etymological adaptation of the attested form Andeliko with the adjective angelikos 'angelic'. Mr. P. Ph. Christopoulos suggests (per letter, as above, note 6) that there may be some confusion with the name of the castle in the vicinity called Angelokastron, on which see A. Orlandos 1961. 12 It is to the credit of Palamas (1923:2) that he half a century ago demanded with good reason the official restoration of the name Anatolikon instead of the ancient and classical Aitolikon.
REFERENCES Adler, Markus Ν. (ed.). 1907. The itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela. London. Athenagoras, Metropolitan of Paramythia and Parga, 1928. To Aitolikon e Anatolikon kai he schole autou apo tou XVII aionos. Deltion Historikes kai Ethnologikes Hetaireias. NS. 1(= 10 of the whole series of the journal). 129-34. Bees, Nikos A. 1923. Katalogos ton hellenikon cheirographon kodikon tes en Zakyntho Foskolianes Bibliothekes. Deltion Historikes kai Ethnologikes Hetaireias 8.565-76. Christopoulos, Panagiotes Ph. 1962. Aitolikon, article. Threskeutike kai ethike enkyklopaideia (ed. A. Martinos) 1.1132-35. Delatte, Armand. 1947. Les portulans grecs (Bibliotheque de la Faculte de Philosophie, Universite de Liöge, fasc. 107). Liege-Paris. Demertzis, Demetrios. 1964. Sylloge toponymion tes nesou Euboias. Archeion euboikon meieton 11.174-251. Dendias, Michael A. 1931. Leukas e Arta? Epeirotika chronika (Ioannina) 6.23-28. Diller, Aubrey. 1970. Byzantine lists of old and new geographical names. Byzantinische Zeitschrift 63.27-42. Eustratiadis, Sophronios. 1934. Epistolai Eugeniou Ioannouliou tou Aitolou. Hellenika (Athens-Thessaloniki) 7.83-98. Garzoni, Pietro. 1705. Istoria della Repubblica di Venezia in tempo della Sacra Lega contra Maometto IV e tre suoi successori Gran Sultani de' Turchi. Venice: Manfrä. Gedeon, Manouel I. 1938. Patriarchikai ephemerides. Eideseis ek tes hemeteras ekklesiastikes historias 1500-1912. Athens: Sergiades.
80
DEMETRIUS J. GEORGACAS
Georgacas, Demetrius J. 1971. The names for the Asia Minor peninsula (Beiträge zur Namenforschung, Beiheft 8). Heidelberg: Winter. Gerland, Ernst. 1903. Neue Quellen zur Geschichte des lateinischen Erzbistums Patras (Scriptores sacri et profani, 5). Leipzig: Teubner. Gordios, Anastasios, in Sathas 1872:424. Historikon lexikon tes neas hellenikes. 1939. Vol. 2. Athens: Akademia Athenon. Kolias, Georgios T., and Panagiotes Ph. Christopoulos. 1970. To ktematologion tes Mones Prousou Eurytanias. Athens: University of Athens. Konstas, K. S. 1971. Selides topikou laikou dikaiou apo ten Tourkokratia. Niochori 12.17-21. Kremos, Georgios P. 1880. Phokika. Vol. 3. Athens: Karyofylles. Lambros, Spyridon. 1932. Brachea chronika (Mnemeia tes hellenikes historias 1.1). Athens: Akademia Athenon. Leake, William Martin. 1835. Travels in northern Greece. 4 vols. London: J. Rodwell. Lignos, Antonios. 1925. Archeion tes koinotetos Hydras, 1778-1832. Vol. 6:1818-1821. Piraeus. Meletios, Metropolitan of Athens. 1784. Ekklesiastike historia. Vol. 3. Vienna: Baumeister. —. 1728. Geographia palaia kai nea. Venice: N. Glykys. (2nd ed. 1807. Anthimos Gazis. Venice: P. Theodosiou.) Miklosich, Franz, and Joseph Müller. 1887. Acta et diplomata graeca medii aevi. Vol. 5. Bonn: Gerold [reprinted Athens: Spanos]. Nouchakis, Ioannis E. 1901. Hellenike chorographia. 3rd ed. Athens: Kousoulinos. Orlandos, A. 1961. The fortress of Angelokastron. Archeion Byzantinon Mnemeion tes Ellados 9,1:54-73. Palamas, Ch. 1923. He onomasia tou Aitolikou (article). Newspaper Sterea Ellas (Athens), No. 128 (2 Dec. 1923), p. 2. Philippides, Daniel, and Gregorios Konstantas. 1791. Geographia neoterike. Vienna. (1970: Ed. Aik. Koumarianou. Athens: Hermes). Philippson, Alfred. 1958. Die griechischen Landschaften, II, 2: Westliches Mittelgriechenland und westgriechische Inseln. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Sathas, Konstantinos N. 1869. Tourkokratoumene Hellas, 1453-1821. Athens: Kamarinopoulos-Gyphtakes [reprinted 1962], —. 1872. Mesaionikebibliotheke. Vol. 3. Venice: Chronos. —. 1880, 1881. Documents inedits relatifs ä l'histoire de la Grece au moyen äge. Premiere serie. Documents tires des Archives de Venise (1400-1500). Tome I& H. Paris. Spyropoulos, Apostolos G. 1972. Ti egrapse gia ton topo mas enas Anglos periegetes tou perasmenou aiona. Niochori 16.25-26. Stoicheia sysaseos kai ekselikseos ton demon kai koinoteton. 1961. Vol. 1: Nomos Aitolias kai Akarnanias. Athens: Henosis ton Demon tes Hellados. Tafel, Gottlieb (Theophilus) L. Fr. 1839. De Thessalonica eiusque agro dissertatio geographica. Berolini: Reiner. —. and Georg M. Thomas. 1856. Urkunden zur älteren Handels- und Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig. Vol. 2 (Fontes rerum Austriacarum. Π: Diplomataria et Acta ΧΙΠ und XIV). Vienna: Hof- und Staatsdruckerei. Varelas, Georgios I. 1962. Touristikos hodigos gia ten Hellada. Vol. 1. Athens: Organismos Touristikon Ekdoseon. Woodhouse, William J. 1897. Aetolia, its geography, topography, and antiquities. Oxford: Clarendon.
INDO-EUROPEAN '6' ERIC P. HAMP
Walde-Pokorny (1927:2, 522) heads the entry *sueks, sefcs, ueks (: uks) 'sechs'; then with the opening words "Zur schwierigen Anlautfrage" it proceeds to a selective listing of earlier discussions. A generation later, Pokorny (1957:1044) heads his entry *sueks, seks, kseks, kstfeks, Ueks (: uks). It can scarcely be said that the intervening period has led to greater clarity. 1 Let us first enquire exactly what such headings mean and what is wrong with them, or deficient in them. A comparative dictionary, such as the above two works - which are acknowledged to be the most illustrious and erudite specimens in existence, should do one of two things: (1) It may be a relatively complete listing (with evidence) of the lecoverable lexical entries of the reconstructed proto-language; if so, the characterising features of these lexical entries should be indicated with exactitude. (2) It may be a listing that groups into natural sets the etyma attested in related languages in order to show their relations and the nature of their divergence. The above cited headings fulfill neither of these requirements. They simply enumerate various pre-forms that would jointly account, with known regularities, for the phonetic shapes observed in the sundry languages. It is only when the listing shifts to the ordinal that some passing attention is paid to the rules of morphological formation. But no formal avenue is offered to account further for the puzzling initial; 2 the result is just a bewildering forest of suggestions, nearly a flat sweep of all possible combinations. Descendants of a common sort are not even well grouped. We will do best to take up separately in a convenient order representative forms from the total range attested. The Sanskrit form sät sadbhih, Käth. &B satsü (also, gen. pi. sanndm attested from the Classical period), to which for the final we compare sasti- '60' (: astdu = όκτώ), so-φιά 'sixfold' and sö-fasa '16' (*saz-), is remarkable for its initial in two senses: The initial consonant is clearly distinctive and therefore calls for a
82
ERIC P. HAMP
specific and unambiguous bundle of features in the protolanguage in order to account for it with maximum clarity and simplicity. This consonant, well known in other contexts, is totally unique to the language as an absolute unclustered initial in this word; there is no other word of old standing, except sthiv- 'spit' (which has a special cluster explanation), which begins with this consonant. Wackernagel alleges assimilation to the final consonantism (sas/ζ/ΐφ < *sas[z/t) as the explanation of the retroflexion of the initial sibilant. Ernout-Meillet (1951:1097) accept this assimilation argument for both Indie and Lithuanian; see also Ross 1944:57. The difficulty with the assimilation claim is that it complicates the argument while explaining nothing about the fundamental problem. Such an assimilation would be of necessity ad hoc and irregular; that is therefore a further complication in the chain of reasoning. Yet, starting as it does from the simple initial *s-, it still fails to explain the conditions for the supposed alternation of initials. Though I rapidly part company with Eraout-Meillet's account, to my mind they start off on very solid ground: "Comme l'a vu F. de Saussure, l'initiale de ce nom de nombre a dü etre complexe en indo-europeen." la We would like to see the classical Indie s- as a regular development, isolated though itis. As we know, *s was regularly retroflected under well understood conditions (after k, r, u, /). Let us therefore posit such a conditioning feature, and then another condition to remove the first: schematically, *[retroflector] s [erasure] The initial cannot have been *ks-, since the resulting k? would have persisted; likewise an initial vowel is out of the question. Therefore we may plausibly seek a third element that would permit the initial *k to drop under a natural condition; then that third element must itself drop or be absorbed. Some further evidence on the identity of this third element comes unexpectedly from the Nuristani group of Afghanistan; this little family of four languages is separate from both Indie and Iranian, but closer to the former than to the latter genetically. Prasun wü?(u) can only be derived successfully from *sva-; see Morgenstierne 1949:207, 210; §§41, 49. That is, the Prasun form requires a cluster with u, and the sibilant cannot be *s as an immediate precursor. Morgenstierne has also pointed out (Acta Orientalia 4.117) that Kohistani sva is archaic. Thus Indie and Nuristani together assure us of the likelihood of an initial cluster *ksu-. On this basis the Pali and similar forms in IndoAryan offer no difficulty; Mayrhofer (1951:123) remarks of Pali cha
INDO-EUROPEAN ' 6 '
83
(ιchal before vowels; and geminating a consonant in composition) "Anlaut unklar". We may however regard this as a simple reduction *k?u- > *ks~, which would then develop normally to ch-\ cf. accha'bear' < rksa-, and khamä chamä 'earth' < ksamä (Mayrhofer §§178-9).3 The pre-form for Pali is, then, *ksa *(u)wer (Meillet 1936:50). Now we know that *s vanished medially between vowels (nu 'bride':Skt. snusd); moreover, it dropped very early (Meillet 1936:39). Therefore, I propose two developments for *su in Armenian: Initially, *sy- > *hgw > *gh > fc; but medially and in sandhi, *sy > *hw > *w > v. We are then able to reconstruct vec as *sueJcs. Now the problem is to motivate the context for the assumed sandhi. 10 We find an immediate basis in syntax when we recall the typical permitted order of elements in noun and numeral phrases. Modifiers were permitted free order; prepositions could be repeated through the noun phrase as a means of binding it together; the accusative could be preceded by z- to mark the phrase as definite. Thus we find such arrangements as ams erkeriwr ew eresun 'διακόσια και τριάκοντα έτη'; ζerkosean z-elbarsn 'both brothers'; z-vec am εξ ετη' (definite), for six years'. In this fashion we see that there was ample opportunity for the numerals to find themselves in sandhi situations. Thus if a particular initial was vulnerable in such contexts, as the one in question is easily seen to be, it was quite possible to level the sandhi output in such a complex variety of occurrences. The problematic Old Prussian ordinal (w)uschts usts is notorious, and is discussed at some little length by Stang (1966:279). Since *K (Baltic s) normally appears in Old Prussian written as s the sch is accounted for by Stang as going back to sj in the same fashion as in the case of the Latvian. Lith. uses 'the six weeks of lying-in' has been connected with this, but it may well be a borrowing, too. For Meillet and others the solution to uschta- has lain in Armen, vec with an initial *y-, but I hope that we have now removed that possibility. Two facts about uschtaseem to me of primary importance: The u is ultimately susceptible of explanation as a zero-grade syllabic match to the u which we have already seen in the pre-forms discussed; moreover, it is anomalous with respect to the other Baltic attestation, and yet the expected ablaut in the oldest form of the lower ordinals. Hence the u must be old. Secondly, we have
86
ERIC P.
HAMP
supposed that *s after *k and *k gave s in Baltic; but this 'i' may not have fallen in with the sibilant output of for some time, and the form of '6' could then have been *ses-, ordinal *susta- (in zero-grade). I am inclined to link the unexpected sch with this *s. We may then see a stronger reason than simple assimilation (or dissimilation as the case may be) for the appearance of a reflex of s internally; for at this period, of the sibilants, only s and never s appeared after u within a morpheme (see footnote 6). Thereafter, we may assume that *s retained the value [i] before t. On such grounds we may claim, using only the known phonological rules of the language, that a zero-grade ordinal *ksuk(s)to-would lead to *schuschta~. If we resist a glib dissimilation argument,11 this is as far as I can take matters at this time in the direction of reconciling these forms. But perhaps we have been able to make some progress, and eliminate some false scents. The remaining forms offer no special problems individually that have not been already dealt with. The Germanic words (Goth, saihs, OHG sehs, Eng. six etc.), Lat. sex, Umbrian sestentasiaru 'bi-monthly, i.e. 1/6-year-ly' (*sekstent-äsiä-som; Poultney 1959:323), and Toch. säk, skas are all agreed to reflect a simple initial *s~. While not quite so obvious, Albanian gjashte (< *ses-tä < *seks-ti- fem.) reflects a simple initial *s- in an originally stressed syllable. The α-vocalism is from ja with yod absorbed after the palatal stop gj; as I have discussed in detail elsewhere, ja is the expected outcome of *e before an original cluster. The reflex sh of the second *s is supported by the 'lllyrian' Sestus; see Hamp 1961:52. Unfortunately the Hittite numeral is not attested with a phonetic complement. We are now ready to draw together the results of the above arguments. Indo-Iranian-Nuristani leads us to *ksuacs. This heavy initial cluster12 would have simplified in two ways dialectally: to *ks- for Pali and much of modern Indie, and to *su- for Sanskrit, Nuristani, and Romany Gypsy (Welsh and European Gypsy sov, Armenian Gypsy ses, Syrian Gypsy reported as shaysh and sas). The Nuristani and Kohistani JVreflexes would reflect directly this interstage. The preservation of the full cluster in Iranian parallels the same behaviour in the case of other heavy initial clusters, e.g. Av. fstäna- (see Hamp 1960:274), while Sanskrit either reduces them or drops the zero-grade form. Then, as a later development, *sv- reduced to s- no doubt as a product of underlying heavy cluster reduction, since only surface su and su were under-
INDO-EUROPEAN ' 6 '
87
lyingly in the language; alternatively the phonetics of s may have contributed to absorbing u. Baltic and Slavic have led us to recognize *kses-. Celtic, Greek and Armenian point to *suelcs; the remaining dialects (Germanic, Italic, Tocharian, and Albanian - a set with no inherent dialect unity) lead to *seL·. None of this last set can go back to *su- since a distinctive reflex would then show. But there is no evidence that an original *ks- would have a separate reflex in these dialects; in fact, there exists stray evidence for a merger of *ks- and *s- in some of these. 13 I therefore propose two types of pre-form for all of these: *s\ieks in Celtic and Greek-Armenian; *kseks in all the others. It is unlikely that Celtic and Greek-Armenian innovated together; in fact, the mechanisms of the change(s) are probably quite different in the two cases. We know that in Celtic *ps and *ks merged; we also know that initial clusters, especially when complex, underwent radical change in Celtic (e.g. *st, and the famous 'dental spirants' as in the etymon for 'earth' and 'yesterday'). But in Greek and Armenian initial clusters of stop + sibilant persisted (to the present day in Greek). Therefore, setting aside Celtic as having its own specific motivations, the GreekArmenian reduction seems to be a heavy cluster simplification exactly parallel to that of Sanskrit and Nuristani; 14 alternatively, it may have been a stop dissimilation. All the other dialects appear to have reduced the heavy cluster as Päli did. Only Old Prussian may have retained a trace of *u, because in zerograde it had syllabified. For Indo-European I therefore reconstruct but a single shape, *ksueks. The changes leading to the apparent pre-forms are perfectly consonant with what we know of the developments, feature by phonetic feature, for the separate dialect groups. Almost all of these relate to the phonetic reduction of a complex initial, a phonetic process which we observe in various manifestations in almost all the IE languages, with the notable exception of early Iranian. In this last particular the configuration of our evidence in question accords well with what we know for other etyma. The fact that the picture is fragmented and has been imperfectly recognized results from the isolation and uniqueness (in the surviving attestation) of this perfectly well-formed IE cluster. No questions of ablaut, semantics, paradigmatic levelling or derivation, ambiguity, or polysemy, such as frequently plague reconstructive riddles, are involved here.
88
ERIC P. HAMP CODA ON THE SHAPE OF *ksuelcs
B. Trnka, in his article on foreign phonological features in English (1964:188) gives a list of over 100 words with double occurrence of the same consonant. He proceeds to point out correctly that some, of old pedigree, are bimorphemic in origin {hundred, tight, dead; but sister on the IE level, as I would insist). He regards quick as an expressive reduplication from *gwiwos; I prefer to regard it as a normal but rarer phonological development (like Lat. quinque or coquö) from *gwiwos — *gwiHwos. He concludes that "only two English words, the numerals six and nine, are old IE words (monomorphemic?)". Others would be borrowings (pepper, poplar, pauper, purple, purpose, pope, pipe, cease, sauce, etc.) or expressive (pip, peep, blab, etc.). In a perceptive footnote ( # 3 , p. 190) Trnka finds it "tempting to conclude that the double occurrence of the same phoneme in IE morphemes served only for expressive purposes and that its use for other purposes in Greek and Latin (cf. Gk. kakös, pdpyros; Lat. populus, pöpulus, caecus, bibö, coquö, quinque, etc.) may have been due to the influence of other languages". I have already stated elsewhere with respect to quinque, coquö (as also with πέπων τέτταρες), Welsh pump, πάψιμο 'cessation' to παύω, etc.) that chance output from natural phonetic change can result in the observed doubling in a restricted number of cases; so in Germanic and English the morphemes for hang and gang (Go. hähan, Hitt. kankprob. < *kenk-, Pokorny 1949:566and 614; Skt.janghä, Lith. zengiü < *ghengh~) reflect 'centum' mergers of palatal and velar. The evidence on *kenk- 'bind' and *kenk- 'burn, (inflict) pain' (hunger, Go. hührus) is weak and ambiguous. Moreover, Lat. bibö surely represents a revision to a more transparent reduplication of an earlier *pibö, itself an originally reduplicated formation. Trnka's observation leads us to speculate on the IE root established by the equation Hitt. seszi = Skt. sasti 'sleeps'. An IE root *ses- not only stands out by virtue of its phonological constitution; it leads us to wonder what semantic relation this word 'sleep' bore to the well known root *suep-. If we think of *ses- as having originally had an expressive function an hypothesis immediately suggests itself. We know that the phonological rules of IE automatically inserted *e in the zerograde of a monosyllabic stem when it stood word-initially. Thus if there had been an expression *[s:] or *ss signifying hushing, or quiet sleep, it would have been institutionalized in the lexicon as *ses-. In such a fashion *suep- and *ses- would not clash as synonyms.
INDO-EUROPEAN ' 6 '
89
It may indeed be that *ksueks was in origin complex, since it is a single morpheme. But it was also normal for many IE words to terminate in *s. In this sense, the special shape of English six may be just another chance result. University of Chicago
NOTES 1
Wackernagel (1929:1. 355), for all his completeness and meticulous accuracy, scarcely offers an improved or different picture. His references to earlier scholarship (355-6) are fuller and more explicit than are Walde's. Frisk (1960:527) is inconclusive. Szemerenyi (1960:78) offers the thesis that *ueks > * sueks; the inadequacy of this formulation will emerge from what follows. la In addition to my objection to Ross's repeated use (1944:54-57) of the assimilation argument, I cannot accept his assumptions of contamination between Indo-Iranian initials which should not have been simultaneously available within single dialects. 2 Wackernagel (355, §182d) suggests only a generalized hypothesis: "Danach haben in der Grundsprache die Anlaute kxsu-, kxs-, sy- und s nebeneinander gestanden, wohl wechselnd unter dem Einflüsse des Sandhi und des Silbenausgangs." 3 I am thus led to agree with that part of Wackernagel's account (1929:355) that derives Pali and Prakrit cha from an Indie k$-. 4 Also an apparent gen. pi. wywsw-nw; see Gershevitch 1954:251, Addenda §1316. 5 We get similar information, more directly, from Digor Ossetic cexscez (Isaev 1966: 47, §23). From this we may conclude that Ossetic is ambiguous not only between *xs and *xs (so Benveniste 1959:33) but also between *xs and If that is so, I do not follow Benveniste's argument (1959:40) claiming evidence from Ossetic for *xsip- beside *xsvip-. 6 On retroflexion of *s after i and u see Karaliünas 1966 and Hamp 1967, as well as Stang's allusion to earlier discussion (Stang 1966:96-9). 7 No doubt for [suexsos], but for the exact reading see Whatmough 1970:298. 8 ξέστρνξ κριθή- ή έξάστιχος. Κνίδιοι is just a riddle. We cannot base any conclusion on this, even though an initial *ks- would easily fit within our total argument. This would be simply facile use of a stray fact, whose relevance is not really known. 9 Solutions for the final consonantisms of vec, vestasan '16' and vat'sun '60' are of course already reasonably well worked out; see Meillet 193 6:40. 10 It is possible to consider the serial order of numerals in this connexion. Indeed hing '5' once ended in a vowel (preserved in hnge-tasan '15'), which would give a satisfactory phonetic environment. But, as I have remarked elsewhere, unless we feel that we are dealing with a culture which spent its time counting sheep or shekels or stirrings of the soup, such reasoning lacks syntactic motivation. 11 Szemerenyi (1960:78) properly rejects Vaillant's claim of dissimilation *ksuks-to-
> uksto-.
12
Perhaps paralleled only in Skt. ksip-etc.; see Benveniste 1959:40 for discussion of the Iranian cognates, and note especially the Avestan xsv·. 13 In fact, I would expect Albanian to go most closely with Balto-Slavic. 14 For reduction of a three-member cluster, compare *pktens > κτείς. Since in Celtic ks became [xs] it seems likely that in initial position the weak spirant was simply absorbed by the following sibilant.
90
ERIC P. HAMP REFERENCES
Benveniste, fimile. 1959. ßtudes sur la langue ossete (Collection Linguistique publiee par la Societö de linguistique de Paris, 60). Paris: C. Klincksieck. Ernout, Alfred, and Antoine Meillet. 1951. Dictionnaire dtymologique de la langue latine. 3e id. Paris: C. Klincksieck. Frisk, Hjalmar. 1960. Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 1. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Gershevitch, Ilya. 1954. A grammar of Manichean Sogdian. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hamp, Eric P. 1960. Avestan fStäna. KZ 76.273-5. —. 1961. Loss of and *n before *s in lllyrian. IF 66.51-2. —. 1966. Three Armenian etymologies. Revue des etudes armeniennes (n.s.) 3.11-15. —. 1967. On IE *s after /, u in Baltic. Baltistica 3.7-11. Isaev, Μ. I. 1966. Digorskij dialekt osetinskogo jazyka. Moskva: Nauka. Karaliünas, S. 1966. Κ voprosu ob i.-e. *s posle i, u ν litovskom jazyke. Baltistica 1.113-26. Mayrhofer, Manfred. 1951. Handbuch des Päli, I : Grammatik. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Meillet, Antoine. 1936. Esquisse d'une grammaire comparee de l'armenien classique. Vienna: Imprimerie des P. P. Mekhitaristes. Morgenstierne, Georg. 1929. Indo-Iranian frontier languages, vol. 1. Oslo: H. Aschehoug. —. 1938. Indo-Iranian frontier languages, vol. 2. Oslo: H. Aschehoug. —. 1949. The language of the Prasun Kafirs. NTS 15.188-334. Pokorny, Julius. 1949 - 1969. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern: Francke. Poultney, James W. 1959. The bronze tables of Iguvium. Baltimore: American Philological Association. Ross, Alan S. C. 1944. An Indo-European-Finno-Ugrian Loanword Problem. Transactions of the Philological Society, 45-94. Stang, Chr. S. 1966. Vergleichende Grammatik der baltischen Sprachen. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Szemerenyi, Oswald. 1960. Studies in the Indo-European system of numerals. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Trnka, Bohumil. 1964. On foreign phonological features in present-day English. In Honour of Daniel Jones, Papers contributed on the occasion of his 80th birthday, ed. by D. Abercrombie, D. B. Fry, P. A. D. MacCarthy, N. C. Scott, J. L. M. Trim. London: Longmans. Wackernagel, Jacob. 1929. Altindische Grammatik, ΠΙ, 1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Walde, Alois, and Julius Pokorny. 1927-32. Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen, 3 vols. Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter. Whatmough, Joshua. 1970. The dialects of ancient Gaul. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
ADJECTIVES AS F I R S T C O M P O U N D M E M B E R S IN H O M E R HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD
The familiar descriptions of Indo-European possessive (bahuvrihi) compounds often contain classifications of such compounds according to the underlying syntactic relation between their elements. They tell us that a good many bahuvrihis have an adjective stem as a first component, the adjective standing in an attribute relation to the noun which forms the second component, e.g. Vedic ugrdbähu- '(having) strong (ugrd-) arms (bähü-y (Wackernagel 1905: 274). No doubt this is a central fact in the ancestor language. But that there is something less than archaic about the particular kind of Vedic compound just cited from Wackernagel as typical may be seen earlier in the same work (Wackernagel 1905:59-61) where there is a reference to Caland's famous rule to the effect that the Indie and Iranian adjective suffix -ra- was at one time replaced by -i- when it appeared in the first component of a compound. This -/- also occurs before certain derivative suffixes. The phenomenon is also Greek, witness kudrds 'renowned' side by side with kudi-dneira 'characterized by renowned men, bringing men renown (fem.)'. The whole derivational paradigm of which pairs like these are a part has been studied extensively. An excellent and convenient example is Risch's treatment of the 'Caland suffixes' in Homer (Risch 1974:65-112). Words like ugrd- and kudrds are, however, not only particular instances affected by Caland's rules; they have another aspect. In Homer, at any rate, there exists an interesting pattern. Adjectives, with their normal stem forms, are quite common as initial components of possessive and other compounds. Thus, items with kako- 'bad', megalo- 'great', leuko- 'white', do(u)likho- 'long', euru- 'wide' function quite without restriction. But these are primary, derivationally opaque adjectives. The matter is altogether different with productively formed adjectives.
92
HENRY Μ. HOENIGSWALD
Their number in compounds is exceedingly small. Risch's list of first compounding elements (222-25) reveals the following (all denominative): halio-trephes, said of seals and usually translated 'seareared'. 1 It should be remembered that hdlios can function as a quasi-noun - αΙΙάδη haliäön, II. 18.432 - and always refers to a mythical personage. In view of diotrephes 'Zeusnurtured' the interpretation 'nurtured by the halioV is therefore to be preferred to one in which halio- has a general, productive relationship with hals 'sea'. agriö-phönos 'rough-voiced'; cp. barbarö-phönos. The absence of a systematic semantic connection with agros 'field' needs no comment. khalkeo-th6rex 'with brazen breastplate', khalkeö-phönos (see the above) 'with voice of brass' are correctly explained by Risch as metrically motivated variants for the ordinary khalko- as in khalko-knemis 'bronze-greaved' (Risch 1974: 218).
hippio-khaites 'shaggy with horsehair', hippio-khdrmes 'one who fights from a chariot' are in the same position; cp. hippö-komos 'decked with horsehair'. The adjective from hippos is hippeios,2 a formation which, to be sure, was built metrically more or less like hippo- itself. olbio-daimön 'of blessed lot' may be a slightly similar case, though compounds with ölbos 'bliss, wealth' do not occur in Homer and it would in any case be awkward to think of olbo-daimön as the proper (though unmetrical) word. demio-ergös 'working for the people', a word with a distinguished post-Homeric history. What is involved here is the special terminological function of demios in the Odyssey, in addition to the metrical situation, demioergös occurs in the Odyssey, as against demo-böros 'devourer of the common stock', and the 'determinative' compound demo-gerön 'elder of the people' from the Iliad (there are also proper names with Demo-). kerdaleö-phrön 'greedy of gain', from kerdaleos 'crafty' which may be considered the regular adjective going with kerdos n. 'gain'. liparo-kredemnos 'with bright headband', liparo-plökamos 'with glossy locks' contains liparös 'shiny'. But here the
ADJECTIVES AS FIRST COMPOUND MEMBERS
93
underlying noun, lip- 'fat' can hardly be said to lead an ordinary existence in Homer (Leumann 1950:309-10). This is all. Evidently, in spite of the great metrical advantage of many etymologically and semantically clear adjectival forms, such forms are not in free use as first compound members. This is a matter of complementation: the pattern is theös 'god': theios 'divine; but not *theio-eides 'having divine appearance' - rather theo-eides 'having the appearance of a god' instead. University of Pennsylvania
NOTES 1
The relation between possessive compounds and compounds in -es with a verb stem as the second component is of course close. 2 hippios since Alcaeus. 3 It is of course true of this particular example (and, mutatis mutandis, of others like it) that *theioeidis would not fit the hexameter. It would, however, be a mistake to think that (denominative) adjective stems and noun stems are both available on an equal footing to satisfy the meter: khalko- occurs freely wherever possible (-knimides, -glökhinos; -pariiou, -khitdnön, -pod% -baris, [-korustin, -bates, -lupous]; not to mention khalkerea), while khalkeo- in compounds is found only occasionally and with limitations as described above (II. 4.448 = 8.62, 5.785 [to which add Hes. Th. 311]).
REFERENCES Leumann, Manu. 1950. Homerische Wörter (Schweizerische Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft, 3). Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt. Risch, Ernst. 1974. Wortbildung der homerischen Sprache. 2. Auflage. Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter. Wackernagel, Jakob. 1905. Altindische Grammatik, II, 1: Einleitung zur Wortlehre; Nominalkomposition. Reprinted 1957. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
HISTOIRE DES CONCEPTIONS SUR LA RACINE EN INDOEUROPfiEN GUY JUCQUOIS
La conception de la racine constitue un des points centraux dans la theorie de l'indoeuropöen. Les idees de Benveniste ä cet 6gard sont sujettes ä de nombreuses critiques formulees ailleurs, cependant 6tant donne 1'enorme influence qu'elles ont exercee dans le domaine de la linguistique comparative il a paru souhaitable de retracer l'histoire des theories ölabories en cette matiere depuis Bopp jusqu'ä Brugmann en passant par Schleicher et de Saussure. 1. INTRODUCTION
Les theories scientifiques sont, comme les individus qui les congoivent, implantees dans la tradition et dans l'histoire hors desquelles elles ne peuvent etre totalement comprises. En ce sens, les revolutions scientifiques, ou ce qui apparait comme tel au public, sont bien plutot des evolutions. D'une maniere ou d'une autre, les dicouvertes sont pröparees, parfois de tres longue date, par des chercheurs qui, dans leur ensemble, n'atteindront pas ä la notoriete, mais sans le labeur desquels les grands noms de la science n'auraient pas ete appeles ä la celSbrite. Si ceci est vrai dans des domaines tels que la chimie, la physique ou les mathematiques, il en est encore davantage ainsi lorsqu'il s'agit des sciences qu'on appelle aujourd'hui humaines et notamment de la linguistique. On connait le role qu'a exerce et exerce toujours l'enseignement de Ferdinand de Saussure et le courant structuraliste inspire directement de ce dernier. On accorde cependant göneralement peu d'interet, en dehors du cercle restreint des indoeuropeanistes, au contenu methodologique du premier grand travail du Maitre genevois portant sur le systeme des voyelles en indoeuropeen. Pourtant, c'est dans un memoire ayant trait ä cette question technique que de Saussure appliqua pour la premiere fois des principes d'analyse linguistique qu'il formula dans la suite de maniere magistrale.
96
GUY JUCQUOIS
La theorie du linguiste de Geneve etait liee implicitement ä une conception de la racine qu'il n'a pas elaboree lui-meme, mais qui fut exprimee de fa?on coherente et systematique par un eleve d'A. Meillet, presqu'un petit-fils spirituel de Saussure, E. Benveniste, dans un travail qui fit epoque (1937). Si Γοη sait qu'en cette matiere c'est la theorie elaboree par ce dernier auteur qui fait, dans 1'ensemble, autorite et si l'on admet que la theorie de la racine constitue le point essentiel de la reconstruction morphologique de l'indoeuropeen, on se rend compte de l'interet qu'il y a ä retracer la demarche entreprise par plusieurs savants et qui a abouti ä la theorie de Benveniste. C'est l'ebauche de cette histoire que nous voudrions tenter ici en hommage ä notre collegue A. A. Hill, ä 1'occasion de son emeritat. II y a, au fond, deux chapitres ä 1'histoire des conceptions sur la racine en indoeuropeen, mais dont le deroulement chevauche partiellement. En effet, si l'on considere que de Saussure a introduit ä cet egard une rupture avec la tradition, on admettra qu'il faille distinguer la periode presaussurienne et la piriode postsaussurienne. Cependant, dans la realite, force nous est de constater que des auteurs contemporains ou plus recents que de Saussure ont continue ä defendre des theses soit franchement antisaussuriennes (telles que Celles de Specht), soit indifferentes ä l'enseignement saussurien, comme c'est le cas dans une certaine mesure pour K. Brugmann et meme pour A. Meillet. Nous nous sommes base sur cette constatation pour decouper l'histoire des conceptions linguistiques sur la racine en indoeuropeen non pas en deux chapitres qui auraient pu etre intitules 'les prosaussuriens' et 'les antisaussuriens', mais en quelques paragraphes portant sur des linguistes ayant adopte en cette matiere des positions originales et personnelles.
2. LA RACINE DANS LES THEORIES DE F. BOPP1
Le fondateur de la grammaire comparee des langues indoeuropeennes, tres conscient de 1'importance d'une theorie generale de la racine comme fondement de toute explication morphologique, y avait consacre dans son oeuvre une cinquantaine de pages qui constituent le premier chapitre de sa morphologie. Pour cet auteur, le lexique de l'indoeuropeen, une fois ramen6 aux racines dont il est issu, se divise en deux parties qui correspondent ä ce que nous appellerions mots-pleins et mots-outils ou mots grammaticaux. Bopp rattache les premiers ä des racines appelees verbales et les seconds ä des racines dites pronominales. Cependant,
LA RACINE EN INDOEUROPEEN
97
puisque des 'racines verbales' sont attestees seulement dans des fonctions nominales, il parut preferable ä M. Breal, dans l'introduction qu'il redigea au second volume de sa traduction (Bopp 1868:xx) de remplacer ces termes respectivement par racines predicatives ou attributives et racines indicatives. D'une fagon tres imagee, Bopp estime qu'en indoeuropeen "le principe essentiel de la creation des mots ... parait etre la combinaison des racines verbales avec les racines pronominales, les unes representant en quelque sorte l'äme, les autres le corps des mots" (Bopp 1866:230). L'existence de deux categories distinctes de racines decoule de la nature des choses d'apres Breal (Bopp 1868:xx): "pour interpreter la pensee humaine, le langage dispose de deux moyens: il peut peindre les objets, en choisissant pour chacun sa maniere d'etre ou sa qualite la plus saillante (c'est le role des racines verbales); ou il peut montrer les objets, en appelant sur eux, ä l'aide de la voix, 1'attention de celui qui ecoute (c'est l'emploi des racines pronominales). La combinaison de ces deux sortes de racines a donne, dans les langues indoeuropeennes, les noms et les verbes, dont le caractere commun est de designer une personne ou un objet en meme temps qu'ils expriment une action ou une qualite." Bopp, prenant ses distances d'avec les grammairiens indiens et d'avec certains de ses contemporains mais approuve sans restriction par Breal dans ses commentaires, ne pouvait admettre qu'on tentät de ramener les mots-outils - le texte dit "les pronoms simples"2-ä d'anciennes racines de mots-pleins, bien qu'il puisse accidentellement y avoir identite formelle entre une racine verbale et une racine pronominale, ainsi par exemple i 'aller' et i 'celui-ci'. Enfin l'appellation 'racines verbales' ne doit pas faire croire que cet auteur faisait deriver les noms du verbe. II dit explicitement, au contraire, que "les noms ne derivent pas des verbes, ils se trouvent sur une meme ligne avec eux et ont meme provenance" (Bopp 1866:221). La racine n'est pas une pure abstraction pour Bopp, "quoique, dans Γ etat oü nous sont parvenus nos idiomes, il faille ordinairement recourir ä une sorte de dissection pour degager d'un mot sa racine" (Breal apud Bopp 1868:xix). Tout d'abord, en effet, il existe des mots-racines, c'est-ä-dire des 'racines verbales' utilisees dans les langues attestees sans aucun morpheme derivationnel ou, dans une terminologie modernisee, des lexemes par opposition aux lexies (Bopp 1866:269-70). En outre, les racines ont eu, "dans la premiere periode du langage" (Breal apud Bopp 1868:xix), leur valeur independamment des suffixes qui leur furent rattaches par la suite. En d'autres termes, et toujours en suivant
98
GUY JUCQUOIS
les commentaires de M. Breal (Bopp 1868:xix), "nous sommes ramenes ... vers un äge anterieur ä la flexion, oü les groupes phoniques dont sont composes nos mots ne s'etaient pas encore agglutines, et oü les id6es qu'ils expriment ne s'etaient pas encore subordonnees les unes aux autres". Selon Bopp toutes les racines indoeuropeennes etaient monosyllabiques, les formes polysyllabiques s'expliquant soit par un redoublement, soit par l'agglutination d'un preverbe devant une racine verbale, soit encore par la retroderivation permettant d'obtenir, par exemple, un verbe ä partir d'un substantif par suppression de morphemes (1866:222). A l'exception de la regle du monosyllabisme, les racines verbales ne sont soumises ä aucune restriction: elles peuvent etre monophon6matiques ou au contraire polyphonematiques; il peut meme y avoir des groupes consonantiques variables ä l'initiale.3 II est interessant de constater que l'idee si fSconde d'A. Martinet de la double articulation avec ce qu'elle implique d'6conomie dans la communication etait dejä presente en germe chez Bopp lorsqu'il 6crit que "c'est grace ä cette libert6 de r£unir et d'accumuler les lettres (sic) que la langue est parvenue ä exprimer toutes les idees fondamentales par des racines monosyllabiques" (1866:222). La racine, au cours de son histoire durant l'epoque indoeuropeenne, ne pouvait subir que trois types de modifications: le redoublement, le renforcement et l'adjonction de ce que nous appelons aujourd'hui l'infixe nasal. L'existence d'une perspective diachronique au sujet de l'indoeuropeen ne parait pas avoir ete etrangere ä Bopp. Dans son introduction, Breal distingue ainsi une periode tres archai'que de laquelle date le redoublement de l'initiale radicale dans certaines formations, puis durant la piriode flexionnelle serait apparu le 'renforcement' de la voyelle radicale; quant ä l'element nasal, il ne serait que le produit d'une ancienne mitathese ou ne constituerait qu'une simple Variante articulatoire (Bopp 1868:xxi-xxii). Si les conceptions de Bopp en ce qui concerne la racine en indoeuroρέβη sont par certains de leurs aspects perimees, il faut neanmoins porter ä son actif la distinction des mots-outils et des mots pleins avec les cons6quences pour la racine et 1'introduction d'une perspective historique dans la protolangue. 3. LA RACINE DANS LE COMPENDIUM DE SCHLEICHER
Pour Schleicher, "les plus anciennes parties de la langue indoeuropöenne sont les sons significatifs, les racines" (1861:286). A l'origine, les racines
LA RACINE EN INDOEUROPEEN
99
devaient etre moins itoffees phonologiquement qu'elles ne le furent ä la fin de la periode commune oü Ton constate la presence d'elargissements. Avec la nasale, ce que nous appelons l'infixe nasal, anciennement d'usage seulement au theme du present et les formes ä redoublement, les racines elargies constituent, d'un point de vue formel, la classe des racines secondaires, les autres racines 6tant appelees primaires. A1'instar de Bopp, Schleicher maintient la distinction entre les racines verbales et les racines pronominales. Cette distinction est basee sur le sens, car une meme söquence phonique peut etre successivement racine verbale et racine pronominale. La racine s'obtient apres l'extraction de tous les morphemes de derivation et des desinences et la röduction eventuelle de sa voyelle au degre normal. Elle est toujours monosyllabique. Par ailleurs, Schleicher admettait que la forme de la racine, mis ä part le monosyllabisme, 6tait absolument libre. L'auteur classe les difförents schemas radicaux de la fagon suivante (V = voyelle, C = consonne): V, CV, VC, CCV, VCC, CCVC, CVCC et CCVCC. D'autre part Schleicher presentait sans doute la decouverte de Saussure puisqu'il note que frequemment dans les racines du type CaC ou aC, meme quand C = *i ou *u, il y a une alternance du type CaC/CCa, par exemple (en notation de l'6poque): mar/mra 'mori', gharjghra 'lucere', gan/gna 'nosse', mais aussi ak/ka 'acuere' et i, aijja 'ire'. Les racines du type CVC, röpandues en indoeuropien, sont omises par une curieuse faute d'impression dans le corps du texte mais figurent dans les corrections en finale de volume. Pour Schleicher, il ne semblait pas y avoir de difference entre des racines de type pad- 'ire' ( = *ped-) et ce que nous appelons aujourd'hui des bases au degr6 z6ro, ainsi vid- 'videre' ou bhug- 'flectere', formes interpretees aujourd'hui comme etant au degre zero pour *ueid- et *bheug-, Les linguistes de cette generation ne s'£taient pas encore debarrasses de l'idee que l'indoeuropöen etait ηέ un moment donne dans le temps, d'oü l'usage d'expressions telles que "les plus anciennes parties de la langue" (Schleicher 1861:286). On sait que cette conception simpliste aura la vie dure puisqu'on la retrouve encore, exprimee d'une autre maniere chez Benveniste (1937:148) qui se proposait "de retrouver le systeme initial". Schleicher, reprenant ainsi la c61ebre th6orie de la repartition des langues en langues isolantes, agglutinantes et flexionnelles qu'on lui attribue gen6ralement, mais qui remonterait plutot ä Guillaume Schlegel (Leroy 1971:25), admettait une periode antörieure ä l'indoeuropien classique; ä cette 6poque, les racines auraient eu une existence autonome
100
GUY JUCQUOIS
dont il subsiste encore des traces en indoeuropeen dans les mots-racines 6ventuellement thematises (Schleicher 1861:288-89). Au vocatif seulement reapparait, dans certains types de mots, la racine pure. Le maintien de cet archaisme au vocatif a ete facilite par le fait que le vocatif est plus proche d'une interjection que d'un mot ordinaire puisqu'il n'entre pas dans le jeu des relations syntaxiques normales (Schleicher 1861:286).
4. F. DE SAUSSURE ET LA THEORIE DE LA RACINE
Ainsi que nous le rappelions en d6butant, F. de Saussure n'a pas, dans ses travaux, etabli une theorie genirale de la racine en indoeuropeen. Non seulement il ne definit nulle part ce qu'il entend par cet element morphologique d'importance, mais en outre et de fa?on tres paradoxale dans son Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europiennes, l'auteur travaille constamment avec cette notion de racine. On sait que la geniale decouverte par de Saussure des phonemes appeles aujourd'hui laryngales reposait entierement sur une analyse phonologique d'elements morphologiques auxquels le Maitre de Geneve assignait une forme et une fonction sans les avoir au prealable definis meme implicitement. Les repercussions de ce travail furent grandes puisque le structuralisme en linguistique generale aussi bien que l'ensemble des conceptions contemporaines sur l'indoeuropeen remontent de fagon directe ou indirecte au Memoire. II subsistait pourtant dans cet ouvrage des lacunes graves et des confusions qu'on ne semble pas, ä ma connaissance, avoir relevees dans la suite. Les deux principales lacunes de Saussure se retrouveront chez son successeur, E. Benveniste, ä propos duquel nous avons eu l'occasion ailleurs d'exposer notre point de vue.4 La premiere lacune consiste en une absence de perspective temporelle ou plutöt dans la presence d'une perspective temporelle ä deux etages seulement, le plus recent etant represente par ce qu'on pourrait appeler l'indoeuropeen commun ou le degre d'evolution de la protolangue juste avant la separation. L'autre serait anterieur ä celui que l'on vient de decrire et correspondrait, dans la pensee de l'auteur, "aux periodes les plus anciennes" (de Saussure 1879:12 note 2) ou ä "l'etat primordial" (1879:137 note 1). On devine sous ces expressions ä la fois trop vagues et trop precises l'embarras de l'auteur ou en tous cas son manque d'intöret pour des d6veloppements historiques qui risqueraient de compromettre le savant iquilibre struc-
LA RACINE EN INDOEUROPEEN
101
tural qu'il vient de construire. L"6tat primordial' ou les 'periodes les plus anciennes' ressemblent fort ä un foure-tout dans lequel on releguerait ce que l'explication structurale laisse en suspens. La seconde lacune est aussi importante que la premiere: l'absence de definition des termes techniques utilises et principalement les termes 'racine' et 'suffixe' employes constamment dans le Memoire sans que l'auteur n'ait cru necessaire de s'arreter, ne serait-ce que dans une note, pour definir ces termes. Force est done au lecteur d'inferer du texte du Memoire des eldments de definition. C'est ce que nous tenterons ici. L'aspect semantique de la racine est completement ndglige par de Saussure, seul le preoccupe l'aspect formel, caracteristique que l'on retrouvera chez Benveniste qui declare vouloir rechercher la structure et qui, en consöquence, nöglige "en principe les questions de 'valeur', d"aspect', etc." (Benveniste 1937:148). Cette absence de definition de la racine a entraine de Saussure dans des confusions dont la principale consiste ä confondre structure morphologique et structure phonologique. En effet, il ne faut pas confondre les lois phonologiques presidant k 1'elaboration des sequences sonores et qui s'appliquent ä tous les morphemes ou parties de morphemes ou jonetions de morphemes et, d'autre part, les lois morphologiques qui regissent la formation et l'usage de chaque categorie de morpheme. Par exemple, le fait que si *e est suivi de deux phonemes consonantiques dans le meme morpheme, le premier de ces morphemes sera une sonante et le second une consonne5, est une loi phonologique de l'indoeuropeen et s'applique ä n'importe quel segment de la chaine sonore. De meme, si Ζ est tout phoneme autre que αχ et a% (respectivement *e, * ö en langage contemporain), chaque racine contient a\ + Ζ (de Saussure 1879:172) est l'application d'une loi phonologique que l'on pourrait formuler de la maniere suivante: la sequence αχ + αϊ est impossible, de meme que αϊ + ö2 ou aa + du moins ä une certaine periode de l'indoeuropeen. Des lors puisque Ζ est tout phoneme autre que αϊ ou α2, il en decoule que tout segment sonore pris ä n'importe quel endroit du discours verifie toujours la loi αϊ + Ζ. La loi enoncee ä la page 172 du Recueil et d'apres laquelle il n'y a pas de "racines termin6es vocaliquement et dont le vocalisme consisterait uniquement dans αϊ" 6 est valable pour tout el6ment morphologique non suivi immediatement de la particule deictique *i ou de la voyelle thematique *ejö. Par contre, quand l'auteur signale qu'un grand nombre de racines sont dissyllabiques, ce qui dans le contexte signifie aussi que d'autres
102
GUY JUCQUOIS
racines sont monosyllabiques, dans ce cas-lä l'auteur emet une loi qui ne concerne que la structure morphologique des racines (de Saussure 1879:174). Toutefois, comme de Saussure ne definit nulle part la racine, ni formellement, ni s6mantiquement, ces confusions restent secondaires. Elles ne deviendront reellement fächeuses que lorsque sera explicit6e la conception de Benveniste sur la racine construite sur le schema C\eCz, conception dejä präsente ä l'etat latent chez de Saussure mais que ce dernier n'a pas mise par ecrit personnellement. 5. LA RACINE DANS LE Grundriss DE K. BRUGMANN
L'etude de Saussure nous a fait faire un bond dans le temps, il nous faut maintenant revenir en arriere et examiner les conceptions de l'auteur de la plus grande synthese en matiere d'indoeuropien, K. Brugmann. Aussi bien dans son Grundriss que dans Γ Abrege, Brugmann ne nous livre que fort peu sa thöorie de la racine en indoeurop6en. Ainsi, c'est en parcourant les paragraphes sur les 'bases radicales' (Brugmann 1905:145) qu'on apprend incidemment que l'auteur ne se prononce pas sur le caractere monosyllabique ou dissyllabique des racines. Brugmann n'a pas repris les denominations de Bopp et Breal de racines verbales et de racines pronominales. II distingue pourtant (1905:298) certains mots qui "sont des elements absolument simples, et ne se laissent decomposer que dans la mesure ou il est possible d'y distinguer divers mouvements articulatoires. ... Mais dans la plupart des cas, en raison de leur identite partielle avec d'autres formes, identit6 portant autant sur les sons que sur la signification, il est possible d'y distinguer ... certains groupes articulatoires dont la partie essentielle est caracteristique du concept qui se retrouve constamment dans toute une categorie de mots." Cette distinction recouvre, au fond, celle qu'avait 6tablie Bopp. Dans le passage cite, l'expression 'partie essentielle' vise certaines modifications formelles possibles de la racine: redoublements, alternances vocaliques ou consonantiques (probleme des 'bases'). A part ces passages dont le moins qu'on puisse dire est qu'ils ne sont pas explicites, Brugmann n'aborde, ni dans son Grundriss, ni dans son Abrege, le probleme de la racine de face. Ainsi, on ne trouve nulle part d'indication, meme sommaire, sur les formes que peuvent revetir les racines. De ce point de vue, on peut affirmer qu'il y a une nette regression par rapport ä de Saussure qui, au travers de lois phonologiques, nous donnait neanmoins des indications ä ce sujet.
LA RACINE EN INDOEUROPEEN
103
Ce silence s'observe, ä l'epoque, ailleurs que chez les neo-grammairiens. R. Meringer, fondateur de la celebre revue Wörter und Sachen, ne souffle mot de la racine dans son petit volume intituli Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft, publi6 ä Leipzig en 1903. On trouve dejä chez Brugmann la conception que "la racine ne represente rien de plus que l'id0e que nous nous formons sur la partie d'un mot indoeurop6en ou les sujets parlants voyaient l'616ment central de la signification" (1905:299). Par opposition avec certains de ses devanciers, on notera chez le celebre n6ogrammairien une perspective dynamique de la diachronie et plus particulierement de l'epoque ä laquelle renvoie l'expression 'indoeuropien'. C'est ainsi qu'on peut admettre, en principe et non pour des cas pris isol6ment, que ce qui nous apparait comme des racines en indoeurop6en a pu exister auparavant en tant que mots. Neanmoins Brugmann semble admettre implicitement qu'il y aurait eu une piriode dans l'histoire de la protolangue durant laquelle la majorit6 des racines aurait έίέ cröee. C'est ce qui resort d'expressions telles que: "que la creation de racines ή"ait jamais completement cesse ..." (1905:299 note 1, les italiques sont de nous). Par la Brugmann rejoindrait des conceptions naives telles que celles que rendent des expressions comme 'stade initial', 'periode primitive', etc. Somme toute, cet auteur se sentant en terrain mouvant preferait s'en tenir ä des considerations tres g0nerales qui contrastent d'ailleurs avec le goüt du detail verifiö qui apparait dans son oeuvre. C'est sans doute dans le meme sens qu'il faut interpreter l'expression: "ein passender Ersatz für Wurzel ist noch zu finden" (1906:8). Ces vues seront defendues egalement par d'autres neogrammairiens tel que Η. Hirt. Cet auteur est encore plus laconique en ce qui concerne la racine que Brugmann. Dans son Indogermanische Grammatik (1927: 236s.), la question de la racine est ä peine abordee pour passer immediatement au probleme des elargissements de racine (Wurzelerweiterung).
6. EN GUISE DE CONCLUSION
II aurait fallu, pour etre complet, analyser egalement les conceptions du linguiste franpais A. Meillet exposees de maniere tres claire dans sa celebre Introduction α Γ etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes (1937:146s.). Cependant, etant donne que, contrairement aux autres linguistes etudies plus haut, Meillet a consacre ä ce theme plusieurs longs
104
GUY JUCQUOIS
passages de son Introduction ... (1937:146-82), il nous a semble preferable de reserver ä cet auteur une courte etude publiee ä part (Jucquois 1972a). Les theories de Benveniste ont fait l'objet d'une critique systematique de notre part (1966, 1970, 1971 et 1972b). Elles sont etrangement independantes de Celles de Meillet qui fut pourtant son Maitre et son predecesseur au College de France. La conception de Benveniste doit au contraire beaucoup aux travaux des linguistes etudies ici et particulierement ä ceux de Saussure qu'il explicite tout en se plagant, peut-etre inconsciemment, sous le modele semitique. Universite de Louvain
NOTES 1
Les citations de l'oeuvre de Bopp sont faites d'apres la traduction frangaise de la Vergleichende Grammatik etablie par M. Breal sur la seconde edition allemande. 2 En italique dans le texte. 3 Les exemples cites sont ceux avec le *s mobile. 4 Jucquois 1966, 1970,1971 et 1972b. 5 A l'exception de Λ et Ο qui peuvent etre suivis d'une seconde sonante. - On n'insistera pas non plus sur les repetitions de memes regies sous des formes differentes ä plusieurs endroits du Memoire ..., en voici ä titre d'illustration quelques exemples: p. 118 Saussure emet les deux regies suivantes: apres α il ne peut y avoir qu'un seul coefficient sonantique et, d'apres le meme principe, il n'y a pas de racine avec */, *u suivi d'une nasale ou d'une liquide suivies ä leur tour d'une consonne, ce qui est reexprime en des termes plus generaux aux pages 172-173: "sauf des cas isoles, si a\ est suivi de deux elements, le premier est toujours une sonante, le second toujours une consonne. Exception. Les sonantes Α et Ο peuvent etre suivies d'une seconde sonante" (p. 172). Regies reprises sous la forme de formules (p. 173): premier type: [* Ζ + ] αϊ + Ζ, oil Zest tout phoneme autre que αϊ et αι. Second type: [χ Ζ +] αϊ + S + C, ou S = sonante et C = consonne, avec l'exception mentionnee plus haut: [* Ζ + ] αϊ + Α (Ο) + 5". Cf. encore une formulation differente de la meme loi ä la p. 9. 6 En italique dans le texte. REFERENCES Benveniste, E. 1937. Origines de la formation des noms en indo-europeen. Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve. Bopp, F. 1866. Grammaire comparee des langues indo-europeennes. Traduction de Μ. Breal. Tome 1. Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale. —. 1868. Grammaire comparee des langues indo-europeennes. Traduction de Μ. Breal. Tome 2. Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale. Brugmann, K. 1905. Abrege de grammaire comparee des langues indo-europeennes. Traduction de J. Bloch, A. Cuny et A. Ernout, sous la direction d'A. Meillet et de R. Gauthiot. Paris: Klincksieck.
LA RACINE EN INDOEUROPEEN
105
—. 1906. Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. 2de ed., vol. 2, tome 1. Strassburg: Trübner. Hirt, H. 1927. Indogermanische Grammatik, 3: Das Nomen. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Jucquois, G. 1966. La structure des racines en indo-europeen envisagee d'un point de vue statistique. Linguistic Research in Belgium, ed. par Y. Lebrun, 57-68. Wetteren (Belgium): Universa. —. 1970. La theorie de la racine en indo-europeen. Linguistique 6.69-102. —. 1971. La theorie de la racine en indo-europeen (suite). Linguistique 7.73-91. —. 1972a. La theorie de la racine chez Antoine Meillet. Museon 85.281-87. —. 1972b. La theorie de la racine en indo-europeen (suite et fin). Linguistique 8.73-103. Leroy, M. 1971. Les grands courants de la linguistique moderne. 2de ed. Bruxelles: Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles. Meillet, A. 1937. Introduction ä l'etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes. Paris: Hachette. Meringer, R. 1903. Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft. Leipzig: G. J. Göschen. Saussure, F. de. 1879. Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes. [Cite d'apres: Recueil des publications scientifiques. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1922.] Schleicher, A. 1861. Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Weimar: Böhlau.
ON
SOME
ACCENT
RULES
OF
PANINI
SUMITRA M. KATRE
A. ON REPLACEMENT MORPHEMES OF han- 'TO KILL, STRIKE'
1. In the section dealing with Kft affixes Pänini sets up OP (3.3.57) which is ruled in after a number of verbal bases under varying conditions from 58 to 87. Of these 76 to 87 deal with the verbal base han- 'to strike, kill, slay' {hank hiriisä-gatyoh II 2) and the special forms generated with this affix. Of particular interest are 76, 77 and 84. They will be discussed in detail here. 2. 3.3.76 reads: hanas ca vadhah which Böhtlingk (1964:122) renders as "Desgleichen von han, wobei vadh- substituirt wird". Renou (1966:235), following a more exact method, translates it as: "(Le suffix 'ap' vaut) apres la racine han- 'tuer' (non pr6c6de de pröverbe, quand il s'agit de l'etat, selon 18 [bhäve] par entrave de 'ghaii') et l'61£ment vadh- (est le substitut de han-, cf. II.4.42 sqq.)." Now as both renderings stand, we have the following procedure for generating the expected form: han+av -*• vadh+ap ->• *vädh-ah 'murder, slaying, killing', since the affix OP being a ρ-// is anudätta (3.1.4 anudättau sup-pitau). 3. The next sütra reads as: mürtau ghanah which, in Renou's translation is: "(Le suffix 'ap' vaut apres la racine han- 'tuer') pour exprimer le sens de 'forme solide, masse', ghan- (6tant le substitut de han-) (;entrave de ighan' 18)." Thus han+ap -* ghan+OP *ghdn-ah. 4. On the other hand 84: parau ghah is rendered by Renou as: "(Le suffixe 'ap' vaut apres la racine han-) precede de priverbe pari (pour designer un instrument, et) gha (est le substitut de han-) (;entrave de 'ghan' 18)" resulting in pari+han+ap ->• pari+gha+ap -> pari-gh-aby 6.1.97 (ato gurte [pararüpam 94, ekah pürva-parayoh 84]). 5. In all these three instances Pänini rules in substitutes for han-: vadhah
108
SUMITRA Μ. KATRE
in 76, ghanab in 77, and ghah in 84. While most commentators and translators agree that the han replacement in 76 is vadh-, in 77 ghan-, in 84 it is gha-l Why this is so is not explained by them. Now the radical substitute vadha is ruled in by 2.4.42-43 for han- in the Optative and Aorist (hano vadha Lin/, Luki ca) and is specifically mentioned as an ao-anta (terminating in short -a-) and not an αο-ιτ (having short a for an ιτ-marker) which would zero itself in operations by 1.3.9 (tasya lopah [it 2]), after serving its purpose indicated by metarules set up by Pänini. In the Aorist form a+han+sic+t han is replaced by vadha: a-\-vadhasic-\-t -*• a-\-vadh0-\-sic-\-t by 6.4.48 (ato lopah [ärdhadhätuke 46]) -> a+vai/A+iT+jic+iT+i, [it being ruled in by 7.2.35 (ärdhadhätukasya^Jit\Jvalädeh) and i t by 7.3.96 (asti-sico*pfkte {fr 93}) -> a-fvadh+ij-\-0+iT+t by 8.2.28 (itα ίτι [lopah 23]) -» a+vadh+i+i+t -> a-vadh-i-t. The operation of 7.2.7 ato haläder laghoh [angasya 6.4.1, neji 4; vibhäsa 7] is blocked by the fact that the -a- of vadha-, though zeroed, functions as present by the principle of sthänivattva (1.1.56: sthänivad ädeso'nal-vidhau) and prevents the operation of vj-ddhi ruled in by 7.2.3 (vada-vraja-halantasyasuacah). Therefore the -a- of vadhais not an ιτ-marker. This is specifically mentioned by Käsikä (1952:000) On 3.3.76 Käsikä reads: hanter dhätor anupasarge bhäve ap-pratyayo bhavati, tat-sarfiniyogena ca vadhädesah, sa ca antodättah; tatra udättanivftti-svarena (8.2.5) udättatvam bhavati. This would involve the following procedure for generating the desired form: han+av ->· vadha-\-ap -• vadh-ah by ato gune 6.1.97. The accent on the final syllable clearly indicates that the unaccented affix OP must have an anga which terminates with an accented syllable. 6. Consider now the following sütra: mürtau ghanah. With aΡ as the operating affix the accent should be on the initial syllable of the verbal base, giving us the undesired form *ghdn-a- but the desired form is oxytone. Like vadha- then, ghanä- as a Aa/i-replacement must be considered as an ao-anta with oxytone accent before the affix ap, and the procedure indicated above for vadhd- will apply to this. Thus by interpreting in all the three substitute-situations the replacement elements as ending in short a the desired forms with correct accent are generated. The oxytone accent has not been explained by Renou under these rules. Böhtlingk has merely given vadha- as the form generated by 3.3.76 in his Wortschatz (1964: *272) with the following note: "Die richtige Betonung vadha- erklärt man dadurch, dass mann nimmt vadha sei zweisilbig. Dann würde der Accent nach 6.1.162 auf die Endsilbe ruhen und vadhä+
SOME ACCENT RULES OF PÄNINI
109
ap ergäbe vadhä-. Die Wurzel ist aber bei Pänini nicht zwei-silbig, sonst würde er die Regel 7.3.35 nicht gegeben haben." However, on 7,3.35 the verbal base vadh- in jani-vadhyos ca is considered by Käsikä as a separate radical ending in a consonant and not identical with the replacement element for han. By 6.2.144, since parighä- is generated with the affix OP, it would have the final accent in the compound, it does not require the operation of 6.1.162. However, for vadhä- and ghanä- this rule is operative and we get the desired forms as indicated earlier. It is clear from this discussion that by not considering the accent rules of Pänini wherever they are applicable one is likely to overlook the niceties and sophistication which have gone into the making of this great work. However, not all verbal replacements ending in -a- need be considered as OD-antas. Thus 7.3.78 rules in piba-, jighra-, dhama-, tistha-, mana-, yaccha-, pasya-, fccha-, siya- and sida- as replacements for pä- 'to drink', ghrä- 'to smell', dhmä- 'to blow', sthä- 'to remain standing', mnä- 'to think', däν- 'to give', dfs- 'to see', /*- 'to go', sad~ 'to decay, wither', and sad- 'to sit down'. Of these replacements the only one where the status of substitute-final -a is in doubt is piba-. If it were considered as an iT-marker, then piba+sap+ti pibO+sap+ti by 1.3.9 leaving pib-\sap+// and by 7.3.84 read with 86 (puganta-laghüpadhasya cd) guna would be induced in the penultimate vowel of pib-, generating the undesirable form *peb-a-ti\ by a paribhäsä quoted by Käsikä on this rule: angaxjtte punarvfttau avidhir nisthitasya the operation of the guna would be blocked; alternatively it is suggested that piba is an ao-anta with udätta accent on the initial syllable (cf. 6.1.189 abhyastänäm ädih [udättah 159]). This would give us pä+sap+ti -» piba+sap-\-ti pib-a-ti by 6.1.97 (ato gurie). In the remaining substitutes enumerated in this sütra with metrically heavy penultimates 7.3.86 does not operate: consequently the final -a of these elements may equally be considered as an ιτ-marker or an ao-anta, both generating the same desired forms.
B. ON THE ACCENTUATION OF COMPOUNDS TERMINATING WITH VERBAL NOUNS IN -Κ/α
7. The general rule for accentuation of compounds framed by Pänini is 6.1.223 samäsasya {antah 220, udättah 159). All other rules enunciated in the second päda of chapter 6 and elsewhere are modifications of this general rule, but even as exceptions to the general operation of this rule, they constitute sub-sections of utsargas and apavädas within this general
110
SUMITRA Μ. KATRE
frame-work. Now since the verbal nouns designated past passive participles are generated by ruling the ni§thä affix Kta which, by 3.1.93, is a member of the class designated kjjt, the accentuation of compounds ending with this formation is governed by the general rule 6.2.139: gati-kärakasjupapadät kit when the compound itself is defined by the cover-term Tatpurusa (123ff.). Since the past passive participle by itself is oxytone (3.1.3 ädyudättas ca [pratyayah 1]), the compound realised also will be oxytone, thus coming within the general rule of operation enunciated at the end of the first päda of chapter 6. However, by 6.2.144 (tha^atha-ghaN-Kta^ac^ap^itra-Känäm [antah 143; udättah 64]) this position is reconfirmed. 8. By 6.2.32: saptaml siddha-suska-pakva-bandhesv akälät [prakftyä pürvapadam 1] the prior member receives the accent proper to it when the second members consist of the expressions siddha~ 'accomplished, effected', suska- 'dried or withered up', pakva- 'cooked', and bandha'formation'. The first three are verbal nouns in -Kta ( = past passive participles): sidh+Ktasid-dhä-; sus-\-Kta -*• sus+kd- by 8.2.51 (susah kah) andpac+Kta- -*• pak-\-vd- by 8.2.52 (paco vah) [both -^nisthä-tahAl] and the prior member stands in relationship to the ulterior member is the seventh triplets ( = locative case). Thus särfikäsye siddhah and kämpilye siddhah are respectively realised as sätfikasya-siddha- and kämpilyäsiddha- 'accomplished or effected in S or K ' ; similarly üke suska- and nidhane suska- generate the compounds ükä-suska- and nidhdna-suska'withered or dried in death'; kumbht-pakva- 'cooked in a pot'; etc. If words signifying 'time' occur as first members of these compounds, the rule does not operate by the constraint a-kälät: thus pürvähne siddhais realised as pürvähna-siddhä-. Similarly 6.2.2 (tatpuruse tulyärthatXtiyä-saptamy-upamänas-Javyaya-dvitiyä-kityäh [prakjrtyä pürvapadam 1]) does not cover cases where the second member is a past passive participle other than those mentioned in 32. 9. When the first member ends in the dative case and the second member in -κ/α, the first retains its original accent by 6.2.45 κte ca [caturthl 43; prakftyä pürvapadam 1]. Thus gobhyo hita- = gö-hita- and gobhyo raksita- = gö-raksita-; similarly asva-raksita-, etc. In the same way 46 rules in the retention of the original accent by the first member: (karmad· häraye^anisthä [prak^tya pürvapadam 1]), generating compounds like srepi-kfta- 'formed into rows', pügä-kfta- 'formed into corporations', when the members constituting the compound are in the same case
SOME ACCENT RULES OF PÄNINI
111
relationship. When they differ, as in the instrumental tatpuru§a srertyä kfta- = sreni-rftd- 'made by rows', the accent shifts to the second member. 10. 6.2.47: ahine dvitiyä [prakftyä pürvapadam 1] rules in the retention of its proper accent by the first member when no separation is signified: kastarh sritah = kastd-sritah 'undergoing pain'; trisakalam patitah = trisakala-patitai} 'fallen in three pieces'; grdmatfi gatabi — grdmagatahi 'gone to the village'; when separation is indicated, compoundfinal accentuation is the result. Α värttika on this rule restricts the domain of this rule by specifying that the past passive participle in the second member should not be preceded by a preverb: sukha-präptd- or sukhäpannd- 'one who has gained happiness', etc. 11. 6.2.48 rules in the retention of its original accent by the first member if it happens to be in the instrumental case and the final member ends in -κta and designates the object ( = passive construction): tftiyä karmarii [prakftyä pürvapadam 1]. Examples are: ahinä hatalj. = ahi-hatah (or according to some dhi-hatah) 'struck by a snake'; nakhena nirbhinnah = nakhd-nirbhinnah 'split asunder or cleft by the nails'; dätrena lünah — ddtra-lünah 'reaped with a scythe'. When the construction is not passive 144 operates: rathena yätah = ratha-yätdh 'travelled by a chariot'. 12. The most important rule in this series then follows: 49: gatir anantarah [prakftyä pürvapadam 1; κte 45; karmani 48]. A word designated by the cover term gati (1.4.60 gatis ca [prädayafj. 58]) retains its original accent as first member before a verbal noun in κ ta when it designates an object ( = passive construction). This rule is a prior exception (purastäd apaväda) to the operation of 144 and generates forms like prd-kj-ta'commenced', prd-hfta- 'struck, beaten', abhy-üd-dhfta- 'taken up', etc. By carrying over ( = anuvftti) of the expression karmarii ('in passive construction') from 48 the domain of this rule is restricted; in the active construction rule 144 operates and where such construction is admissible, the compound-final receives the acute accent: pra-kftdh katam Devadattah—'D. has commenced preparing a mat'. Similarly when the first member retains its case marker: duräd-ägatd- 'come from afar'. 13. This brings us to the consideration of which verbal nouns terminating in -κta are in the active construction. Pänini rules in the active construction (kartari) by 3.4.67 kartari kft where κ$τ is defined by 3.1.93
112
SUMITRA Μ. KATRE
as kft at IN, that is, all non-personal affixes. The personal affixes which constitute the L-substitutes of the ten La-käras (tenses and moods) comprised by the siglum titi by 3.4.78 are then capable of operating both in the active and passive constructions, the latter including the impersonal construction as well, by 69: Lah karmani ca, bhäve ca^jakarmakebhyah: the L-substitutes function in the active and passive constructions (with verbal bases which are transitive) and in the active and impersonal constructions with intransitive verbal bases. By this rule the verb-class is divided into two classes: *sakarmaka (transitive) and akarmaka (intransitive). By 70 Pänini rules in the affixes designated by the cover term KIJTYA (3.1.95-132), κta and those having the significance of the affix KHaL (\tayor eva kftya-Kta-KBaLarthäh [karmani bhäve ca 69]). Thus the affix κ ta operates in the passive (-(-transitive) and impersonal (—transitive) constructions. 71 then extends the domain of the applicability of Kta in the active construction: ädi-karmani Ktah kartari ca when the action is just commencing or incipient. The first moment when an action is initiated is designated ädikarman: pra-kftäh katam Devadattah {kartari) 'D. has just commenced preparing a mat', but prdkftah kato Devadattena (karmarii) or simply pra-kftdm Devadattena {bhäve). Since any action signified by a verbal base ( + or —transitive) has in incipient stage, theoretically all verbal nouns in -κta can, at one stage, when this incipient action is denoted, function in the active construction, a form like pra-kj-tah {karmani) can have, in this incipient stage, an oxytone by 144: pra-kjtäh. In the case of certain verbal bases, however, the -κta ruled in can function in the active construction even when the action designated by them is not incipient {ädikarman); this is defined by 72: gatyartha^j akarmaka-slisa-slii-sthä^äsa-vasa-jana-ruha-jiryatibhyas ca [kartari 67, karmani ca bhäve ca 69]. The following examples make this clear: ä-gatö Devadatto grämam {kartari) but ά-gato Devadattena grämah {karmani) and ä-gatärfi Devadattena {bhäve). In the case of intransitive verbal bases: päri-gläno bhavän {kartari) but pariglänäm bhavatä {bhäve). Similarly with slis: upa-slisto gurum bhavän {kartari), upa-slisto gurur bhavatä {karmani), and upa-slistäm bhavatä {bhäve). The group beginning with slis-, though intransitive and could have easily been covered by the term akarmaka- in the rule, are separately mentioned since with preverbs they function as transitive verbs which would prevent their taking up the impersonal {bhäve) construction. Thus 71 and 72 rule in that all verbal bases operate in the three constructions (viz. kartari 'active', karmani 'passive' and bhäve 'impersonal') under the constraints stipulated
113
SOME ACCENT RULES OF PÄNINI
therein. Consequently the choice of accent will depend upon the presence or absence of these constraints. 14. The option thus presented continues to operate in Rule 61 κte nityärthe [anyatarasyäm
54 pratytyä
pürvapadam
1]:
nitya-prahasitd-
or nitya-prahasita- 'perpetually smiling'. Similarly satata-prahasitd- or satatd-prahasita-. When nitya is not the context 144 operates: muhürtaprahasitd- 'smiling for an instance'. 15. Following the special rule 144, modifying the general rule 139, a number of special rules modifying prior (purastäd apavädä) and other exceptions are enumerated. Thus 145: su^upamänät Ktah [antah 143, udättah 64] rules in forms such as su-kftd-, su-bhuktd-, su-pltä- as ex-
ceptions to 49 above. Similarly in compounds like vfkävaluptdm- = vfkena iva avaluptam; sasena iva plutam = sasa-plutdm and sirfihena iva
vinarditam = sirfiha-vinarditdm the domain of 6.2.48 is restricted. By 146 similarly nomen propria having nominale in -Kta as final members have the compound-final accent: sam-bhutd- = Rämäyaria, etc. The general exception to the operation of this rule is contained in the gaya äcitädi: ά-cita- etc. Following the an-äcitädi gana is the pravfddha
class which is oxytonic without being nomina propria (147). Likewise datta- and sruta-, when forming final members of compounds designating nomina propria expressing benediction, are oxytonic: devä enam deyäsur — Devadattdh; visnur enam srüyät = Visnu-srutdh; on the other hand, however, devaih pälitaht — Deva-pälitdh and similarly Deva-dattd-
'name of Arjuna's conch' are accented according to 48 above. 16. As an exception to the operation of 48, 149 states: itthambhütena kxtam iti ca [\atah 145, antah 143, udättalj, 64] "(The final syllable of the
ulterior member of a compound consisting of a verbal noun in -Kta has the acute accent) also when (the compound) signifies: done by someone who finds himself in that state." Thus suptena pralapitam = suptapralapitdm 'spoken by some-one who finds himself in sleep'; likewise the compounds unmatta-pralapitdm, vipanna-srutdm, pramatta-gitdm, etc. In the same manner gavä kritah = go-kritdh, asva- kritah etc. are excep-
tions to 48. 17. Turning to bahuvrihi compounds which are normally governed by 6.2.1 (bahuvrihau prakftyä pürvapadam) the initial member normally preserves its original accent. By 169: nisthä^upamänäd anyatarasyäm
114
SUMITRA Μ. KATRE
[mukham 167, antah 143, udättalι 64] in a Bahuvrlhi compound the final syllable of the ulterior member mukha has the acute accent concurrently (with that ruled in by 110) when the prior member is a verbal noun in -κta or an instrument of comparison. 110 reads: nisthä^Jupasargapürvam anyatarasyäm [antah 93, udättafi 64]. Thus reading 110 and 169 together, in an expression like praksälita-mukhah = praksälitam mukham yena/yasya vä we have the following variants: a) praksälita-mukhäh (169); b) praksälitä-mukhah (110); präksälita-mukhah (1,49). 18. As an exception to 6.2.1 we have, in Bahuvrihi compounds, the final syllable of an ulterior member receiving the acute accent when it is a verbal noun in -κta (except when it is kfta-, mita or pratipanna-) when the prior member is one indicative of (a) the name of a species other than one which indicates a coverlet, (b) time and (c) the word-class beginning with sukha- 6.2.170 (jäti-käla-sukhädibhyo' näcchädanät κ to' kfta-mita-pratipannah). Examples are: a) särahga-jagdhä- = särango jagdho yena 'one who has eaten an antelope', paländu-bhaksitä- 'one who has eaten onions', etc. b) mäsa-jätd- 'born a month ago', samvatsarajätä- 'born a year ago', etc.; c) sukha-jätä- 'happy' = jätam sukham yasya, the word order being ruled in by 2.2.37 (vähitagny-ädisu). When a coverlet or mantle is indicated, by exclusion (anäcchädanät), västracchana- and väsana-cchanna- come under the domain of 6.2.1. Similarly kundd-kfta- = kftah kundah yena, kundämita- and kundd-pratipanna-. When jäta- 'born' is the final member of a Bahuvrihi compound, the compound-final udätta is ruled in optionally under the constraints enumerated in 170: (171 vä jäte) whereby both 1 and 171 operate concurrently: a) ddnta-jäta- or danta-jätd- 'one whose teeth have grown'; b) mäsa-jätah or mäsa-jätdh 'born a month back'; c) sukhd-jätabt or sukha-jätdh = jätarfi sukham yasya. 19. One particular instance deserves final mention here. By 6.2.116 naiio jara-mara-mitra-mftäh [111 uttarapadädih, 64 udättah] the initial syllable of the final member of a Bahuvrihi receives the acute accent after the privative particle «on. Only the last of the four words indicated in this rule is a verbal noun in -κta: τηχίά- 'dead' which generates a-mfta'immortal' = +avidyamänam mftam asmin. This is a prior exception to the operation of 172 (nan-subhyäm) which rules in a compound-final accent in such Bahuvrihis. University of Texas
SOME ACCENT RULES OF PÄNIN1
115
REFERENCES Böhtlingk, Otto. 1964. Pänini's Grammatik (reprint of 1887 edition). Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Renou, Louis. 1966. La grammaire de Pänini. 2 volumes. Paris: Ecole Frangaise d'Extreme Orient. Vamana and Jayaditya. 1952. Käsikä, ed. by Pandit Srisobhita Mishra (Kashi Sanskrit Series, vol. 37).
SOME REMARKS ON RECONSTRUCTED GERMANIC GEORGE S. LANE
In recent years several scholars have been pursuing with great vigor the reconstruction of various 'stages' in prehistoric Germanic.1 Their efforts have for the most part been of extreme value. However, there has been running through all of them a current of uncertainty regarding the most acceptable terminology to apply to these various prehistoric stages. On one point most of them agree, namely, that Proto-Germanic should be considered as covering a period of time and can be divided into different stages according to the presumed chronology of various changes before the distinctions begin to arise which separate Germanic into definite dialect groupings. For those of us who were raised for the most part on 'neogrammarian' theory and practice, this notion of Proto- (earlier, Primitive) Germanic causes a certain uneasiness. We were taught that a proto-language was a set of hypothetical linguistic features which could be reconstructed by the comparative method; i.e., it was a set of answers to certain equations made between the known forms, phonological or morphological, in attested related languages. As such one could vouch only for its accuracy within the limits of available evidence. Additional evidence might cause radical revision of the reconstruction. The consideration that one was dealing with a real language was hardly pertinent. It would seem then that by this definition, Proto-Germanic would correspond to the final stage of what is called Proto-Germanic by Lehmann and by Antonsen, or to the second stage of van Coetsem (which he calls 'Gemeingermanisch') even though all these are somewhat differently defined. I realize that what I am here saying lays me open to being called, disparagingly perhaps, 'neogrammarian' or even 'Schleicherian'. I am quite willing, however, to keep company with our forebears in the discipline even if they date from a century ago, if it will help us maintain their strictness of methodology and at the same time allow us to up-date some of the conceptions about the nature of the results of our reconstruction.
118
GEORGE S. LANE
It would seem to me that any other definition of a protolanguage brings us dangerously near areas of hazy speculation about the state of that language at any one time before this point of reconstruction - as indeed it already has. Witness the disagreements on the various phases of Pre-Germanic (as I will still call it) or (as Professors Lehmann and Antonsen call it) 'the stages of Proto-Germanic'. The danger which I find inherent in speaking of 'stages' of a protolanguage is that we lose some of the strictness of the comparative method. To be sure, and I realize it full well, the resultant statement of the relationship between cognate languages appears to be a 'family tree'. However, as Leonard Bloomfield has said, that is merely a picture of our method, but it is the only possible method we possess for reconstruction.2 I am not particularly worried about the fact that such a definition of Proto-Germanic must relegate the entire period of development, from Proto-Indo-European on down, to a basket of unfinished business called Pre-Germanic. If we had some branch of Indo-European which we could clearly demonstrate to be more closely related to Proto-Germanic than to any of the other protoforms of Indo-European, then and only then would we be able to reconstruct with some degree of accuracy a form of language postdating Proto-Indo-European but antedating Proto-Germanic. As it is, our chronological sequence of events preceding ProtoGermanic, thus defined, is hazy and subject to dispute. In general the main characteristics of Proto-Germanic thus conceived are well known. They are so well known in fact that it is difficult to separate those features which are deduced from the comparison of the attested languages themselves from those which are deduced from our notion of the parent Proto-Indo-European itself. We should however, I believe, for the sake of strictness of methodology, be able to distinguish how much of our reconstruction is directed 'backward' from that which is directed 'forward', so to speak. I think we might be surprised at how little we can conclude from a comparison of the languages themselves, especially from the phonological point of view. Let us try. We would, I believe, end up with the following system of vowels in accented syllables at least: (short) je, ο, a, i, u/, (long) je, ö, ä, l, üj. This, to be sure, doesn't look too much different from the system found in our handbooks since the '90's. But that appearance is deceiving. The question of the phonemic identity of [o] and [«] could hardly arise and certainly the same vexed question concerning [e] and [/] would be unthinkable. As for the long vowels, we know of course at present by etymology that jäj and in some instances jij and jüj are of secondary
REMARKS ON RECONSTRUCTED GERMANIC
119
origin and were probably nasalized vowels in Proto-Germanic since they result from the lengthening of Pre-Germanic ja, i, uj accompanying the loss of a nasal before voiceless velar fricatives. But from the point of view of reconstruction by the comparative method this would be extremely difficult to demonstrate. Only in the instance of [£] might it be suspected, due to the fact that we find that its reflex in Old English ( f ö n , pöhte) has fallen together with 'West Germanic' ä ( < PGmc. e) before nasals (möna, mönad, nömon, etc.) On the other hand I doubt that PGmc [£] and [%] could be deduced even by so-called 'internal' reconstruction, e.g., OSax. thihan beside pple gethungan, OE peon, but pret. pi. pungon, pple pungen, or even in the instance of Goth, pühta, pühts beside pugkjan, etc. We must keep in mind that we would know next to nothing about vowel gradation. Likewise I am not at all sure what we would do about 'e 2 '. I am inclined to think however that it would not be reconstructed, simply because it is not found in Gothic. Besides, all discussion about e2 even today involves us in speculation about conditioned developments from Proto-Indo-European. I suspect that where e2 appears in North and West Germanic it would be, as indeed it is still today, a mere subject of controversy. As to diphthongs, clearly jai, au, euj would have to be reconstructed, but not jei/. I am quite sure our conception of vowel gradation would never induce us to separate the PGmc. /f/'s of such an origin from all the rest. As regards consonants, a series of voiceless fricatives //, p, x/ and the sibilant /si would be clearly indicated, but whether or not both voiced fricatives and voiced stops would be reconstructed I am not sure; possibly not, if for no other reason than the difficulty of reconciling the North and West Germanic stops and fricatives with the Gothic system not a good reason, to be sure. It is difficult to place oneself in a position of sufficient ignorance. Certainly the voiced jzj would be reconstructed (as indeed it must), and jr, I, m, y, wj would no doubt be consonant phonemes without any hint of original variation with vocalic allophones - even /y/ and /w/ would, in my opinion, have no conceivable relationship to /// or /«/ (except of course phonetically, which is of no importance here). As for vowels of final syllables, we would find ourselves in a highly speculative area. It does no good to say that short e and short a are lost in open final syllable at the end of the Pre-Germanic period and are therefore not to be assumed. How could they be assumed when, in the
120
GEORGE S. LANE
positions where they are lost, there is no comparative evidence for their ever having existed? For i and u we would be left with a puzzling set of correspondences for the reconstruction of which our best evidence would appear to be Gothic and Old High German, possibly at times Old Saxon, and less often Old English and Old Icelandic. In all probability final u after short syllables would be assumed on the basis of the equation Gothic sunus, OHG, OSax. OE sunu, and possibly after long ones as well on the basis of Gothic handus: Olcel. hgnd in spite of O H G hant, etc. But the umlaut of a > ρ in Old Icelandic might prove a treacherous piece of evidence. What about Goth, landa: Olcel. iQnd (OHG lant, etc.) ? The final decision would depend on the interpretation of Runic forms: nom. waruR, acc. magu, etc. As would certainly the questions about final /, e.g. Runic -gastiR, paliR, etc., for here we would be without Gothic evidence entirely. The only other basis for judgment would be, of course, its preservation after short syllables in West Germanic, OHG wini, etc. Still more difficult would be a decision about protected final a, and this in spite of Runic -aR, abundant as it is, since it is nowhere else preserved, and I doubt very much if Finnish borrowings in -as (kuningas, etc.) would be brought to bear on the problem. In most instances, in fact, neither the Runic inscriptions nor the Finnish borrowings from Germanic would be of great assistance to us. Their interpretation as evidence would be most difficult without knowledge of their Indo-European antecedents as most certainly would be that of Germanic names in Latin inscriptions. What indeed could one make out of such forms as VATVIMS, AFLIMS, SAITCHAMIM(I)S, etc., if one could not speculate about the Indo-European originals ? With regard to original (that is, Proto-Germanic) long vowels and diphthongs, I fear no valid conclusions could result. Remember of course that, except for s and r, we would have no knowledge of prehistoric final consonants, not even n, and no inkling of a possible distinction between bimoric and trimoric vowels could be had. Heaven knows we still have enough confusion and disagreement as it is in this area of laws of finals. As to accent position, another of the features regularly invoked in discussing Proto-Germanic, the conclusion would probably be drawn that it did indeed fall on the initial (or radical) syllable, but the evidence would be simply on the basis of the accent in the attested languages themselves and the consequent later reduction of vowels in medial and final syllables. The evidence from the Germanic consonant
REMARKS ON RECONSTRUCTED GERMANIC
121
mutation would, of course, not enter in, since we would ignore it completely. From the above summary sketch, it is evident that our picture of Proto-Germanic phonology thus arrived at would be sketchy indeed much more sketchy and, in most respects, less accurate than is that of Proto-Indo-European (or at least, so we hope!). How can that be? The answer is simple. The Germanic languages are too similar and are all attested from too near the same date. For Proto-Indo-European we have a great variety of widely divergent forms frequently with chronological differences of 2000 or even 2500 years between them. To be sure, in the above discussion I have been concerned only with reconstruction 'backward' as I called it, not with reconstruction 'forward', that is, I have tried to assume that 1 knew nothing about reconstructed Indo-European which could be brought to bear on the shape of Proto-Germanic, or about anything that happened in Pre-Germanic times. It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to make use of this evidence. When we do, we discover at once that many of our notions about ProtoGermanic phonology, particularly as regards the consonant phonemes, are based on our Indo-European reconstructions and the subsequent mergers in Pre-Germanic times, especially as they relate to accent. In this area we are of course entirely dependent on reconstructed ProtoIndo-European. The same thing is true when we consider the reconstruction of vowels in final syllables. There could be no 'laws of finals' in Germanic without reconstruction of the parent language any more than there are laws of finals in Proto-Indo-European itself, except through the most hazy sort of internal reconstruction. As we have seen, it was only in the instance of the vowels of tonic syllables that we were perhaps able to fare moderately well without comparison with Proto-IndoEuropean. A conception of mergers and splits of the PIE phonemes would not have changed our PGmc. reconstruction here much, only perhaps in clearing up the matter of the relationship of [o] and [u], but not certainly in that of [e] and [/]. I have, I know, presented nothing new in the above discussion. However, if I have in any way helped distinguish what sorts of comparison go into our reconstruction of a prehistoric state of language, I hope it has been worthwhile. I have dealt with Germanic, since the discussions which provoked my remarks were concerned with that language group, but I think what I have said can apply equally well to other branches of Indo-European. To be sure, in the instance of Greek or of Indo-Iranian, our reconstruction 'backward' would leave less to be concluded from
122
GEORGE S. LANE
reconstructed PIE itself, except of course in the instance of the vowel system of Proto-Indo-Iranian. The reason for this is obvious: these languages are closer chronologically to PIE than are the Germanic dialects. In summation then, I hope I have made clear my reasons for wanting to keep 'proto-' clearly defined as one 'stage', and one stage only, in the reconstruction of the prehistoric stages of a language, and that stage should be, to my mind, the point at which all our evidence converges, whether it be that of the descendant languages themselves, in this instance the attested Germanic languages, or the evidence adduced through the comparison of these languages with other more distantly related ones, or the reconstruction based on them, in this instance the other IndoEuropean languages or reconstructed Proto-Indo-European itself. This does not mean that I do not find the attempts that have been made to distinguish various stages of reconstruction of the greatest importance. I do. They are of extreme value in helping us make lucid statements about the chronology of the changes in prehistoric Germanic. However, I shall feel much more comfortable if I may continue to speak of them as stages of Pre-Germanic development, not of Proto-Germanic. University of North Carolina
NOTES 1
F. van Coetsem, Das System der starken Verba und die Periodisierung im älteren Germanischen (Amsterdam, 1956); "Zur Entwicklung der germanischen Grundsprache", in Kurzer Grundriss der germanischen Philologie bis 1500 (Berlin, 1970); W. P. Lehmann, "A definition of Proto-Germanic", Language 37.67-74; Ε. Η. Antonsen, "On defining stages in prehistoric Germanic", Language 41.19-36. The last named article is extremely valuable for its copious bibliographical references. 2 Language (New York 1933), 318.
CLAUSES, P A R A L L E L I S M , W O R D ORDER, A N D PARTICLES IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL A N D ISTHMUS N A H U A T HOWARD W. LAW
The following study is offered in the same spirit as Archibald A. Hill offered his Eskimo and Latin sketches (Hill 1958:419-82), i.e. that "he knows not England who only England knows" (418). Important linguistic features such as linking, juxtaposition, conjoining and order of syntactic elements have repeatedly been described for English by Hill and others. The presentation of the details of these features for still another language - Nahua of Mexico in this instance - is intended to extend further this discussion. Recently interest in language universals has focused attention on these same features. By treating data from both Classical Nahuatl and a contemporary Nahuat dialect, Isthmus Nahuat (Veracruz, Mexico), a comparative-historical dimension is also provided. The description of the syntax 1 of Classical Nahuatl has not been extensively treated by linguists and others interested in the language of the Aztecs at the time of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico.2 One of the most recent descriptions is the brief, two and one-half pages, treatment by Stanley Newman (1967). Newman describes the syntax of Classical Nahuatl as consisting of nonverbal and verbal utterance types. Sentences are described as "an utterance containing a verb" (197). Nonverbal utterances consist of "a noun in the vocative", "a single particle", or "morphemes or words joined in a copular relationship". Examples of the later are: ni-tla-ka Ί am a man', and nakatl in i-tlacual cuawtli 'meat is the food of the eagle'. Verbal utterances consist of minimal simple sentences, "an independent clause expressed by a single verb"; compound sentences, "two or more independent sentences closely linked"; and complex sentences, "one or more dependent clauses in addition to the independent clause or clauses" 197). (Introducer particles frequently mark the status of the following clause
124
HOWARD W. LAW
They introduce independent clauses and subordinate clauses, and occur in compounded forms and syntactic sequences. "Juxtaposed clauses might be implicitly independent or dependent" appearing without any formal indication of status (198). The sentence consisted of a predicate as its sole obligatory component. "The substantive, functioning as a subject or object, was a optional unit of sentence structure." (198) Predicates or substantives might be single words or phrases. "The words of an expanded unit were linked either in a parallel construction or in a complex construction made up of a nuclear term with its modifying satellites." (198) "Parallel predicative constructions, particularly those composed of a redundant sequence of verbs with similar meanings, were a favorite stylistic device of Classical Nahuatl. ... In addition to parallel linkages, the predicate was also expanded by subsidiary modifying words and by complementing words or phrases. Innumerable particles and particle combinations functioned as adverbs of time, place and manner. ... Another form of adverbial modifier was composed of a noun, usually a noun having a qualitative reference, followed by the particle ik." (198) "Although word order was flexible, a subject substantive usually followed the predicate verb and preceded an object substantive: kicuito in askatl in tlaolli 'the ant came to take the maize kernel', literally, 'it-came-to-take-it the ant the maize kernel'." (199) Of the unique or at least unusual features briefly treated by Newman, the following five are elaborated and illustrated in this paper: (1) copulative constructions, (2) juxtaposed or non-verbal clause constructions, (3) parallelism, (4) word order, and (5) particle usage. A second dimension of description will present a comparison of these features in Classical Nahuatl and a present-day dialect.
1. COPULATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS
Newman's first type of copulative construction (above), i.e. the combination of a subject pronoun prefixed to a noun, should be treated as one type of word, a verbal subtype, manifesting the predicate function of a clause construction and therefore a part of the morphological description. 3 Newman's second type of copulative construction is treated in this paper in the section on juxtaposed constructions. A third type of construction which seems truly copulative in Classical
CLAUSES ETC. IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL AND ISTHMUS NAHUAT
125
Nahuatl is one containing ca, catca or ie, or a variant of one of these. Examples are given here with their text sources indicated. Numerous others occur in the many published texts. (1) ie: yn ie vecauh 'in ancient times' [lit. 'which was a long time ago'] (Sahagun's Florentine Codex 1-001-05) auh in quenamique iezque in jpan tlacatia 'and how they will be who were born upon it' (Sahagun's Florentine Codex IV-001-07) auh in y tonalamatl oc cenca ie melaoac ic motocaiotia naoallotl 'and this book of days is more correctly called sorcery' (Sahagun's Florentine Codex IV-001-08) (2) catca: ςαη tlacatl catca 'just a man' [lit. 'just a man he was'] (Sahagun's Florentine Codex 1-001-07) xiuhtotonacoche catca 'he had an ear pendant of cotinga feathers' [lit. 'cotinga ear pendant there was'] (Sahagun's Florentine Codex 1-001-14) yn itoca catca opuchtli 'whose name was Opuchtli' (Sahagun's Florentine Codex 1-016-05) (3) ca: vctli vunca ca 'there was wine therein' (Sahagun's Florentine Codex 1-022-19) ca cenca vey tlaioalli 'very great was the darkness' (Sahagun's Florentine Codex 1-027-06) ςαη mozeltzin momactzinco ca yn jxqujch ittallo, yn amo ittalo 'In thy hand alone are all things visible [and] invisible' (Sahagun's Florentine Codex 1-034-40) As Garibay (82) says, there doesn't exist in Nahuatl a verb that is equivalent to the so-called substantive verb ser 'to be' in Spanish. This is not an uncommon feature of American Indian languages. The verbs ca, catca and yez are sometimes compared, according to Garibay, to such a copulative verb in Indo-European languages, but more probably they signify different aspects of 'be in', 'exist', or 'result in'. It is not in any case a simple reference to a copula function, but marks an external realization, result, persistence of action (i.e. progressive tense in IndoEuropean languages) or as a combining form with two verb roots. In the above examples instances can also be seen of attribution, complementation or simply a comment. The copulative clause construction consists of the Copulative Predicate manifested by a copulative verb plus at least one other tagmeme4 other than an Introducer Tagmeme (for Dependent Copulative Clauses);
126
HOWARD W. LAW
in fact, this is both the diagnostic feature of a copulative clause and its definition. Dependent Copulative Clauses are introduced by relative pronouns such as in. If no Topic or Subject is manifested by clause elements, the person of the subject of the predicate is indicated by the form of the verb, i.e. on the word level. In the limited sample analyzed the Topic precedes the Predicate and the Subject follows the Predicate. This order might not be verified in a larger sample. In this sample, peripheral tagmemes which preceded were: Manner and Intensive; Temporal and Comment tagmemes followed. An illustrative Copulative Clause occurs in Sahagun's Florentine Codex IV-001-08 and is represented by the following formula: + Intens: Intens +P:v CO p + Com:com + S u b : Dep. Tr. CI. Significant changes have taken place in the Nahuatl language in the centuries following the Spanish Conquest. These will be illustrated from a description of a modern dialect, Isthmus Nahuat, spoken in Mecayapan, Veracruz, Mexico (among other villages)5. No copulative form is used in modern Isthmus Nahuat. Constructions which would have taken the form of the copulative construction in Classical Nahuatl become juxtaposed constructions in Isthmus Nahuat. Examples are: yeh notah. 'he is my father' a?kon motah ? 'who is your father ?' te· motokat? 'what is your name?' inön tagat weyi. 'that man is big' [Cf. inön weyi tagat 'that big man' inön tagawewe 'that big man', or 'that old man'] [Cf. Juan Carmona presidente. 'John Carmona is president.' Presidente Juan Carmona 'President John Carmona'] The form catca (of Classical Nahuatl) means 'perhaps, maybe' in Isthmus Nahuat, as in catka Juan Carmona presidente. 'Perhaps John Carmona is president.', or in yeh motah catka. 'Perhaps he is your father.' Other situations use a form of the verb 'to go' where the copulative occurred in Classical Nahuatl, e.g. [Is. Nah.] yahki yalwa 'It was yesterday' yawi yawipta 'It will be tomorrow' In both examples the verb, yahki or yawi, could be translated by the proper form of the verb 'go' according to the context.
CLAUSES ETC. IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL AND ISTHMUS NAHUAT
127
The formulas for these Isthmus Nahuat clause constructions 6 are: Subj-Eq Clause = +Subj: pro/N + Eq: Ν Top-Corn Clause = 4-Top: pro/N + Com: aj Intr Clause = +P:vmtr + Tem: temp
2. JUXTAPOSED OR NONVERBAL CONSTRUCTIONS
Newman (1967:197) treats nonverbal constructions as consisting of "a noun in the vocative (§7.1.5.2a) or a single particle". A more thorough description of nonverbal constructions would include juxtaposed elements (words or phrases) in a subject-equational or topic-comment relationship. Such a description includes, as the following formulas show, constructions individually described as a single noun, pronoun or particle, and more complex constructions of phrases as well. Examples are given here with their text sources indicated. Numerous others occur in the many published texts. Topic-Equation: inic ce amuxtli (1-001-01) Payna motepatilloticmj motejxiptlatianj
tepan
mixeoanj
(1-001-18)
ixoacalichioale (1-002-06) Tlaloc tlamaczquj (1-002-23) Injc navi amuxtli ytechpa tlatoa in tonalamatl in quititlanja (IV-001-01) Topic-Comment: yn jxaiac centlacochichiltic centlacotliltic (1-003-21) [auh iri[ y tonalamatl oc cence ie melaoac ic motocaiotiz naollotl ca naoalti intech povia (IV-001-08) injn mactlatetl vmei in tonalli in iuhquj itlavilanoan muchioa yn itech povi (IV-002-01) In the above examples and the following formulas, two diagnostic features should be noted: (1) the absence of any verbal element, the predicating function being manifested by a substantive, a particle, or a clause in each instance, and (2) the contrast between a Topic-Equation construction and a Topic-Comment construction, i.e., the equational function is manifested by a substantive; the comment function by a nonsubstantive. The formulas for these construction types are:
128
HOWARD W. LAW
Topic-Equation Clause = + Top: n/pro + Eq: η [A pronoun manifesting the Eq slot is possible, but probably is rare.] Topic-Comment Clause = +Top: N/pro + Com: Com [A Comment phrase consists of either a modifier (word or phrase) or a modifying clause (as in the examples above).]
3. PARALLELISM
Newman (1967:199) cites parallelism as involving nouns in "a type of expanded structure". These nouns "were either linked with i-wan 'and' or were merely juxtaposed", i.e. as morphological compounds of two roots. In a thorough analysis of expanded text material, such a feature of Nahuatl structure is very frequent. Parallel structures are found in at least the following levels: the paragraph, the sentence and the clause. Only the latter two will be discussed here. Sentences in Classical Nahuatl frequently consist of a series of predicates, each predicate consisting of a single verb or a verb phrase. Other sentences consist of predicate-like functions manifested by nouns; these too occur in series or parallels. Such sentences, then, may be analyzed as a series of clauses in parallel. Examples are given here with their text sources indicated. Many others occur in the published texts. Clauses: qujtemoujaia qujpixoaia (1-002-24) quixotlaltiaja qujtzmolinaltiaja qujxoxuvialtiaja quicueponaltiaja quizcaltiaia (1-002-25) moteittitiaia motenextiliaia (1-003-15) chocatinenca tecoioutinenca (1-003-19) quipoloaia qujmotlacalhujaia (IV-001-14) Formulas for parallel clause structures are: Sent / Clauseparallel = + P : VSerial ± Ο : Ν Vserlal =
+
H:v±H:v...±H:v Phrases: naoalli tetzaujtl atlacacemello teixcuepani qujiocoianj in iaouitl iaotecanj iaolatoanj (1-001-07) yn xiuhcoatl in mamalhoaztli (1-001-10)
CLAUSES ETC. IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL AND ISTHMUS NAHUAT
129
in teuhtli tlagolli (1-002-11) in necujtonalli in tlatocaiutl in pillotl in mahuizgotl (1-002-18) vel ipeuhca vel itzin in cemjlhujtlapoalli ynic vmpeuhtiuh otlatocatiuh ioan injc ontlantiuh ce xivitl (1V-001-20) in aquallotl in ayecyotl in tlahuelilocayotl in tlacazolyotl (Tlalocan 96-14) Formulas for parallel noun structures are: Nseriai=
+H:N±H:N...±H:N
Classical Nahuatl syntactic structure seems much richer in parallelism than does Isthmus Nahuat, where predicates are more often linked by a conjunction or some particle. In terms of the traditional concepts of parataxis and hypotaxis (Bloomfield 1933:176f, 185f.), Classical Nahuatl is quite paratactic and Isthmus Nahuat is quite hypotactic, although both exhibit each type of construction to some degree. Although comparable examples of parallelism of clauses are hard to find, the following occurs in the author's field notes : 7 [yehamen] akimamkeh akitiskeh Formulas for parallel clause structures are not significantly different from the ones presented above for classical Nahuatl.
4. WORD ORDER8
Newman (1967:199) states that "although word order was flexible, a subject substantive usually followed the predicate verb and preceded an object substantive". In phrases, "the head noun usually followed its modifying term. ... The sequence of a nuclear term preceding the modifying noun, however, was the normal possessive construction. In this type of syntactic construction a possessed noun or postposition was followed by a noun functioning as the possessor. ... The complementive type of expanded substantive was composed of a nuclear noun followed by a relative clause, usually with the intervening particle in 'the, this'." (199) Examples of the above word orders are given here including some of Newman's (all found on p. 199): Predicate verb plus substantive subject: kicuito in askatl in tlaolli tealtiaia yn pochteca (1-001-12)
130
HOWARD W. LAW
Noun following its modifier: we I a?mo- cualli in cualtin tla-ka ? Possessed noun followed by possessor noun: i-tzacual tonatiuw i-pan kalli jtoca Tezcatlipoca (1-002-09) Noun followed by relative clause: totechiwka-wa-n in o-nemiko? in tla-ltikpak yn cioateteu yn qujnmoteutiaia yn njcan tlaca (1-003-09) It is hard to accept Newman's assertion that word order was flexible. His own subsequent statements give little credence to that, nor does he support it with any illustrative data. Too little study has been made of this subject to be dogmatic, however. A general familiarity with a variety of languages seems to indicate either relatively fixed word order, with any variations predictable in terms of formal features or style choices, or relatively free word order with some formal system of syntactic particles or morphological case markers as indicators of the function of the elements of each construction. Latin ably illustrates the latter as do languages of the Philippines; English seems to be of the former type. There is no case system of the Latin type in Classical Nahuatl. The particles do not function as syntactic markers that would consistently resolve word order problems. One must conclude then that word order in Classical Nahuatl was relatively fixed as Newman indicates for the various phrases he discusses. This fixed word order is found also in other phrase types and in clause-level constructions as well. While it is true that there is no case system of the Latin type in Classical Nahuatl, there were sets of suffixes which governed the use of certain elements in some constructions. Examples of these are most notably those with locative function, e.g. with -pan, -tlan, etc. added to substantives, as in: a·pan 'in the water', tzapoicpalpan 'on seats made of sapota leaves'; notlan 'by me', tepetitlan 'next to the mountain'. It is true that the particles of Classical Nahuatl show some syntactic relationships between the constituents of syntactic constructions. These will be discussed in the following section. However, as stated above, these fall short of specifying completely and precisely the function of the associated elements; so that even free order of phrases or clauses is not allowed. For examples of particle usage see the following section.
CLAUSES ETC. IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL AND ISTHMUS NAHUAT
131
This is not to say that there are no variations from a single arrangement of the elements of a given construction. It is to say that such variations are describable in terms of formal features in the total context, or in terms of style choices (about which we know essentially nothing), or are undescribable due to insufficient knowledge about the relevant area at the present. In a sense, then, the assertion that Classical Nahuatl is characterized by relatively fixed word order is forced on us because of lack of evidence for anything else, or is a dogma or act of faith, if the reader prefers. One thing is clear - more investigation is needed at the present time. The author's work on the modern dialect, Isthmus Nahuat, yielded similar conclusions as to the freedom of word order. What appeared to be free word order was found upon further investigation to be conditioned by some formal linguistic feature in the total context. On one occasion, when the author was investigating the possible freedom of occurrence of the three words: tagat 'a man', siwat 'a woman', and kimaga? 3rd per. subj, 3rd per. obj., 'hit', the three were rearranged in varying ways to see if any other meaning than 'a man hit a woman' would result. When asked why such constructions as siwat kimaga? tagat or siwat tagat kimaga? wouldn't mean 'a woman hit a man', the informant replied simply: 'Because no woman would ever hit a man!' - a cultural fact had overruled a linguistic implication. 9 The further conclusion from this illustrative anecdote is that there is a normal fixed order of subject preceding predicate which alternates with predicate followed by subject with the object, when it occurs, in third position. If this were not true, the question asked the informant would have been misunderstood and elicited a different response. The apparent difference between the following constructions: (1) Trans. CI. = + S : N + P : v + 0 : N (2) Trans. CI. = + P : v + S : N + 0 : N is one of emphasis, i.e. the subject in 1 is made emphatic by front-shifting. Thus, any sequence of nouns and verb ordered N V N would be interpreted as SPO unless extra-systematic conditions (e.g. nonlinguistic cultural elements) determined a different interpretation. The other order, NNV, is statistically extremely rare and would presumably occur under very special conditions requiring such an order (e.g. a close connection between the first Ν of N N V and the same semantic element in a preceding clause). Such a construction would certainly be interpreted as OSP following a rule now derivable from the above data:
132
HOWARD W . LAW
If the subject is syntactically expressed, it will occur following the predicate in unemphatic speech or preceding the predicate in emphatic speech unless special intonational features of pause and length are present. If the object is syntactically expressed, it follows the subject in unemphatic speech or the predicate in emphatic speech unless special intonational features of pause and length are present. If the subject is not expressed in unemphatic speech, it follows the predicate unless special intonation features of pause and length are present. If special intonational features are present, the following orders may occur ( # = junctural features of pause and length): O#PS,
s#O#p, P # O # S
These same rules may be applied to Classical Nahuatl, and, so far as the available data are concerned, they seem to hold. Of course, part of the conditions cannot be obtained (i.e. the intonational features), so any conclusions are incomplete and tentative at this point. 5. NUMBER AND USE OF PARTICLES
A fifth significant feature of Nahuatl is the number and use of particles. Particles are sometimes classified as adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions or postpositions. Newman says (1967:197): "The lexicon of Classical Nahuatl was rich in particles, whose nuances of meaning intrigued the early grammarians (Olmos 1547:98-106; Carochi 1645:493-529). The expressive force of the numerous particles was augmented by the stylistic device of using clusters of them in syntactic combination." Particles participated in only limited derivation and some were reduplicated. They were, however, according to Newman (197) "profusely compounded", two particles with similar meanings often being joined. "Modifications of meaning were conveyed by the compounding of particles: intla-k-ay-ai-k 'if never until now' {intla· 'if', -k elided from ka·, ligature, ay- elided from aya 'not yet', ai-k 'never'). ... The analysis of many derived particles was obscure, particularly the groups of particles which were formerly related and had similar meanings. ... In the great majority of instances the status of the clause was overtly marked by a particle functioning as an introducer. Among the many particles signalizing the independent clause were: aw 'and', axka-n 'now', kil 'it is said that', ma·, affirmative with the imperative form of the verb, ma-ka or ma-kamo·, negative with the imperative, ni-man 'then', san 'only, but',
CLAUSES ETC. IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL AND ISTHMUS NAHUAT
133
ye 'certainly, already'. Some of the subordinating particles which introduced dependent clauses were: inik 'in order that', intia· 'if', intla-ka or intia-kamo- 'if not', Pcua-k 'whenever, at the time that', i-man 'when', i-pampa 'because', ma-nel 'though', okik 'while'. Each of these particles had a wide range of meanings and usages, which were further extended by their frequent occurrence in compounded forms ... and in syntactic sequences, such an san achPton 'nearly', san cue-l 'in a very short time', san ika 'in a short time, presently', san i-pan 'moderately', san mach 'not only that', san sen 'together', san wel achi-k 'almost', san ye 'on the contrary', sa san 'anyhow', sa sankenin 'more or less." (197-8). The use, meaning, or function of many of the particles found in Classical Nahuatl texts is both hard to state in specific occurrences and to generalize in terms of the language as a whole, since many have multiple functions. The most frequent particle and the vaguest in meaning is in. It is the unusual sentence which contains no occurrence of in, yet its function may be only as the determiner of a noun phrase. It also functions as a demonstrative pronoun and a relative pronoun. It is found in such combinations as inic {in + ic) 'for, because', inin (in + in) 'this', inoc (in + oc) 'meanwhile', intech (in + tech) 'in or of them', etc. It can be pluralized: ininme. Other particles demonstrate similar features, but occur less frequently. In support of the above statements regarding the frequency of particle occurrence the author did a study of Book I - The Gods, Florentine Codex, by Fray Bernardino de Sahagün. In this text in occurs with two variants, yn and jn. The total occurrences for in and its variants was 3652 times. The text consisted of approximately 22,000 words with almost 8,000 unique entries. The next most frequent particle was auh, occurring 643 times. This was followed by ic (with variant yc), occurring 363 times, and amo, occurring only 251 times. The following comments about some of the particles in Classical Nahuatl and examples of their use are merely suggestive. In, in addition to the description given above, has been seen by some investigators as principally an expletive, or an emphatic particle. It may also function as a conjunction, for example as a temporal customarily associated with another temporal. 10 auh in oixpanconquetzato 'y cuando fue a parar enfrente' 'and when he went to stop in front' in ayamo tona, in ayamo tlahui 'cuando aun no luce el sol,
134
HOWARD W. LAW
cuando aun no amanace' 'when the sun did not yet shine, when it had not yet dawned' auh in icuac onaci yohualnepantla 'y cuando llego la medianoche' 'when it had become midnight' In may also function as a conditional 'if' although this is usually in association with tla. Examples are: in tla acayac quitta, zan mocuepa 'si a nadie ve, luego se vuelve' 'if he sees no one, then he will return' yehuatl tonatiuh yexquia in meztli Tecuciztecatl, in tla ye achto onhuetzini tleco 'hubiera sido sol la luna Tecuciztecal, si primero se hubiera echado al fuego' 'the sun would have been the moon Tecuciztecal, if he had been thrown into the fire first' The conjunction ic, with its variants inic and iquin, functions in six ways, according to Bright: (1) As a deductive - 'for this, because of this, for this reason' ic cenca chocahua 'por lo cual mucho llora' 'because of this, he cries a lot' niman ye ic totenco quitlalia 'por tanto en nuestros labios se pone' 'because of this, he puts it on our lips' inic necia, inic tazazanilhuiya, inic tlatlaxotiaya 'con esto solia manifestarse, con esto andaba divirtiendo a la gente, con esto acostumbraba hacer cosas de admiration' 'for this reason he appears, for this reason he goes around entertaining the people, for this reason he regularly does remarkable things' (2) As an inferential or consequential - 'thus' ic ye noceppa quitoque in teteo 'asi pues, de nuevo dijeron los dioses' 'thus the gods spoke again' niman ic concalaquique ipan in Quetzalcoatl 'asi pues, luego lo introdujeron ante Quetzalcoatl' 'thus then they were presented before Quetzalcoatl' niman ic ye noceppa ce conic, niman ic ilhuintic 'por tanto, bebio una vez mäs, con lo cual se embriago' 'thus he drank one more time, thus he became drunk' (3) As an enumerative - (Functions as a relator between the members of a series) inic ixpan titlalcua, inic titizo, inic titextlahua, inic ticopaltema,
CLAUSES ETC. IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL AND ISTHMUS NAHUAT
135
auh inic titlamictia 'ante ellos (los dioses) juramos, y nos sangramos, y nos pintamos la cara ritualmente, y ofrecemos incienso, y sacrificamos' 'before them we swear and we bleed and we paint our faces and we offer insence and we sacrifice' iquin ye Tollan, iquin ye Huapalcalco, iquin ye Xuchtlapan, iquin ye Tlamohuanchan ... iquin ye Teutihuacan 'y en Tula, y en Huapalcalco, y en Xuchtlapan, y en Tamoanchan, y en Teotihuacan' 'and in Tula, and in Huapalcalco, and in Xuchtlapan, and in Teotihuacan' (4) As a comparative - 'as if' in yohualtica hueca necia inic tlatlaya 'por la noche aparecia como si ardiera' 'at night it appeared as if it was burning' (5) As a purposive - 'in order to, for' mocencahua in Motecuzomatzin inic tenamiquiz 'convoca Moctezuma para ir al encuentro', 'he summons Moctezuma to go to the meeting' yehuatl on tlazotiz inic tinemizque 'aquel dispondrä para que vivamos' 'that one will arrange for us to live' (6) As a causal - 'because' inic cenca hueI oxoxotlac tlecuilli 'como que mucho en gran manera estaba ardiendo el fogon' 'because the hearth was burning brightly' Garibay (1940:90) indicates that ic is a modal conjunction of many uses including: (1) 'with this, in this way', (2) 'immediately', (3) [as a postposed element] 'with, in connection with, by means of'. Examples from Garibay are: in ic tihuapauhque 'with this we vanished' xochitla icpaqui 'he is happy with the flowers' ihuipil ic contlapacho 'he covered her with his shirt' Later (99) he says that the temporal is expressed with in alone or joined to some temporal adverb such as ic. The time is generally the same as that of the principal clause in which it is customary to express the joining with niman, niman ye, or niman ye ic, for which these conjunctions have the character of temporals although without the correspondence (presumably of time or tense). The following examples are given by Garibay: in icuac onaci yehaulnepantla, niman ye ic quintlamaca
136
HOWARD W. LAW
'When it gets to be midnight, they give them ...' in ye yuhquin ohuelacic yohualnepantla, in muchintin teteo quiyahualotimomanque 'When it got to be midnight, all the gods began to encircle.' in ic quittaya it la tezahuitl, quitoaya 'When they saw the prodigal, they said ...' Garibay (100) also cites the use of ic as a causal, giving the following illustrations: ca yehuatl ic nentlamati in teteo aquin onoc in tlalticpac 'since the gods are sad because there is no one on the earth' amo yecoliztli ... inic cenca huel oxoxotlac tlecuilli 'it's intolerable ... because the hearth burned brightly' According to Bright the conjunctions auh and ihuan are both copulatives, but they have different meanings and uses, ihuan is simply copulative 'and' as in: iamatzon ihuan iamaneapanal, ihuan iamamaxtli 'su tiara de papel, y su es tola de papel, y su maxtle de papel' 'his paper tiara, and his paper stole, and his paper breeches' Auh has an inferential meaning or a consequential meaning sometimes blended with adversity 'well, so it is, thus, and now' or 'but, nevertheless' as in auh in ayac tlato ca ic omoquixti 'pero si nadie dice que robo' 'but no one says that he stole' auh in tla aya quitta'pero si a nadie ve' 'but if he sees no one' Auh differs from ihuan in two other ways: (1) auh occurs with the affective suffix -tzin, i.e. auhtzin, and ihuan never does, and (2) auh occurs very frequently compared to ihuan initially in an utterance. Bright describes the conjunction zan as meaning 'only', 'certainly', or 'just' (in the sense of just having occurred). There are two principal uses: (1) As an emphatic or insistent: auh zan huel motlapalo 'pero por cierto que no se atrevio' 'but certainly he would dare' zan niccahuaquiuh 'por cierto que tengo de llevärmelo' 'certainly I have to take it with me'
CLAUSES ETC. IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL AND ISTHMUS NAHUAT
137
(2) As an adversative 'but': macamo ya oyotica ticnamicacan ... ma zan ihuian calaquiz 'no salgamos a su encuentro, sino que entre en paz' 'we will not go out to your meeting, but (only) enter in peace' Zan also occurs in compound with other particles, either written together or apart. Examples are: zanyuh 'antes, un dia antes' 'before, a day before' zantepan 'despues' 'after' zantequitl 'apenas, no bien' 'barely, unsatisfactorily' zan cue I 'muy en breve' 'very briefly' zan huel achic, zan achiton, zan tepiton 'por poco' 'almost, nearly' za zanquenin 'mäs ο menos' 'more or less' in zan oc 'ahora no hay mäs que' 'now there is only' Fries (1945:30) states that "throughout the history of English there has been an increasing use of function words. ... This increasing use shows itself expecially in the great variety of the 'meanings', in which they appear." Later (31) he says that "what has actually occurred has not been simply a levelling and loss of inflections; it has been a gradual displacing of certain types of inflections - not all - by other devices." In modern Isthmus Nahuat the situation with particle usage is quite different. One obvious feature is the frequent occurrence of Spanish loan particles such aspero 'but', kwando 'when', por 'by, for', porke 'because', ke 'that', este [from Spanish hasta 'until'] 'until, up to', si ' i f . Though many Nah.ua particles have been retained, e.g. the negatives amo, aya, ayi9, ayo, etc., and others such as ikwa? 'when', kan 'where', in 'this', o-mpa 'there', there are others not found in modern speech, e.g. auh 'and', intla 'if', cenca 'very, much', αηοςο 'or'. Certain others are recognizable in a changed form: e.g. ic of Classical Nahuatl becomes, in certain uses in Isthmus Nahuat, iga, and nikan 'here' becomes nigah. Still others in Isthmus Nahuat seem to be innovations, or at least consist of unrecognizable changes. The following are examples of this latter group: po-s 'much, very', is interrogative with yes-no questions, kP quotative, aman 'today', inam 'now', yalwa 'yesterday', wipta 'day after tomorrow', and ha ~ ya 'now, already'. 11 Simpson College
138
HOWARD W. LAW
NOTES 1
The term 'syntax' is used here to mean a section of the grammar dealing with constructions more complex than the word, i.e. in contrast to morphology, which has been rather extensively treated. The following are some of the more important treatments of Classical Nahuatl syntax: Colecciön de gramäticas de la lengua mexicana, Vol. 1: 1457-1673 (Mexico, 1904); Garibay 1940; Newman (in McQuown 1967:17999); Whorf (in Hoijer 1946:367-97). 2 The following quotations from Garibay's Advertencia General are relevant here: "La principal dificultad para el estudio de la lengua nahuatl ... es la falta de escritos en ella, que pueden ser base de su conocimiento. Mientras abundan Gramäticas y estudios parciales (cfr. Bibliografia), faltan textos ο son muy costosos y raros en su edition." '"Mexicano Cläsico' ... aquel en que estän escritos los documentos recogidos ο redactos en el siglo XVI, a raiz de la Conquista, y a mas tardar, hasta mediados del XVII." "Aunque parece increible, no existe aun una gramätica de la lengua escrita con todas las exigencias cientificas ... hay mucho que se debe a mi observation personal, como toda la Sintaxis, acerca de la cual casi nada hay escrito. Tampoco hay un Diccionario completo de la lengua." 3 Newman has apparently been influenced by the English translation in treating this type of construction in the syntax section of his article. For a more appropriate description of this type of construction see H. Law 1966:50. Cf. Whorf 1946:377 for another more satisfactory treatment. Newman seems to have followed Whorf in many other respects. 4 All formulas in this paper are written in notation taken from the theoretical materials of tagmemics published by Kenneth L. Pike, Robert E. Longacre, et al. Extensive bibliographical references are available in Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 3 (1966), 365-94. More recent materials have also been published but are not essential to understanding this description of Nahua structure. The formulas presented are derived from the author's study of approximately 200 clauses from the following textual sources: Sabagun's Florentine Codex, Books 1 and 4, Tlalocan, Vol. 1, Garibay 1940. 5 Published materials on this dialect include: H. Law 1948, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1966, 1971. This dialect shows not only interesting changes from the proto-Nahua period, but also gives evidence of retentions of an earlier period, e.g. the phoneme /t/ instead of /tl/. For a description of this and some kinship relations in Isthmus Nahuat, see Joan Law 1965 and 1969. See also C. F. Voegelin, and Kenneth Hale 1962. For a brief description of the southern Veracruz region before the conquest, see Bernal Diaz del Castillo 1908. 6 Formulas for the Isthmus Nahuat dialect are based on the author's field work and analysis beginning in 1945 under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. 7 The treatment here differs from that in H. Law 1966, Chap. 3. 8 On word order and other syntactic matters, see Robelo 1902. 9 For a comparable treatment of this problem and a similar conclusion, see Whorf 1946:377. 10 In writing this section on the particles, the author has profited from ditto lesson materials prepared by William Bright and given to the author while he was a Visiting Instructor at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1963-65. Many of the examples in this section as well as substantive descriptions have been taken from or adapted from Bright's unpublished materials. 11 See Law 1966, Chap. 5.2.4. Note similar innovations recorded by Whorf for Milpa Alta in Whorf 1946:393.
CLAUSES ETC. IN CLASSICAL NAHUATL AND ISTHMUS NAHUAT
139
REFERENCES Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt. Coleccion de gramäticas de la lengua mexicana, Vol. 1: 1457-1673. 1904. Mexico. Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1908. The true history of the conquest of New Spain, translated by A. P. Maudslay. London: Hakluyt Society. [A later edition entitled, The discovery and conquest of Mexico, edited by E. D. Ross and E. Power, was published in New York in 1928.] Fries, Charles C. 1945. The teaching of English as a second language. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Garibay Κ. A. M. 1940. Llave del Nahuatl. Otumba, Mexico. (2nd ed., 1961.) Hill, Archibald A. 1958. Introduction to linguistic structures. New York: Harcourt Brace. Law, Howard W. 1948. Greeting forms of the Gulf Aztecs. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 4:43-48. —. 1957. Tamakasti, a Gulf Nahuat text. Tlalocan 3:344-60. —. 1958. Morphological structure of Isthmus Nahuat. International Journal of American Linguistics 24:108-29. —. 1961. Linguistic acculturation in Isthmus Nahuat. A William Cameron Townsend, 555-61. Mexico. —. 1966. Obligatory constructions in Isthmus Nahuat grammar. The Hague: Mouton. —·. 1971. Sahagun's Florentine Codex concordance (computerized version), books 1-12, Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on American Indian Cultural Anthropology, University of Chicago Library. Chicago, Illinois. Law, Joan A. 1965. An ethnolinguistic study of natural consanguineal kinship terminology. M. A. Thesis, University of Texas. —. 1969. Nahua affinial kinship: A comparative study. Ethnology 8:1.103-21. Newman, Stanley. 1967. Classical Nahuatl. Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 5: Linguistics, ed. by Norman A. McQuown (Robert Wauchope, General Editor), 179-99. The University of Texas Press. Robelo, Cecilio A. 1902. Estudios gramaticales del idioma Nahuatl, escritos en Frances por Remi Simeon y tracidos, con notas y adiciones. Coleccion de gramäticas de la lengua mexicana, Vol. 2, appendix, 43-53. Sahagün, Fray Bernardino de. 1950. Florentine Codex, General History of the Things of New Spain, translated from the Aztec into English, with notes and illustrations by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. The School of American Research and the University of Utah, Monographs of The School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico [Books 1-12]. Sebeok, Τ. Α., ed. 1966. Current trends in linguistics, Vol. 3. The Hague: Mouton. Simeon, Remi. (See under Robelo, Cecilo A.) Tlalocan. Vols. 1-4. 1944-62. Mexico, D.F.: La Casa de Tlaloc. Voegelin, C. F., and Kenneth Hale. 1962. Typological and comparative grammar of Uto-Aztecan: I (Phonology). International Journal of Linguistics, Memoir 17:1-114. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1946. The Milpa Alta dialect of Aztec. Linguistic Structures of Native America, ed. by Harry Hoijer, 367-97. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Inc. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 6.
A SYNTACTIC CHANGE IN THAI F A N G KUE1 LI
Thai numerals are usually placed before the noun classifiers or measures, but the numeral ηϊη B1 'one' 1 may occupy two positions in a noun phrase, the preclassifier and the postclassifier position. Mary Haas is, as far as I know, the first one to make such a statement about its use in Thai: The position of ηϊη. This word may be placed either before or after the classifier, e.g., phuu chaai ηϊη khon 'one man' or phuu chaai khon ηϊη 'a man'. If placed before, it is a number-word; if placed after, it is a descriptive word. Only ηϊη is used in both ways (Haas and Subhanka 1945:145). Following Haas, Richard B. Noss in his classification of words in Thai considers ηϊη a numeral if it occurs before a classifier, and a demonstrative if after a classifier (Noss 1964:102-3, 109). In generative terms, Warotamasikhadit (1963:81) gives an optional transformation rule: X + Ν + nig + C + Υ -> X + Ν + C + ηϊη -f Y He also supplies a note saying that "ηϊη 'one' is the only member of NU2 that can be shifted after the classifiers." 2 All these statements describe fairly adequately the syntactic behavior of this numeral, but none tries to explain how it has come to behave in this way. The earlier grammars tend to neglect the double usage, such as in F. J. Wershoven 1892:51, where he says, "Die Kardinalzahlen stehen vor dem Substantiv (e.g. noun classifier), ausser ηϊη welche nachsteht." It may not be legitimate to assume that at Wershoven's time the only position which the numeral 'one' could occupy was the postclassifier one, while all other numerals were placed before the classifiers. Nevertheless the postclassifier position can be shown to be the predominant one in Thai. Pallegoix's grammar (1850:60-66) has a chapter on classifiers (e.g. his numeralia) where ηϊη always occupies a postclassifier position, never the preclassifier one, in all of the examples. There may be several hypotheses to explain the peculiar behavior of
142
FANG KUEI LI
this numeral. (1) The original position was the preclassifier one just as in the case of other numerals, and the postclassifier position evolved secondarily. (2) The postclassifier position was original and the preclassifier one came later into use. (3) The numeral ηϊη had originally two positions just as it has in Thai to-day. Several methods may be used to test which of these hypotheses is acceptable.
COMPARATIVE EVIDENCE
We know that the numeral ηϊη is also used in other Tai languages. The most closely related language is Lao. In Guignard 1912 and Roffe 1956 (Luang Prabang dialect), we find only examples of this numeral used after the classifier. There is no explicit statement that it is not used before the classifier.3 In Lungchow, a dialect of the Central Tai group, the numeral 'one' has two forms: ηϊη B2, used alone in counting, and ηϊη Al, used together with a classifier (Lee 1940:264). When used with a classifier, it is placed immediately after the classifier, if there is no noun following; otherwise it is placed after the noun. For example: van ηϊη (measure classifier + one) 'one day' ^uy kin ηϊη (classifier + noun + one) 'one person' tuu ηϊϊΐζ ηϊη (classifier + noun + one) 'one dragon' Thus, the ordering of the elements in a noun phrase in Lungchow is different from the Thai phrase. Thai has the order noun + classifier + ηϊη, while Lungchow has the order classifier + noun + ηϊη. In both cases ηϊη is postclassifier in position whether immediately after the classifier or separated by a noun. All other numerals in Lungchow, as in Thai, are placed before the classifier, thus sooy tuu yuk 'two dragons'. Other languages which use other words for this numeral, such as ^diau (Wu-ming, etc.) or ^ee (Po-ai), also place them after the classifier. Thus the numeral one, whether it is ηϊη or some other word, has definitely an association with the postclassifier position.
DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
The earliest documentary evidence in Thai shows that ηϊη is used in the postclassifier position, while the other numerals are in the preclassifier
A SYNTACTIC CHANGE IN THAI
143
position. For example, on the third side of the Ramakamheng's inscription of the 13th century, we have: 4 saalaasootj ?an (pavilion 4- two + classifier) 'two pavilions' Ian nitj (classifier + one) 'one pavilion' This seems to be the most prevalent usage in many documents, but another example may be cited from a document of 1784, concerning Sino-Siamese relations, where a list of gifts offered to the Chinese Emperor is given.5 Among the tributes offered, we have this entry: phlaai chaatj 1 chaatj
} 2 chaatj phatj chaay 1
It may be translated thus: Male elephant
(classifier) 1 } 2 (classifier)
Female elephant
(classifier) 1
This quite conforms with the prevailing usage. In a document of 1782, a translation of a Chinese document of which the original Chinese version has not been found, we have, among other things, a list of various kinds of satin (Chinese tuari) offered as gifts to the Siamese King. The list as published in 1964 contains the following items (Phraraachasaan ... 1964:13): phree mat; tuan phree kim tuan phree siam tuan phree phian kim tuan phree pe^ srii tuan ruam
2 muan 2 muan 1 muan 1 muan 4 muan 10 muan
The technical names of different kinds of Chinese silk being in doubt, the list may be approximately rendered as follows: Dragon-design satin Brocaded satin Glossy satin Phian(?) brocaded satin White( ?) colored satin Together
2 bolts 2 bolts 1 bolt 1 bolt 4 bolts 10 bolts
144
FANG KTJEI LI
In the published modern version the numeral one is placed before the measure-classifier 'bolt' just as all other numerals, but in the original manuscript in the National Library in Bangkok, the numeral one in the third and the fourth items is placed after the measure-classifier 'bolt'. Perhaps the editor has under pressure from recent usage shifted the position of the numeral one to conform with the other numerals. Semantically, since this is a list of items, the postclassifier numeral one must be equated with the other numerals, and the semantic differentiation according to position, as given by Haas and others, does not operate here. Since the earlier documents show only the postclassifier position as far as we know, and the earlier grammars do not record a preclassifier usage, it seems probable that the preclassifier position is a recent development. Theoretically it is also reasonable to assume that riitj originally occupied only the postclassifier position, and that it is shifted occasionally to the preclassifier position after analogy with the other numerals, rather than to assume that mrj like other numerals occupied the preclassifier position and that it is occasionally shifted to the postclassifier position for some unknown reason. Comparative evidence also shows that other languages do not show a preclassifier position for ni'rj. It seems also probable that the differentiation of meaning, if any, between the two positions is a secondary development occurring after the two positions came to be permitted for riiq. The exact date for the shift in position must wait for definite documentary evidence. If the postclassifier position of mrj is the original one, the unusual position in contrast with other numerals seems to point to the suppletive origin of ηϊη. Its basic meaning must have been something like 'single, only', similar to diau 'single, only, alone' which is used in other languages also as the numeral one. According to speakers of Lao (Vientiane dialect), there is a possible usage such as kiip ni'rj nit} 'only one kip (unit of money)', equivalent in meaning to kiip diau my.6 In instances like these, one may suspect that the original meaning of nit7 is kept. The meaning suggested by Haas for the postclassifier position must be a secondary development, after nv7 had been shifted to the preclassifier position to conform with the other numerals. Thus the preclassifier position is translated by the numeral 'one', and the postclassifier position, still in common use, becomes a de-emphasized form and is translated by the English article 'a'.
University of Hawaii
A SYNTACTIC CHANGE IN THAI
145
NOTES 1
The designation B1 after the quoted form indicates the tone class, but tones will be omitted when they do not contribute to the problem in question. The transcription is mine, and will be used in place of all other transcriptions in quotations from other authors; see F. K. Li 1954. 2 There is no Nu2 in his sample lexicon; all numerals are listed under N u g (p. 35). 3 A. Crisfield also informs me that the Vientiane dialect has no examples of nlij in the preclassifier position, except in rare situations. 4 This inscription has been published several times; for example, in Georges Coedes 1924, and in the 3rd edition published with a Thai title in 1957, which is the one used here. The inscription uses the retroflex η for η in nltj, and shows tone B2, corresponding to the Lungchow form in isolation, rather than B1 as in modern Thai. The modern Thai form has also a pronunciation with tone A2 in unaccented situations in the postclassifier position. 5 I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Department of Fine Arts in Bangkok for sending me among others a microfilm copy of this document, and to the University of Washington for financial support for making my trip possible in the summer of 1967 to examine these manuscripts in the National Library in Bangkok. This document is utilized by Manomaivibool (1970:44, 49). In her note 8 (p. 65-66) she says, "The numeral one in the Siamese version follows the word 'elephant'. The Siamese, whenever they mention the numeral one, place it either in front or after the classifier which it modifies. This prevails also in other documents written during Rama I's reign, e.g. Kotmäi trä säm düang. But in the tributary lists recorded in the Sino-Siamese documents which I read, the numeral one always precedes the classifier." This is contrary to what I find in these documents and I am not sure whether she refers to the printed version or the original manuscripts. 6 Kindness of A. Crisfield who obtained this information for me.
REFERENCES Coedes, George. 1924. Recueil des inscription de Seam, premiere partie. (3rd ed., under Thai title: Prachum sinlaacaarlk, phaak thii 1, caarik krur) sukhoothai. Bangkok: Department of Fine Arts: 1957.) Guignard, T. 1912. Dictionnaire Laotien-Frangais. Haas, Mary R., and Subhanka, R. 1945. Spoken Thai. Li, F. K . 1940. The Tai dialect of Lungchow. —. 1954. Consonant clusters in Tai. Lg. 30.368-79. Manomaivibo 1, Prapin. 1970. A comparative study of Sino-Siamese diplomatic documents 1784 and 1787. Doctoral dissertation. Noss, Richard B. 1964. Thai reference grammar. Pallegoix, J. B. 1850. Grammatica linguae Thai. Bangkok. Phraraachasaan pai miag chin khran krur) Thonburii 1ε"? phraraachasaan krur) chir) mii maa nai rachakaan thii I krurj ratnakoosin. 1964. Roffe, G. Edward, and Thelma W. 1956. Spoken Lao. 2 vols. Warotamasikhadit, Udom. 1963. Thai syntax: An outline. Doctoral dissertation, Univ. of Texas. Wershoven, F. J. 1892. Lehr- und Lesebuch der siamesischen Sprache.
HOW THE COCKTAIL WAS C H R I S T E N E D GORDON M. MESSING
We all know what a cocktail is, some of us all too well. Its queer name, however, has intrigued and baffled several generations of scholars, both professional and amateur. "The cocktail", as that Altmeister of American folkways, H. L. Mencken, confessed ruefully, "to multitudes of foreigners seems to be the greatest of all the contributions of the American way of life to the salvation of humanity, but there remains a good deal of uncertainty about the etymology of its name and even some doubt that the thing itself is of American origin" {The American Language, Supplement 1, p. 256). This is a handsome admission, for Mencken himself had struggled manfully to cut through the thorny conjectures with which he found the path of truth to be cumbered. Yet even if our latest and greatest authority, The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology (1966), like Mencken, dismisses all previous conjectures as unsatisfactory, I think the game is nto yet lost. In fact, I am about to risk a brand-new etymology which, if I may modestly say so, should at least make more sense than any of its predecessors. It would help if we knew more about what ingredients went into the primitive cocktail or Ur-Cocktail. The first dated entry in A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (1938, hereafter, D. A. E.) is from 1806: "A cocktail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters - it is vulgarly called bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion." The first dated entry in the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter, O. E. D.) is a passage from Washington Irving (1809) mentioning "those recondite beverages, cock-tail, stonefence, and sherry cobbler". A recipe of 1833 states that the cocktail is "composed of water, with the addition of rum, gin, or brandy, as one chooses-a third of the spirits to two-thirds of the water; add bitters, and enrich with sugar and nutmeg." It looks as if the prototype of the cocktail may have been less variable than its present-day counterpart.
148
GORDON Μ. MESSING
Mitford Μ. Mathews in A Dictionary
of Americanisms
on
Historical
Principles (1951) defined the word ("origin unknown") as "a well-mixed iced drink, composed of spirituous liquor and various flavoring ingredients, sometimes including bitters", and this is surely a reasonable statement. Incidentally, when the cocktail became internationally renowned, foreigners were often struck by the multiplicity of its components. In French, the word has taken on the secondary meaning of a heterogeneous mixture or medley of things or people. Curiously enough, the French assign this same figurative meaning to the word salad (especially, salade russe or Russian salad). If language operated like mathematics, and things equal to the same thing were equal to each other, we might conclude that a cocktail was a salad, or vice versa, in France at any rate! So much for the drink itself. Before venturing upon my own etymology, 1 should like to pass in review the better known suggestions of the past which are still sometimes revived. Only the other day David Dalby, a specialist on African languages, informed the astonished readers of The New York Times (10 November 1970) that cocktail was one of over eighty Americanisms imported from the Dark Continent, but no details were ever forthcoming. Mencken courteously allowed the seven rival claimants of his day to plead their case {op. cit., p. 257): 1. That the word comes from the French coquetier, an egg-cup, and was first used in New Orleans soon after 1800. 2. That it is derived from coquetel, the name of a mixed drink known in the vicinity of Bordeaux for centuries and introduced to America by French officers during the Revolution. 3. That it descends from cock-ale, a mixture of ale and the essence of a boiled fowl, traced by the Ο. E. D. to about 1648 in English. 4. That its parent was a later cock-ale meaning a mixture of spirits and bitters fed to fighting-cocks in training. 5. That it comes from cock-tailed meaning 'having the tail cocked so that the short stump sticks up like a cock's tail'. 6. That it is a shortened form of cock-tailings, the name of a mixture of tailings from various liquors, thrown together in a common receptacle sold at a low price. 7. That in the days of cock-fighting the spectators used to toast the cock with the most feathers left in its tail after the contest, and the number of ingredients in the drink corresponded with the number of feathers left.
Mencken himself, like the sensible fellow he was, displayed strong scepticism about Nos. 1, 6, and 7. All three sound suspiciously romantic; almost (as the old joke has it) as if their inventors were too full of their
HOW THE COCKTAIL WAS CHRISTENED
149
subject. He turned thumbs down on No. 5 (although, if properly interpreted, it contains a vital clue). This is a poorly-phrased explanation which tries to account for the name not as describing the drink but the drinker: a cocktail, so it follows from No. 5, is a drink which 'cocks your tail', i.e. bucks you up. With Nos. 3 and 4 we are back in the never-never land of picturesque fancy; it is superfluous to point out that Nos. 3 and 4 both require a giant broad-jump over a phonetic abyss to get from cock-ale to cocktail. No. 2 (like No. 1) can be taken as straight out of Baron Münchhausen or Joe Miller until some sobersided scholar comes up with chapter and verse attesting a French coquetier or coquetel in this precise context. (Walter Skeat, the eminent English philologist, was indignantly scornful of those romantic souls who rejected his obvious analysis of good old English beefeater ('one who eats beef') in favor of a mythical French word, buffetier.) Thomas Pyles, in his Words and Ways of American English (1952, p. 132), could offer no solution to the mystery of cocktail. He duly repeated the unholy seven taken over from Mencken, and threw in for lagniappe an equally fishy conjecture of the late Christopher Morley. This was to the effect that a certain unspecified American barman was wont to empty the last drops from his bottles into a separate bottle which held a cork decorated by - guess what! - a cock's feather. An even more deplorable flight of fancy is recorded by Alfred H. Holt in his Phrase Origins (1936), and I pass it along here only in order to touch absolute rock-bottom: "The daughter of King Axolotl VIII of Mexico is said to have invented the mixture; her name was Xochitl or Coctel." (Could we not as easily return the compliment? Something like - 'Pulque is said to have been first served up to Capt. John Smith by King Powhatan's charming daughter, Pocohontas alias Pulquehontas.") "Ingenuity" - it is Skeat again, writing this time to deride those etymologists who pooh-poohed his straightforward derivation of sweetheart from sweet and heart and preferred a more elegant ancestor, the phantom word swetard - "Ingenuity is the sworn foe of true philology." With a fervent 'amen!' to those sentiments, I say it is time to sponge the slate clean. We will therefore in the interest of common sense begin with one simple assumption which will automatically eliminate the first four of Mencken's would-be etymologies: whatever the source of the drink or its designation, cocktail was called just that and nothing else from the outset of its phenomenal career.
150
GORDON Μ. MESSING
At this point, a responsible voice can be heard in booming assent, that of Eric Partridge in his Origins. "Cocktail." he writes, "any creature with tail resembling a cock's, hence a lively cheerful, basically spirituous drink." Although a step in the right direction, this explanation is too vague to be plausible. Nonetheless, it is the most reasonable suggestion to date and peremptorily exorcises all the unhappy ghosts of our previously listed derivations. I do foresee one possible objection to assuming cocktail from the start was cocktail. Early in the 19th century (and Mencken has gleefully documented this phenomenon in The American Language), a wave of prudery washed over our land. The word cock, for good and sufficient reasons, vanished from the American drawing-room and was supplanted by the more innocuous rooster; the earliest citation of the latter word in Richard H. Thornton's An American Glossary (1912) is dated 1809. As a general rule, first citations of words are always later than the phenomena they describe. Could cocktail have drawn its name directly or indirectly from the cock if that fowl could not be mentioned in the presence of the refined without causing cheeks to mantle? To this one could reply in two ways. First, by similar reasoning, the cocktail may have come into being long before its first listed occurrence and prior to any prudish wincing at the indelicate word cock. Second, the cocktail was, we can be fairly sure, not consumed in the drawing-room in those halcyon days; and as a man's drink, to be savored in masculine society, the cocktail would be all the more cherished by its preservation of a good, earthy word outlawed by polite society. A cocktail is and always was a cocktail: so far, so good. But now let us part company with Partridge and turn back to the equine matters underlying Mencken's No. 5. The custom of docking a horse's tail has a long history, and in fact in this sense cocktailed is attested as early as 1769. A Dictionary of Rural Sports cited by the Ο. E. D. states that the tails of hunters and stagecoach horses were generally so shortened; since these animals were not thoroughbreds, it was natural for the term cocktail (originally, a cocktailed horse) to shift into its "modern turf application" (1870), namely, "any horse of racing stamp and qualities, but decidedly not thorough-bred, from a known stain in his parentage". This is the sense which appears in a letter quoted by the Ο. E. D. from Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott: "It is certainly painful to see a race horse in a hackney chaise, but... the wretched cocktail on whom the same task is usually imposed, etc.." This quotation is dated 1808 and
HOW THE COCKTAIL WAS CHRISTENED
151
establishes that cocktail, the nag with a bar sinister, is exactly contemporary with cocktail, the potation. (In passing, I must regretfully close off one false spoor: ride a cockhorse does not belong with cocktail in the latter's horsier contexts. A cock-horse, whatever its origin, was a familiar plaything by 1577.) It is important to emphasize that while cocktailed horses were common enough on our side of the Atlantic, they bore a different nickname in America, and it is quite familiar from Stephen Foster's song, Camptown Races {1850): 'I'll bet my money on de bobtail nag, Somebody bet on de bay. While D. A. E. cannot cite bobtail as a noun earlier than 1845, it finds bobtailed as early as 1796 in Weems' Letters (an allowance is described figuratively as "lean and bobtailed") and bobbed even earlier (1768) in the Washington Diaries ("catched a fox with a bobd tail and cut ears"). To get back to cocktail, the non-thorough-bred, it is scarcely astonishing that the word was occasionally used to describe what the O. E. D. primly qualifies as "a person assuming the position of a gentleman but deficient in thorough, gentlemanly breeding". Nor is it surprising that the Ο. E. D.'s example comes from Thackeray, whose receptive spirit was finely attuned to the various overtones of gentlemanliness: "such a selfish, insolent coxcomb as that, such a cocktail". What a pity that this usage has not survived! How delightful if we could nowadays legitimately characterize some horrid bounder, even when he is all by himself, as a 'cocktail party'! Now we come to the crucial development of cocktail, a final logical step from the twin meanings, "a horse functioning in the role of a thorough-bred but lacking a pedigree"; "a man posing as a gentleman when he is not one". This is, to take one last backward glimpse at the Ο. E. D., "not in good form, low bred", but to our distress the Ο. E. D.'s citation is relatively late: the Pall Mall Gazette in 1888 rebuked those who "breed tame fowls and then blow them away from the end of their guns" as "snobbish and cocktail". Yet in fact, if I may be permitted to explode my long delayed mine, this shift in meaning is much older and went much further. A horse whose tail had been subjected to the indignity of curtailment and whose ancestry was suspect could not fail to be the object of some scorn. That
152
GORDON Μ. MESSING
this scorn found frequent expression, especially in horsy circles, from the time the practice of cocktailing first began, does not seem too daring a presumption. I find considerable support for this theory in Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities. Writing about 1832, Surtees joked about his sportsman hero, Mr. Jorrocks, in this vein: "Frank, hearty, open, generous and hospitable, and with the exception of riding up Fleet Street one Saturday morning with a cock-pheasant's tail sticking out of his red coat-pocket, no one ever saw him do a cocktail action in his life." Here is an even more vivid example from a later passage of the same book: a stranger has been trying to up-stage Mr. Jorrocks, and the latter, who wants to stand up for his proper worth, asks, "You've perhaps heard tell of the Surrey 'unt?" The stranger coolly replies, "cocktail affair, isn't it?" and amplifies his slur by adding, "It's not what we calls a fast-coach." From these two passages we can safely assert that over fifty years prior to the Ο. E. ZX's citation of 1888, sporting gentlemen familiarly used cocktail as an adjective to mean, not just 'in bad form', but more generally 'contemptible, inferior'. I venture to suggest, relying on the evidence of Surtees and the cumulative weight of the related Ο. E. D. references, that this slangy sense of cocktail can without difficulty be pushed back to a date long before 1832, and so why not as early as the end of the eighteenth century ? At this point, may we not utter a faint but still a triumphant cry of 'eureka' ? Here, to my mind, lies our quarry. Let us suppose that cocktail in this readily assimilable slang sense - more or less 'no-good' - passed from England to America in the late 18th century. The propagators in all likelihood would have been sporting types from Britain; in America, as we have seen, lovers of horseflesh favored bobtail over cocktail, and they would not have been aware of the slang sense of the latter term. Now it is a fact that publicans, barkeeps, barflies, and even ordinary drinkers, tend to be conservative in carrying on their respective pursuits. Nothing, then, could be more natural than that some regular customer for straight spirits, or some barman inclined to dispense only straight spirits should, look down his (British?) nose at an unusual new mixed drink and condemn it as a cocktail (short for cocktail drink). If I am right, this momentous snub would have been first administered to the original cocktail around 1800, and it was not recorded for posterity. Alcoholic beverages have often been named from some characteristic, real or fanciful, particularly their presumed potency: a stinger, for example, because it stings; a zombie, because whoever drinks one be-
HOW THE COCKTAIL WAS CHRISTENED
153
haves like a zombie; red-eye for obvious reasons. Some names are even less flattering. In Iceland, the local schnapps used to be proudly called 'black death'; in the old westerns, the barkeep was supposed to say, "Gentlemen, name your poison." A cocktail, then, would be unusual but not unique if it originally meant something like 'no-goodnik'. An intended snub may have ended as an accolade. Cornell University
GOTHIC
aibr
GUSTAV MUST
This Gothic noun has puzzled scholars for a century and a half, and its origin is still obscure. The word is recorded only once - in Matthew 5:23 in Codex Argenteus. The recorded form is the neuter accusative singular, aibr. It is used to express a gift brought to the altar, and may designate either a gift in general or a certain object which was used as a gift in offering. The Greek texts express it with δώρον and the Latin versions render it by munus. Since the same Greek and Latin words are rendered by Goth. giba 'gift, present' in the next verse and elsewhere, aibr is thought to be a synonym of giba. As is generally known, Goth, aibr has no cognates in the Germanic languages. Furthermore, attempts at discovering for it a counterpart in the other Indo-European languages have proved unsuccessful. The patriarch of Germanic philology, Jacob Grimm, already was aware of the uniqueness of the word. Therefore he regarded it as a scribal error and proposed to emend the recorded form, aibr, to *tibr (J. Grimm 1822:63; 1854:36; 1875:32-3; 1878:24). This 'correction' was suggested by OE fiber, -tifer and OHG zebar Opfertier', 'sacrificial animal', which were thought to serve as etymological counterparts of the artificial Goth. *tibr. Although several scholars have objected to it, this ghost word has kept haunting us in Gothic grammars and textbooks. 1 W. Streitberg restored the actually recorded form in the text of his edition of the Gothic Bible, but in its vocabulary (Part II) the concession is still found: "wohl mit J. Grimm in [tibr] zu bessern" (1960:s. v.). But the emendation cannot solve the problem: since the Gothic letters a and t are clearly dissimilar in form, it is inconceivable that an error of writing a for t could have been made. The scholars who have looked for a solution other than emendation have taken for granted that Goth, aibr should be of Indo-European origin, and have taken pains to reconstruct an Indo-European protoform for
156
GUSTAV MUST
it. 2 Theodor von Grienberger (1900:12f.) derived aibr from *aiw-brawhich he thought to have meant 'das gesetzmässig Dargebrachte'; Francis A. Wood (1906:39) connected aibr with Sanskrit ibhya-s 'rieh'; C. C. Uhlenbeck (1906:246f.) rejected it. The search for an etymology for aibr has even resulted in so peculiar a hypothesis as that proposed by A. C. Bouman (1951:238f.): from PIE *oibh-, cf. Gk. οϊφω, Skt. yäbhati, etc., he derived an *oi(e)bh-ro-m and gave it the meaning 'phallus'. More recently, P. G. Scardigli (1961:138f.) conjectured that the original form of aibr was *taibr and that in combination with the article, pata - as pata taibr - it was dissimilated to aibr. This hypothesis not only lacks sufficient support by evidence but, without solving the old problem, raises a new one - that of another ghost word, *taibr. Ernst A. Ebbinghaus (1963:718-21) attempted to explain the origin of the troublesome word by reconstructing a PIE *aibh-ro- as its protoform containing the following elements: a PIE *ai- 'to give, allot' as the base plus the rare determinative -bh-, and the suffix -ro-. He assumed that the meaning of this combination may have been 'share, portion, gift'. The reconstruction seems appealing; however, the difficulty with aibr lies not in reconstructing a hypothetical protoform, according to phonological rules, but in finding evidence for the actual existence of a combination of elements from which it is assumed to originate. Since we cannot arrive at a clear solution of the problem either by 'correcting' a supposed error or finding an Indo-European etymology for the attested form, we have no choice but to assume that Goth, aibr is a loanword. Considering the possibility of aibr being a borrowing, we must remember that in loanwords, and in foreign words and names, the Gothic digraph ai renders Gk. ε and Lat. e as well as the spellings Gk. ai and Lat. ae, e.g. in Goth, gaiainna from Gk. γεέννα; Goth, haibraius cf. Lat. hebraeus, Gk. εβραίος. If a word occurring in the Gothic biblical text is suspected to be a loanword, two lexical possibilities should be taken into consideration: it may have been received as an item of the secular vocabulary, or it may have been adopted as biblical term into the Gothic translation of the Bible. As is seen from its context, aibr belongs to the terminology of gifts given as offerings. Its Greek and Latin textual counterparts, δώρον and munus, suggest the meaning of 'gift, present' in general; but no word which has this meaning and is phonologically suitable for being the source of aibr is known in the neighboring languages of Gothic. Likewise Greek or Hebrew biblical vocabulary does not offer an appropriate term within
GOTHIC
aibr
157
the same semantic sphere. However, it is also possible that aibr denoted a certain concrete object which was customarily used for offering. Weighing this possibility, the present writer has considered, among others, the Latin word ebur 'ivory'. Since ivory was regarded as a symbol of incorruptibility and moral strength, it was used as a material for religious objects and precious decorations in the churches in the early Middle Ages (as well as in the non-Christian ancient world before), and ivory objects were presented to the church. However, things made of ivory were luxury articles and too expensive to be commonly used as gifts of offering. But an object which has always served as a customary gift at the offering in the church or temple is money, namely in its older form, the coin. In the New Testament there are passages telling about coins given as gifts by the Jews in the temple at Jesus Christ's time. We can recall such an example as the passage about the poor widow's mite, Mark 12:41ff. (which describes a scene of casting coins into the treasury). It is interesting to note that in its parallel passage, Luke 21: Iff., the expression with the general meaning 'gifts' is used instead of specifying them as coins - people were casting 'their gifts' (Gk. δώρα αυτών, Lat. munera sua) into the treasury. (Neither the Marcan nor the Lucan passage has survived in the Gothic translation.) Among the ancient Jewish coins there is a series of coins with a legend that contains the Hebrew word b,br. In my opinion, this term is the source of the word aibr used in the Gothic Bible. The following will present my explanation of the connection of these words. The Jewish coinage proper began with the coin issued by the ruler and high priest John Hyrcanus who reigned from ca. 135 to 104 B.C. He was a son of Simon, the high priest and ruler who won the independence of the Jews from the Syrians and with whom the Hasmonean dynasty began (Madden 1967:53f.; Kanael 1950-51:174). The coins were minted in the period of independence in which commerce flourished and Jewish coins gained recognition also in other countries (Romanoff 1944:27). We do not know how long these coins remained in circulation; however, as a symbol of the independent Jewish state (Kanael 1950-51:174) and issued by its priestly rulers, they may have been popular with the Jews and remembered long after the end of the independence. A large number of the Hasmonean coins have been discovered. They are brass coins of small size and bear the legend which consists of the name of the ruler followed by the formula: 'the High Priest and the fybr of the Jews', or, occasionally, 'the High Priest the head of the hbr
158
GUSTAV MUST
of the Jews' (Kindler 1952:189). The term hbr was used in the legend on the coins throughout the Hasmonean dynasty, for about a century. The exact meaning of this hbr is, despite a long discussion, still not certain because too little is known about the constitution of the Hasmonean state (M. Avi-Yonah in "Prolegomenon" to Madden 1967: XXVI). In the Old Testament a similar word is used in the sense of 'association, company, society'. Since in the coin legend the term is combined with the ruler's name, it is most likely that it denotes a governmental assembly as an authority which, together with the ruler, issued the money. A number of specific meanings of the term t}br of the coin legend have been proposed, such as 'Genossenschaft', 'confederation' (Levy 1862: 50), 'the priestly Senate' (Madden 1967: XXVI), 'community', 'senate' (e.g. Kanael 1950-51:175), etc. If we accept the meaning 'senate', the formula of the Hasmonean coin legend was: 'X the High Priest and the Senate of the Jews' (X marking the name of the high priest and ruler). The names of the rulers varied, but fibr, denoting the other authority issuing the money, remained constant on the coin. Generally, a coin has a name (an official name or a nickname, or both). The denomination stamped on it is usually its official name (as, among others, was the ancient Jewish 'shekel'). But there are no denominations on the discovered Hasmonean coins (Kadman 1957:63f.). Neither have they the ruler's image. But each of these coins did have on its obverse, as the constant part of its legend, the term denoting the other minting authority, the hbr. Thus it is quite conceivable that the coins came to be called the 'senate (hbr) money' (or 'community money', etc., according to what the exact meaning of this hbr may have been). In colloquial use this was likely to be shortened (as generally happens to coin names) - and it was simply called the hbr. Heb. hbr as appearing on the coins is written in the Hebrew consonantal script. It has become customary to vocalize it as heber (also written as cheber), apparently on the analogy of the Hebrew word transcribed as heber, meaning 'company, association, society', in the Bible (Old Testament) because the terms obviously are identical. However, the present traditional pronunciation of Hebrew is based on the rules worked out by the Masoretes in the seventh and especially the following centuries. While striving to restore what they thought to have been the older and 'correct' pronunciation, the Masoretes not only did restore certain lost sounds, incl. the gutturals, but also introduced vowels where they had never existed (see, e.g., Kahle 1959:149-90, esp. 184ff.; 1927:Vllff.).
GOTHIC
aibr
159
They indicated this changed, IDEAL pronunciation by diacritic marks added to the consonantal script. Since the Gothic translation of the Bible was done several centuries before the Masoretes' regulations, not the Masoretic but pre-Masoretic pronunciation of Hebrew has to be considered for the source of aibr. Among the most important witnesses for the pronunciation of Hebrew in the second and third centuries A.D. are the Hebrew texts transcribed in Greek letters, and likewise transcribed Hebrew words in the Greek translations found in Origen's Hexapla. This gigantic work (from the first half of the third century A.D.) consisted of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, its transcription in Greek characters, and four translations of it in Greek (by Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion), all in six parallel columns (some parts even in eight columns). The Greek transcription (in the second column) differs considerably from the Masoretic system of marking the pronunciation. Unfortunately Hexapla is preserved only in fragments and very little of the transcribed text has survived. The word hbr, which occurs many times in the Old Testament, is not found transcribed in the known fragments of the second column. But in them we do find relevant testimony of the pre-Masoretic Hebrew pronunciation and its rendering in Greek script. We see that the rendering of the guttural marked by the Hebrew letter heth fluctuates, e.g. designated by Gk. χ in χαρσείθ (Jer. 19:2) in the Septuagint versus άρσειθ in Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion; but usually it is left unrepresented, e.g. ίηάγ (Psa. 117:27), όλδ (Psa. 158:2), όμρ (Hos. 3:2), έσσην (Exod. 28:15) for hg, hid, hmr, and hsn respectively. Further, we see the absence of certain vowels which are marked in the Masoretic vocalization, e.g. in άρς as monosyllabic versus Masoretic 'eres (Psa. 11:7, Is. 17:9), νεβλ vs. näbel (Psa. 91:4), σελ vs. seläh (Psa. 9:7), βαρ vs. ba'ar (Psa. 91:7), βαλ vs. ba'al (IV Kings 1:2) (Field 1964). From the evidence of such examples it can be concluded that the Hebrew word hbr, which according to the Masoretic system is marked as heber (in the Old Testament), in all probability was transcribed as * εβρ in Greek letters in Hexapla. The same is true of hbr used on the Hasmonean coins: if it came to denote the coins (or those of them with a certain value which were most used for offering), it was written as * εβρ in Greek letters. When this term occurred in an early Greek text of the New Testament it was written in the same form. The form * εβρ must have existed in Matt. 5:23 in the Greek manuscript from which the first Gothic translation of the Gospel according to Matthew was made. Most likely denoting a Jewish coin customarily used as a gift at offerings, it
160
GUSTAV MUST
was one of the numerous variant readings of the early texts. It has survived in the Gothic hapax legomenon aibr. The Greek texts and the early versions of the Bible adopted, and transmitted, certain Hebrew and Aramaic words, esp. religious terms, and words denoting objects, animals, or plants, which were unfamiliar or not in use in other countries. They are found retained even in modern translations of the Bible. The Gothic version also has a number of them. Among others, there is another term for 'gift' - Goth, kaurban, cf. Gk. κορβαν, Lat. corban in Mark 7:11. The word comes from Heb. qorban (cf. Lev. 6:13 et passim). The older a Bible text, the more Hebrew words it contained. There was a high number of them left untranslated in the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament into Greek (made by the Jews for the Hellenized Jews in Egypt) which the Christian Church adopted. Hebrew was revered as a sacred language of the Bible and was not completely unfamiliar in the early Middle Ages. On the basis of early records (esp. a homily composed by Bishop Melito in the second century) it has been concluded that in the early Christian churches it was customary to read the lesson from the Old Testament first in Hebrew, and only then in Greek (Kahle 1959:161f.). In accordance with the early use of Hebrew words more numerously in the Bible text, aibr occurs in the Gothic translation of Matthew which contains also other archaic features. Valparaiso University Valparaiso, Indiana NOTES 1
For example, tibr in W. Braune 1961:138 (in the text) and p. 172 ("... sicher tibr zu lesen ..."), although the 11th edition (1939:139) has aibr in the text; F. Mosse 1942:227. 2 A detailed bibliography can be found in S. Feist 1939, s.v. aibr.
REFERENCES Bouman, A. C. 1951. Een drietal etymologieen. Neophilologus 35.238-41. Braune, Wilhelm. 1939. Gotische Grammatik mit Lesestücken und Wortverzeichnis. l l t h ed., ed. by Karl Helm. Halle: Max Niemeyer. —. 1961. Gotische Grammatik mit Lesestücken und Wörterverzeichnis. 16th ed., rev. by Karl Helm and Ernst A. Ebbinghaus. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Ebbinghaus, Ernst A. 1963. Gothic aibr. JEGP 62.718-21. Feist, Sigmund. 1939. Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der gotischen Sprache ... 3rd ed. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
GOTHIC
aibr
161
Field, Fridericus (ed.). 1964. Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt sive veterum interpretum graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragmenta ... Hildesheim: G. Olms. Grienberger, Theodor von. 1900. VIII. Untersuchungen zur gotischen Wortkunde. Sitzungsberichte der Kais. Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philos.-hist. Classe, 142.12f. Grimm, Jacob. 1822 (First ed. 1819.). Deutsche Grammatik, I, rev. ed. Göttingen: Dieterichsche Buchhandelung. —. 1854. Deutsche Mythologie, I. Band, 3rd ed. Berlin: Dieterichsche Buchhandelung. 1875.1. Band. 4th ed., ed. by Ε. Η. Meyer. Berlin: F. Dümmler. 1878. III. Band. 4th ed., ed. by Ε. Η. Meyer. Berlin: F. Dümmler. Kadman, L. 1957. A coin find at Masada. Israel Exploration Journal 7.61-5. Kahle, Paul E. 1927 (2nd ed: 1967). Masoreten des Westens. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Kahle, Paul E. 1959. The Kairo geniza. 2nd ed. Oxford: B. Blackwell. (First ed., London, 1947, Oxford University Press.) Kanael, B. 1950-51. The beginning of Maccabean coinage. Israel Exploration Journal 1.170-75. Kindler, A. 1952. Rare and unpublished Hasmonean coins. Israel Exploration Journal 2.188-9. Levy, Mforitz] A. 1862. Geschichte der jüdischen Münzen. Breslau. Madden, Frederic W. 1967. History of Jewish coinage, and of money in the Old and New Testament. "Prolegomenon" by Michael Avi-Yonah. (Library of Biblical Studies, ed. by Harry M. Orlinsky.) New York: Publishing House, Inc. (First ed.: London: B. Quaritch, 1864.) Mosse, Fernand. 1942. Manuel de la langue gotique. Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigue. Romanoff, Paul. 1944. Jewish symbols on ancient Jewish coins. Philadelphia: The Dropsie College. Scardigli, Pier Giuseppe. 1961. Zu gotisch aibr Opfergabe'. Die Sprache 7.138-9. Streitberg, Wilhelm. 1960. Die gotische Bibel, I. Teil: Der gotische Text und seine griechische Vorlage ... 4th ed. II. Teil: Gotisch-griechisch-deutsches Wörterbuch. 3rd eci. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Uhlenbeck, C. C. 1906. Aanteekeningen bij gotische etymologieen. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taal- en Letterkunde 25.245-306. Wood, Francis A. 1906. Etymological Notes. MLN 21.39-42.
METHODS OF TEXTUAL LINGUISTICS AND THE OLD HIGH GERMAN LUDWIGSLIED HERBERT PENZL
The study of style in literature and of poetic language has not been restricted to modern texts. In dealing with literary texts from older periods, e.g. Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, Middle High German, Old High German texts, however, linguistic analysis faces certain specific problems different from those typical of modern eras. It is true that most available handbooks on Old Germanic literatures attempt to characterize language and linguistic features as an integral and essential part of the monuments themselves. If we separate a specific linguistic analysis of older poetic texts from their literary interpretation and evaluation, we can distinguish four different types of approach which we can call: the phonological, the statistical-quantitative, the syntactictextual, and the semantic-lexical analyses. It is my purpose here to evaluate briefly the effectiveness and the results of these different types by reviewing their application to one particular Old High German text. This text is the Ludwigslied, which is 59 lines long and was written in a special Old Franconian dialect in 881 or 882 after the battle of Saucourt; it is preserved, together with the Old French Eulalia sequence, in a beautifully written manuscript, now in the library of Valenciennes (cf. Harvey 1945, Berg 1964).
1. TEXTUAL PHONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
In any poetic text the metrical structure has to be carefully examined. The lines of the Ludwigslied (as printed in Steinmeyer 1916:85-88, or Braune and Ebbinghaus 1969:136-38) have been analyzed as containing in each half-line two main (loud) stresses and two secondary (weaker) stresses (Koegel 1897:140-52, Habermann 1909); their distribution has been described according to the types found by Sievers in the Old Germanic alliterative verse lines (types A Β C D E). The first line, Einan
164
HERBERT PENZL
küning uueiz ih Heizsit her Hludwig, has, e.g., types C and A in the two half-lines. The metrical analysis is based on our assumptions of wordstress and sentence-stress ('prose rhythm') in Germanic and in Old High German. The half-lines are linked by terminal rime, which mostly consists of assonances of various types (cf. Pretzel 1941:91). We cannot draw specific phonetic conclusions, therefore: the assonance ih : Hludwig (lab; 25ab, 50ab) definitely does not prove a spirantal pronunciation of final -g. For the performance (delivery), i.e. the reading of a poetic text, its historical pronunciation has to be established. The small size of this text makes it difficult even to derive the phonemic system, let alone specific sound values from the orthography (Penzl 1971 :§4). Sievers, however, did just that by his method of creative reading, his Schallanalyse. He postulated, e.g., voiced spirantal initial th in Ther, thionot (2). He also claimed to have established by his Klangprobe that both Eulalia and Ludwigslied were the work of the same left-handed author, the bilingual monk Hucbald of the monastery of St. Amand on the EInon (Sievers 1929).
2. STATISTICAL-QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
Linguistic analyses of literary texts have attempted to obtain objective stylistic criteria by a statistical-quantitative approach. A number of linguistic features have been singled out, counted, and compared. Available figures on sound frequency in Modern English made it possible to compare them to the occurrence of phonemes in some Modern English poems (Hymes 1960). Compiling such data for Old High German in general and the Ludwigslied in particular would not yield significant material because of the limitations of the available corpus. Among other counted features compared in texts have been: the number of syllables per word, the number of words per sentence, the relative frequency of various word classes, e.g. of adjectives or nouns versus verbs (Wells 1960), the number of compounds versus simple words, the number of certain sentence types and sentence connectives, and of types of discourse. The frequency of nominal compounds seems of special significance in poetic Old Germanic sources. Carr (1939: 412ff.) finds compounds much more frequent in Old English epics, e.g. 1069 in Beowulf's 3182 lines compared to 440 in Heliand's 5983
METHODS OF TEXTUAL LINGUISTICS
165
lines, and Otfrid's mere 196 among about 7730 lines. The Ludwigslied's twelve nominal compounds are still more frequent than their occurrences in the alliterating O H G sources: 11 in the 68 lines of the Hildebrandslied, 12 in the Muspilli (103 lines). Willems (1954) described four different types of paratactic sentence structure in the Ludwigslied. Winter (1964:328) found parataxis versus hypotaxis to be a significant feature of GENRE-STYLE in modern German sources. The Ludwigslied shows about 66 paratactic clause structures versus 22 hypotactic structures, of which 10 occur in the king's speech (lines 34-41). Most statistical counts involve the level of EXPRESSION primarily. The ratio of dialogue (discourse) versus narration, as investigated by Heusler (1902) in Old Germanic monuments, involves rather the level of contents. The Ludwigslied has about 25% discourse, 75% narration, and the OHG Hildebrandslied, e.g., has about 68% discourse, only 32% narration. An author's and a monument's style (cf. Bloch 1953) is based on a number of specific choices available to the author. 1 The limited corpus of an earlier period, e.g. of Old High German in our case, makes it very difficult for the analyst to recover and evaluate these choices. However, even if a statistically valid general norm cannot be set up, comparative statistical data of the texts can be used for a relative evaluation of their styles.
3. TEXTUAL SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS
Modern linguistic theory and practice has, with few exceptions (Pike 1967:146), concerned itself primarily with the analysis of single sentences, not with textual syntax (Dressier 1970). As A. A. Hill (1958) has pointed out, the style of a text involves, of necessity, units larger than a sentence. Hill (1955) and other linguists (Richards 1960, Levin 1962, Sinclair 1966) have analyzed the syntactical structures of individual texts, mostly modern poems, as self-contained units of expression. When Fowler (1966:20) quotes C. F. Hockett's statement that a poem is a "long idiom", the reference is more to a unit of contents. The manuscript of the Ludwigslied indicates a division into 22 twoline and 5 three-line strophes. Their internal coherence and mutual linkage can be shown by contents (Ittenbach 1937:19-27) as well as by EXPRESSION. The total TECTONIC structure of the entire text, however,
166
HERBERT PENZL
seems less susceptible to linguistic justification. Huisman (1950:80-82) sees a purely arithmetic structure in the Ludwigsleich; Eggers (1960) finds a subdivision according to the GOLDEN SECTION in it. He thus separated the introduction of 12 lines from the NARRATIO of 47 lines (lines 13-59), where the king's speech of 10 lines as the center is flanked on each side by 18 lines (ANFLÜGEL, ABFLÜGEL). Ehrismann (1932: 230ff.) and Bostock (1955:206f.) propose somewhat different divisions. Textual syntactic analysis establishes the structure of the strophes and their connection. The first eight lines of the Ludwigslied are as follows (with Steinmeyer's punctuation): 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Einan kuning uueiz ih, Ther gerno gode thionot; Kind uuarth her faterlos. Holoda inan truhtin, Gab her imo dugidi, Stuol hier in Urankon. Thaz gideilder thanne Bruoder sinemo,
Heizsit her Hludwig, Ih uueiz her imos lonot. Thes uuarth imo sar buoz: Magaczogo uuarth her sin. Fronisc githigini, So brache her es lango! Sar mit Karlemanne, Thia czala uuunniono.
Aside from the rimes and metrical structure, COHERENCE (Halliday 1964) is achieved by syntactical and partly by lexical means. Syntactic devices in our sample above and elsewhere in the text include: anaphoric references and substitution by pronouns, deictic particles, parallel phrase and clause structures, word order. Lexical devices are repetition, variation, antithesis, parallel word structures, and the like. We observe the use of substituting pronouns, e.g. in referring to the king: her (lb, 3a, 6b, 7a er), imo (2b, 3b, 5a), inan (4a), sin (4b), the possessive sinemo (8a), Ther (2a); in referring to god: her (2b, 4b, 5a). Cross references to entire lines are expressed by -s (in imos 2b), Thes (3b), es (6b), Thaz (7a). Particles like hier (6a), thanne (7a), sar (3b, 7b), So (6b) suggest location and temporal sequence. Lines are linked by parallel verbal phrases, e.g. uuarth (3a, 3b, 4b), parallel word order (verb-initial) in Holoda (4a), Gab (5a), chiastic repetition like uueiz ih (la, 2b). Lexical variation is used: gode (2a) and truhtin (4a), dugidi (5a) and githigini (5b). czala uuunniono (8b) with anaphoric thia refers to dugidi, githigini and Stuol (6a). Antithesis links Kind and faterlos (3a) to Magaczogo (4b), similarly thionot 'serves' (2a) to lonot 'rewards' (2b).
METHODS OF TEXTUAL LINGUISTICS
167
4. SEMANTIC LEXICAL ANALYSIS
As shown above, syntactic textual analysis already involves consideration of lexical distribution. But a more detailed semantic analysis of the lexicon is called for. The OHG secular poetic corpus is very small; it is very difficult, therefore, to differentiate in detail its vocabulary from the language of the period as a whole. Diachronic evidence from later stages of the language, e.g. MHG or NHG, may be misleading (cf. Ullmann 1964). For the meaning of some words and phrases in the Ludwigslied the evidence from Old Saxon (Heliand) and Old English equivalents is helpful: e.g. dugidi (5a), bruche (6a), uuunniono (8b), ellian (39a), ellianlicho (42b), sigikamf (56b), etc. For some expressions only Otfrid provides suitable OHG parallels: gode thionot (2a), arbeidi... tho Ion (10a, b) godes holdon (36b), burolang (44a) etc. (Koegel 1897: 88-92). The evidence from other Germanic languages concerns mostly words and phrases that appear to be part of a shared Germanic oralformulaic tradition, called Volksepische Sprache by the handbooks. A long list could be given: e.g. uuarth imo sar buoz (3a), Obar seo lidcm (lib), Leidhor thes ingald iz (20b), fro min (30a), nam er skild indi sper (42a), Snel indi kuoni (51a) etc. The line 48a Sang uuas gisungan has an exact equivalent in Beowulf (line 1159). The initial formula Einan kuning uueiz ih (la) is attested in monuments of all Germanic languages (Hövelmann 1936:10). The anaphoric use of sum, e.g. Sume sar verlorane Uuurdun sum erkorane (13a, b), found in lines 17a 17b 18a (Sum uuas luginari Sum skachari, Sum fol loses) and lines 52a 52b (Suman ... Suman) as well, turns out to be part of an old formula of Germanic oral poetry (Meyer 1889:316ff.). It seems that an analysis of the OHG poetic language3 in the light of the recent discussion concerning the oral-formulaic background of Old English poetry (cf. Magoun 1953, Lawrence 1966) would be in order. In conclusion it can be said that certain linguistic types of analysis are prerequisites for literary evaluation and interpretation of Old Germanic texts. It cannot be proven that the Ludwigslied was intended for oral delivery, but a study of the phonology of a text of this type is still important. We must be aware of metrical structure and rimes and should have some idea what the poem sounds like, even without resorting to Schallanalyse. Statistical data of features of a small text may still be useful for comparison with other texts of the period and area involved. Only a detailed syntactical analysis of linkage and ordering of sentences, of devices of coherence, can explain the structure of lines and strophes,
168
HERBERT PENZL
of subdivision and subgrouping within a text. Semantic analysis of the lexicon, including a synchronic, a comparative, and a diachronic approach, is necessary for comprehension of the text and evaluation of its style. We assume that further progress of the techniques of textual linguistic analysis will also result in advances in the interpretation of literary texts. University of California, Berkeley NOTES 1
"The style of a discourse is the message carried by the frequency-distributions and the transitional probabilities of its linguistic features especially as they differ from those of the same features in the language as a whole." (Bloch 1953:42). 2 The lines mean: I know a king, his name is Hludwig, Who gladly serves God: I know He rewards him for this. As a child he became orphaned (fatherless): for this there was quickly a remedy for him: The Lord fetched him; He became His foster-father. He gave him a following, lordly retainers, A throne here in Franconia. So may he enjoy it for a long time! This he shared then quickly with Karlmann, His brother, the number of joys. 3 Some formulae seem to have been taken over in a foreign form, e.g. Dat gafregin ih mit firahim in the OHG Prayer of Wessobrunn. This cannot be proven for the Hildebrandslied (Ik gihorta dat seggert, etc.). REFERENCES Berg, Elisabeth. 1964. Das Ludwigslied und die Schlacht bei Saucourt. Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 29.175-99. Bloch, Bernard. 1953. Linguistic structure and linguistic analysis. Report of the 4th Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Teaching, ed. by A. A. Hill, 40-44. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University. Bostock, J. K. 1955. A handbook on Old High German literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Braune, Wilhelm, and Ernst A. Ebbinghaus. 1969. Althochdeutsches Lesebuch. 15th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Carr, Charles T. 1939. Nominal compounds in Germanic (St. Andrews University Publications, 41). London: Oxford University Press. Dressler, Wolfgang. 1970. Modelle und Methoden der Textsyntax. Folia Linguistica 4.64-71. Eggers, Hans. 1960. Der goldene Schnitt im Aufbau alt- und mittelhochdeutscher Epen. Wirkendes Wort 10.193-203. Ehrismann, Gustav. 1932. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, Erster Teil: Die althochdeutsche Literatur. 2nd ed. Munich: Beck. Fowler, Roger (ed.). 1966. Essays on style and language: Linguistic and critical approaches to literary style. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
METHODS OF TEXTUAL LINGUISTICS
169
—. 1966. Linguistic theory and the study of literature. I n : Fowler 1966,1-28. Habermann, Paul. 1909. Die Metrik der kleineren althochdeutschen Reimgedichte (Einleitung und Ludwigslied). Halle-Wittenberg dissertation. Halle: Karras. Halliday, Μ. Α. K. 1964. The linguistic analysis of literary texts. In: Lunt 1964, 302-7. Harvey, Ruth. 1945. The provenance of the Old High German Ludwigslied. Medium Aevum 14.1-20. Heusler, A. 1902. Der Dialog in der altgermanischen erzählenden Dichtung. Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 46.189-243. Hill, Α. A. 1955. An analysis of The Windhover: An experiment in structural method. PMLA 70.968-78. —. 1958. Introduction to linguistic structures. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Hövelmann, Werner. 1936. Die Eingangsformel in germanischer Dichtung. Bonn dissertation. Huisman, J. A. 1950. Neue Wege zur dichterischen und musikalischen Technik Walters von der Vogelweide, mit einem Exkurs über die symmetrische Zahlenkomposition im Mittelalter. Utrecht: Kemink. Hymes, Dell H. 1960. Phonological aspects of style: Some English sonnets. In: Sebeok 1960, 109-31. Ittenbach, Max. 1937. Deutsche Dichtung der salischen Kaiserzeit und verwandte Denkmäler (Bonner Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie, 2). Würzburg: Triltsch. Koegel, Rudolf. 1897. Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur bis zum Ausgange des Mittelalters, Erster Band, Zweiter Teil. Strassburg: Trübner. Lawrence, R. F. 1966. The formulaic theory and its application to English alliterative poetry. In: Fowler 1966, 166-83. Levin, Samuel R. 1962. Linguistic structures in poetry (Janua linguarum, 23). The Hague: Mouton. Lunt, Horace G. (cd.). 1964. Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists (Janua linguarum, ser. maior, 12). The Hague: Mouton. Magoun, Francis P., Jr. 1953. Oral-formulaic character of Anglo-Saxon narrative poetry. Speculum 28.446-67. Meyer, Richard M. 1889. Die altgermanische Poesie nach ihren formelhaften Elementen beschrieben. Berlin: W. Hertz. Penzl, Herbert. 1971. Lautsystem und Lautwandel in den althochdeutschen Dialekten. Munich: Hueber. Pike, Kenneth L. 1967. Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior (Janua ling., ser. maior, 24). The Hague: Mouton. Pretzel, U. 1941. Frühgeschichte des deutschen Reimes (Palaestra 220). Leipzig: Becker and Erler. Richards, I. A. 1960. Poetic process and literary analysis. I n : Sebeok 1960, 9-24. Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.). 1960. Style in language. Cambridge: Μ. I. T. Sievers, Eduard. 1929. Elnonensia. Berliner Beiträge zur romanischen Philologie 1.247-77. Jena und Leipzig. Sinclair, J. Mc. H. 1966. Taking a poem to pieces. In: Fowler 1966, 68-81. Steinmeyer, Elias von. 1916. Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmäler. Berlin: Weidmann. Ullmann, Stephen. 1964. Language and style, esp. pp. 154-73: The reconstruction of stylistic values. Oxford: Blackwell. Wells, Rulon. 1960. Nominal and verbal style. I n : Sebeok 1966, 213-30. Willems, Fritz. 1954. Der parataktische Satzstil im Ludwigslied. Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 85.18-35. Winter, Werner. 1964. Styles as dialects. I n : Lunt 1964, 324-30.
S T U D I E S ON POLABIAN M O R P H O P H O N E M I C S KAZIMIERZ POLANSKI
An adequate description of the phonemic system of the Polabian language presents great difficulties because of the inconsistent and inaccurate transcription of Polabian records. Nevertheless, the results of the investigations linguists have hitherto carried on have shed some light on these problems. On the basis of these investigations (Lehr-Splawmski 1929, Trubetzkoy 1929, Polanski 1957) an appropriate picture of the phonemic system of Polabian could be obtained, although many problems remain still unsolved or unclear. One such unclear problem is the development of the present tense forms of the verb representing the Common Slavic */-conjugation, e.g. *kl%citb, *polozitb etc. As is well known, the Common Slavic vowel *i developed in Polabian in two ways, depending on whether it occurred in strong (nonreduced) or weak (reduced) position. In strong position the Common Slavic *i changed into the diphthong ai in Polabian, whereas in weak position it underwent reduction to the vowel e, cf. bait ^ *biti vs. aibet ^ *ubiti. In weak position almost all vowels changed into one of two reduced vowels: ä or e. Polabian α de ο ö in weak position became ä, and i ü ai di oi au became e. Nasal vowels generally did not undergo reduction. Whether a vowel was strong or weak depended, no doubt, on stress; however, there is no agreement on the Polabian accentual system. As for the position of stress in Polabian, conclusions can be drawn only on the basis of the distribution of nonreduced vowels. Some of the recorders of the texts provided accent marks, although those marks do not indicate stress position, as Lehr-Splawmski (1929) has shown. Such accent marks often indicate simply the presence of a nonreduced syllable. There are three main lines of thought concerning the problem of stress in Polabian. Lehr-Splawmski (1929) states that in Polabian the last nonreduced syllable was stressed, e.g. zob'o vs. z'etiä, strot'o vs. struotkä, etc. According to Trubetzkoy (1929), on the other hand, if the final syllable was long, it was stressed; if not, the stress was on the penultimate
172
KAZIMIERZ POLANSKI
syllable. A different approach is only represented by Kurylowicz (1955), who tries to show that the position of stress in Polabian was always on the first syllable. If this is true, reduction of vowels would be independent of the position of stress. There are, however, arguments in favor of the hypothesis relating reduction of vowels to stress position. What is even more important is that examples can be given testifying to the fact that the alternation of nonreduced vowel in strong position vs. reduced vowel in weak position was productive in Polabian. For example, the Common Slavic pronoun *kako developed in Polabian regularly as kok. As an interrogative pronoun, kok must have been stressed, and that is why it was in this function noted as Kok, Kock, kök, Kdk, Kok, etc. On the other hand, as a relative pronoun it was unstressed, hence, in weak position; and therefore in this function it was transcribed as Kack, Kak, kack, etc., which is a regular notation for käk with the reduced vowel a. Cf. all the forms and notations recorded in Polariski (1971:204-266). Compare also present tense forms of the verb met == *jbmeti that show a similar distribution of nonreduced and reduced vowels: mom vs. ne-mäm, mos vs. ne-mas, mo vs. ne-mä. Taking all this into consideration, we can now examine the development of present tense forms of the verbs representing the Common Slavic */-conjugation. Examples are numerous in the records; cf., for instance, lüme ^ *lomitb, nüse ^ *nositb, plote ^ *platitb etc. As far as forms with the reduced shape of the ending are concerned, they could be easily interpreted as continuing the regular original *-/ ^ *-itb, since */, as was stated above, developed into e in weak position. But forms with the nonreduced shape of the ending present some difficulty. The nonreduced ending could only occur before enclitic pronouns, as is clear from the following examples: gnezdi-sä ^ *gnezditb sq, d'üji-sä ^ *gojitb sq, codi-sä ^ *caditb sq etc. The change of Common Slavic *i into / in Polabian cannot be considered as a regular phonetic development, since *i regularly developed into ai in strong position. In order to account for this irregularity, Lehr-Splawmski (1929: 210-212) advanced a hypothesis to the effect that forms of the type aitüpi-sä ^ *utopitb sq are the result of the influence of the original *e-conjugation. In other words, Lehr-Splawmski derived such forms from the original ones ending in *-e, and reconstructed *utope-sq, *gnezde-s%, *goje-sq etc. correspondingly. If this were true, Polabian would have lost the distiction between the original verbal themes in *-e and those
STUDIES ON POLABIAN MORPHOPHONEMICS
173
in *-/ in favor of the former at the very beginning of its development. This supposition does not seem to me to be plausible. Verbal themes in *-/ are quite productive in all the Slavic languages. Moreover, they play a very important role in derivation, especially in the derivation of verbs from nouns and adjectives. That is why I would rather suggest that the loss of the distinction between the original */-conjugation and *econjugation was a fairly recent phenomenon and was due to the morphophonemic system of Polabian, first of all to the productive alternation of nonreduced vs. reduced vowels. Not all present tense forms of the original */-verbs are attested. Of those that can be of help here only the second and the third person singular are available. The thematic vowel continuing *-/ in these two forms was in weak position unless they were followed by enclitic pronouns. Polabian -e was the regular continuation of * i in this position. This regular -e, then was secondarily lengthened (became nonreduced) before enclitics. As the most productive was the alternation e vs. /, the result of this lengthening was /'. As an argument in favor of this hypothesis, the development of verbal forms in *-aje- can be cited. Original forms in *-aje- developed in two ways in Polabian. They either changed into -oje, or underwent contraction and yielded -ä; cf. kQsoje *kQsajetb, Votoje ^ *letajetb vs. zevä *zevajetb, pücaivä ^ *pocivajetb etc. The reason for this diiferentiation was most probably stress again. In any case, what is important here is that *-aje- did not regularly develop into a nonreduced simple vowel. However, before enclitics the thematic -a secondarily became lengthened into non-reduced -o; cf. samo-sä, strid'o-sa (verbs borrowed from German). It is also interesting that, from the point of view of morphophonemics, loanwords were treated in Polabian in the same way as native words. An illustrative example is Polabian laicär from German leit-seil, with the dissimilation of the final -/ into -r. Since -a- occurred after c it was treated as though it had developed from the original *-e-, and therefore the adjective derived from it was laicerne. From what has been said above it seems to be clear that the morphophonemic alternations of reduced vowels vs. some nonreduced ones was quite productive in Polabian and played and important role in the morphological system of that language.
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan
174
KAZIMIERZ POLANSKI
REFERENCES Kuryiowicz, Jerzy. 1955. Akcentuacja polabska. Studia ζ Filologii Polskiej i Slowianskiej, I, Warszawa, 349-371. Lehr-Splawinski, Tadeusz. 1929. Gramatyka polabska. Lw6w, Lwowska Biblioteka Slawistyczna, 8, Naklad i wlasnoic K. S. Jakubowskiego. Polaüski, Kazimierz. 1957. Ζ morfologii polabskiej - Na tie porownawczym. Lingua Posnaniensis, 6, Poznan, 154-167. Polanski, Kazimierz. 1971. Slownik etymologiczny j?zyka drzewian polabskich, 2eszyt 2, Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolmskich. Trubetzkoy, N. 1929. Polabische Studien. Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky A.-G., Wien und Leipzig.
LATIN area A N D INDO-EUROPEAN THRESHING TERMINOLOGY IN HITTITE JAAN PUHVEL
Standing on a sunny August day on the citadel of Büyükkale in Bogazköy, one gains a bird's eye panorama of the Great Temple far below, and beyond it, between the temple and the Turkish village of Bogazkale, of the harvesting in progress on the present-day threshing-field. The site of the temple itself affords a close-up view of the proceedings. The evident age-old state of the technology involved is suggestive of a certain millennial continuity, and the thought occurs that the scene cannot have been very different in an earlier era, when the huge storage jars of the temple, now being laboriously reassembled from fragments by Kurt Bittel's excavation team, stood ready to store the end-product of the activity. An attempt to test such intimations of diachrony against the corpus of Hittite texts is hampered by the utter absence of husbandry manuals or other "agriculturalist literature". One is instead reduced to occasional stray references and "non-professional" allusions throughout the range of the corpus. A clear reference to harvesting is found in the Law Code (§ 158 in the Hrozny numbering). Piecing together a "maximal" text from KBo VI 26 I 6-10, KUB XIII 15 Rs. 4-6, and KU Β XXIX 30 II 16-18, we get: takku LIJ-as BURU-ί kussani tiyazi sepan ishäi GlSMAR.GfD.DA.yi. A epzi E. IN. NU. DA istappi KISLAH-an warsiyanzi ITU.3.KAM 30 PARISU SE kussan-set takku SAL-ζα BUR[U-i] kussani tiyazi SA ITU.2.KAM 12 PA §E päi 'if a man takes hire at harvest, binds sheaves, takes (them to) the wagons, shuts the straw-house, and they sweep the threshing-field, for three months his pay is thirty half-measures of grain; if a woman takes hire at harvest, she is paid for two months twelve half-measures of grain'. Here the crucial expression is KISLAH-an warsiyanzi 'they sweep the threshing-field'. The verb wars(iya)- occurs elsewhere in the Code with the meaning 'to harvest', e.g. § 167 taz apäs waraszi (warsi) 'that one
176
JAAN PUHVEL
harvests (the field) for himself', § 166 warasse {KUB XXIX 30 III 4), §106 warsezzi (warsi). Further KUB XXIV 3 II 7-8 aniyanzi warassanzi ÜL kuxiski '(the fields) no one works or harvests'; KUB XXXI84 III65 mahhan-kan BURU-anza kisari nasta apün A. S Ä - L A M arha warfasdu 'as harvest occurs, he shall harvest that field'; KUB XXXI 57 I 14-15 terippüwanzi warsuwanzi ... arauwas NU. GAL 'from plowing and harvesting there is none exempt'; KBo V 7 Rs. 44 A. SÄ warassuwas USALLUM 'harvestable field (and) pasture'. Related meanings are seen in KUB VIII 48 I 7 HUR. SAG. MES-ννα kuis ISTU G\SERIN warasfta 'he that denuded the mountains of cedars', and KUB XII 62 Vs. 11 aiili warsuwanzipaimi Ί will go to pick the flower'. A more general sense 'sweep, wipe, rub' is found in e.g. KUB XIII 2 1 5 KASKAL. HI. A-ma-kan warsantes kuit 'because the roads (are) kept swept', perhaps referring to snow-removal; IBoT I 36 I 68-69 nasta ΚA-us arha warsi 'then he wipes off the gate'; KBo II 3 III 41 Νί. TE. HI. A-us warsi 'she rubs the bodies'; KBo XIV 63a IV 4 arha warsanzi 'they rub down (racehorses)'. wars(iya)- is traditionally (ever since E. Benveniste in BSL 33.137 [1932]) compared with Lat. verrö 'scrape, sweep, brush, scour', Old Russian vresti 'thresh', vorochü 'grain-heap', Lettish värsmis 'unwinnowed grainheap'. But the meaning ranges and specific usages of the Hittite and Latin verbs are congruent and parallel beyond such a general collocation: Harvesting: E. IN. NU. DA istappi KISLAHan warsiyanzi '(he) shuts the strawhouse (and) they sweep the threshingfield'. Ritual: nasta KÄ-us arha warsi 'then he wipes off the gate'. Care of roads: KASKAL. HI. A-ma-kan warsantes 'the roads (are) kept swept'.
condidit horreo quidquid de Libycis verritur are is 'he has stored in the granary whatever is swept up from Libyan threshing-floors' (Horace, Carmina 1.1.10). crinibus templa verrentes 'sweeping the shrines with their hair' (Livy 3.7.8; cf. 26.9.7 aras verrentes). verri sibi vias 'to have the roads swept for himself' (Suetonius, Caligula 43; cf. Vespasian 5 curam verrendis viis).
In both Hittite and Latin we thus find a more general meaning 'wipe, sweep' and a very specific one 'sweep up the winnowed grain from the
LATIN
ärea AND
THRESHING TERMINOLOGY
177
threshing-field'. Emboldened by this accord one may wonder whether Roman tradition can shed further light on threshing terminology and practices of the Hittites. The threshing-field of the Hittites hides its name under the sumerogram KISLAH; the dative-locative KISLA£-m (e.g. KU Β XX 19 III 4, XXX 46 I 10) shows a Hittite phonetic complement. Of its layout and use we are only inferentially informed. The Latin ärea, on the other hand, has been described in detail by Cato {De agri cultura 91 and 129), Vergil (Georgics 1.178-202), Varro {De re rustica 1.51-52), Columella (1.6.23), and Palladius (1.36). Most of these authors are concerned with the location, preparation, and construction of the threshing-floor, including mouse- and mole-proofing, but Varro in particular provides also a graphic description of the activity on the finished ärea: Aream esse oportet in agro sublimiori loco, quam perflare possit ventus. [...] Ε spicis in area excuti grana. Quod fit apud alios iumentis iunctis ac tribulo. Id fit e tabula lapidibus aut ferro asperata, quae cum imposito auriga aut pondere grandi trahitur iumentis iunctis, discutit e spica grana. [...] Apud alios exteritur grege iumentorum inacto et ibi agitato perticis, quoad ungulis e spica exteruntur grana. Iis tritis oportet e terra subiectari vallis aut ventilabris, cum ventus spirat lenis. Ita fit ut quod levissimum est in eo atque appellatur acus ac palea evannatur foras extra aream ac frumentum, quod est ponderosum, purum veniat ad corbem. 'The threshing-floor ought to be located in the field on a higher spot, so that wind can blow through it. [...] On the threshing-floor grain is shaken out of ears. This is done by some with yoked beasts and a threshing sledge. The latter is made from a board weighted down with stones or iron, and when it is drawn by yoked beasts, bearing the driver or a great weight, it shakes the grain loose from the ears. [...] By others threshing is done by driving in a herd of beasts and stirring them in motion there with stakes, until by their hooves the grain is threshed out of the ears. Once threshing is finished, it must be thrown up from the ground with winnowing vans or forks when a light wind is blowing. Thus it comes to pass that what is lightest in it and is called husks and chaff is winnowed forth out of the threshing-floor and the grain, while what is heavy comes clean into the basket.' Anyone who has watched the black little donkeys, the cattle, the sledges, and the winnowing at modern Bogazköy might as well have penned Varro's lines from on-the-spot observation. If thus Ancient Roman and present-day rural Anatolian practices are in substantial agreement, chances are that the tertium of our comparison, the Hittite KISLAH, would have responded equally well to Varronian depiction. Reverting from realia to vocables, what is the linguistic history of ärea? The meaning 'threshing-floor' is early and pervasive, from Cato
178
JAAN PUHVEL
{De agri cultura 91: aream sic factio) through all the "scriptores rerum rusticarum" and right down the epigraphic path {aria in CIL 6.541) into the Romance languages (French aire). The same sense is usual in non-agricultural classical context, e.g., neque in segetibus neque in areis neque in horreis (Cicero, In Verrem 2.3.8), milia frumenti tua triverit area centum (Horace, Satires 1.1.45), area dum messes sole calente teret (Tibullus 1.5.22), tertia nudandas acceperat area messes (Ovid, Fasti 3.557). But there is also a wider meaning of 'open space, vacant lot' (e.g. ponendae domo quaerenda est area primum [Horace, Epistles 1.10.13], campus et areae [Horace, Carmina 1.9.18], ut monumento area esset [Livy 4.16.1], vacuas areas occupare et aedificare [Suetonius, Vespasian 8]), leading to further specialized or transferred usages ('patio', 'bald spot', 'field for action', etc.). In Plautus {Asinaria 1.3.67) we read aedes nobis area est; auceps sum ego, thus 'fowling-floor'. Area denotes strictly "citified" open space and is never applied to the countryside: locus sine aedificio in urbe area, rure autem ager appellatur (Florentinus, Digesta 50.16.211). There is thus a complete dichotomy of the rustic sense 'threshing-floor' and the urban meanings. It seems unlikely that a city word could have been expanded to become an ingrained and specialized agricultural term. More probably the rural usage is basic; the threshing-floor was the one piece of completely cleared and leveled ground next to a farmstead, and the non-rustic extensions of area are simply urbanized analogues conveying second-hand meanings. This relationship was sensed by Varro: Ubi frumenta secta, ut terantur arescunt, area. Propter horum similitudinem in urbe loca pura areae (De lingua Latina 5.3%). The same etymological tie-in with äreö 'be dry', äridus 'dry, parched' shines through in Festus: Area proprie dicitur locus vacuus, quasi exaruerit et non possit quicquam generare (ed. W. Μ. Lindsay, p. 10; ed. K. O. Müller, p. 11). Modern etymologists from Bopp and Curtius to Walde and Hofmann have come up with nothing better, still comparing area: äreö with terra: torreö. I propose instead an etymological connection of area with Hittite hah(ha)r(a)~ 'rake' (or the like), found in KUB VII 14, 14 ^hahra[ (cf. ibid. 13 GI$intaluzis 'shovel', perhaps connectible etymologically with Gk. εντεα 'implements', with suffix as in ishuzi- 'band'), animate acc. sg. G1^hahharan {KUB XXXV 52, 5), alternative nom.-acc. sg. neut. hahhar {G1*hahhar in KBo XII 126 I 5, KUB XLI 2 I 2), once misspelled harhar {KBo X I 1 2 1 6 ; cf. Jakob-Rost 1972:20,44, 60).1 Its denominative verb is seen in 3 sg. pret. act. hahriyat {Bo 5454 I 14), and the full figura etymologica in KUB XXIV 10 III 11 hahharit EGIR-anda hahhariyafddu
LATIN
ärea AND
THRESHING TERMINOLOGY
179
'he shall rake thereupon with a rake' (cf. ibid. 12 intaluzzit EG1R-anda suwäifddu 'he shall fill thereupon with a shovel·). There is also a seasonal festival named EZEN. ME§ hahrannas {KUΒ XIII 4 I 44) or hahrannanza EZEN {KUΒ XXX 54 II 13); cf. KU Β XXXIV 7 r. 18 hahrannas anda and KU Β XXXI lOORs. 3 hahrannass-a GI§ TIR. HI. A GI*SAR[ Ά., woods (and) orchard(s)'. Perhaps hahrannas is in origin the genitive of a *hahratar, thus '(place) of raking', conceived of as nominatival in its own right and yielding a further collective derivative hahrannant-. Remembering KISLAH-w, it is tempting to read it as hahranni. Thus 'threshing-field' would seem to be derived from the idea of 'raking', and Latin ärea would reflect a cognate *AieAiriyeA2. The festival of the threshingfield is even matched in folk religion by the dedication Genio areae frumentariae (CIL 8.6339). In the beginning of the story of Appu there occurs a description of Appu's wealth. A simile is employed which in the most recent edition of the text (Siegelovä 1971:4) reads as follows, combining KU Β XXIV 8 I 13-14 and Bo 8510, 2-3: KÜ. BABB]AR-ma-&7 G U S K I N - Ö S [ NA4 ZA. Gl] Ν-as uddani [pajnku huwigatar man hahhariyan 'as regards silver, gold, and lapislazuli, he has like an entire huwigatar raked together'. The same noun huwigatar appears in the fragment 685/z, 7, flanked in line 6 by hjewaniyat 'rained' and in line 8 by 3 sg. pret. waliwalas (cf. KBo XII 73, 5-6 halkinn-a-kan AB. SIN-/ anda waliwaläi 'he makes grain grow in the furrow'), huwigatar seems to be a neuter noun in -tar, referring perhaps to grain-accumulation on the threshing-field. An underlying verb *hu(w)ig(a)- might have denoted threshing and winnowing as distinct from raking, being thus cognate with Gothic ga-wigan, Old Norse vega 'shake'. If thus huwigatar means 'grain-pile' (literally 'winnow'), and hahrannas signifies 'threshing-field' (literally '[place] of raking') and is cognate with Latin ärea, some conclusions may be drawn concerning the state of early Indo-European agriculture. Rosenkranz (1965-1966:507) is surprised at the amount of Indo-European lexical matter in Hittite agricultural vocabulary but finds that individual items somehow skirt precise comparison and exhibit only a general, although sometimes palpably archaic similarity. From this Rosenkranz concludes that the Hittites separated from the rest of the Indo-Europeans at a very early time, before the latter developed a standard agricultural terminology. If, on the other hand, comparisons like hahriya-: area will stand, there is every reason to doubt the correctness of Rosenkranz's view and to
180
JAAN PUHVEL
move Hittite closer to the mainstream of the early Indo-European agricultural lexicon. University of California, Los Angeles
NOTE 1
This scribal lapsus should add no fuel to Rosenkranz's implausible interpretation of hah(ha)r- as a reduplicated form of *har-, the latter allegedly seen in hars- 'till' (Rosenkranz 1965-1966:505); there is no reason why a *harhar- should assimilate to hahhar-, since the sequence -rh- is stable (cf. OVGharhara-, name of a vessel). For the probable Semitic loanword origin of har(a)s-, see Puhvel 1964:183.
REFERENCES Jakob-Rost, Liane. 1972. Das Ritual der Malli aus Arzawa gegen Behexung (KUB XXIV 9 +). (Texte der Hethiter, Heft 2.) Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Puhvel, Jaan. 1964. The Indo-European and Indo-Aryan Plough. Technology and Culture 5.176-190. Rosenkranz, Bernhard. 1965-1966. Zu einigen landwirtschaftlichen Termini des Hethitischen. Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-egyptisch Genootschap Ex Oriente Lux 19.500-507. Siegelovä, Jana. 1971. Appu-Märchen und Hedammu-Mythus. (Studien zu den Bogazköy-Texten, 14.) Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
ABRUPTNESS A N D G R A D U A L N E S S IN PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE EDWIN G. PULLEYBLANK
The theory of 'lexical diffusion' to account for the way in which sound change occurs was proposed by William Wang (1969) and has since been the subject of a number of case studies by himself and colleagues, mostly based on the material on Chinese dialects placed on computer in their Berkeley laboratory (Wang 1970). According to this theory, 'most (not necessarily all) types of phonological change are phonetically abrupt but lexically gradual' (Wang-Cheng 1970). The first half of this statement, that sound change is 'phonetically abrupt', will be widely accepted (though one would prefer to say 'phonologically'). Gradualness of phonetic change has often been assumed in the past, for example by Hockett (1958:440-44), who speaks of the 'slow drifting' of 'expectation distributions' or 'frequency maxima'. Such a view is rejected by generative phonologists, who insist that phonological change must involve discrete quantum shifts as the result of changes of rules, but one can also argue that abruptness of phonological change really follows from the assumptions of traditional phonemics. For suppose that a given language has two phonemes jtj and /d/ that contrast in various environments. As long as the phonemic distinction is part of the language, any given utterance involving phones of either phoneme will have to be assigned by speaker and hearer either to phoneme /t/ or to phoneme /d/, with no middle ground, even if there is convergence or actual overlap in some phonetic realizations (for instance, in rapid or excited or slurred speech). On the other hand, if a merger does take place in some environment, for example, before pause or between vowels, this means that there are no longer two possibilities but only one, as far as the phonological interpretation of an utterance is concerned, no matter how much spread from the norm there may be in the physical properties of particular realizations. The basic insight that gives rise to the distinction between phonology (or phonemics) and phonetics is the realization that, while the physical measurements of speech, whether
182
Ε. G. PULLEYBLANK
considered from an articulatory or an acoustic point of view, vary along continuous parameters, speech sounds, as language, are a matter of discrete, yes/no, oppositions imposed on these continua by the brain. Consequently only a change in the rules which impose linguistic interpretations on the flow of articulation and audition counts as a change in the language. Looked at from this point of view, the theory that sound change involves gradual shifts can only be a speculation about the preconditions which might tend to bring about linguistic change, which would still have to occur, when it did occur, as a discrete structural alteration. To put it another way, performance factors that tend to blur a distinction might create strains which ultimately lead to a change in competence. Some such hypothesis may be necessary to account for the fact that phonetic change occurs at all. This is not, however, the question with which we are primarily concerned. Whatever may be the factors that precipitate sound change, it is clear that it can only be incorporated into the language by discrete, abrupt, alterations in the structural rules. To have pointed this out and insisted on it is a great merit of the generative school. But having established this principle, we seem to be faced with a paradox. If sound change is abrupt, how is it that it is so hard to observe and why does it give the impression, when we look at the historical evidence, of a gradual process occurring slowly and imperceptibly over centuries? Wang's theory, substituting lexical gradualness for phonological gradualness, attempts to account for this. Unfortunately it results in even greater paradoxes. According to Wang we are to imagine phonetic change as taking place as follows. Suppose that there is a set of morphemes {mi, m2, me. ... m n } which have in common a given phonetic specification A which is changing to Β in environment C. This change will not affect the whole set simultaneously but will first change A to Β in one morpheme, say mi, then move on to affect another morpheme, say ni2, and so on. Instead of being able to set up a rule: A B/C, we must, strictly speaking, set up a whole series of separate little rules, applying at different historical moments: A -> B/mi A B/ni2 A
B/m x
ABRUPTNESS AND GRADUALNESS
183
If, and only if, every member of the set {mi, m2 ... m n } is affected by the change, can we generalize this into the rule: A B/C. Otherwise we can only sum up the succession of changes by enumeration. Wang leaves aside what he calls the 'fascinating questions: why some morphemes change earlier than others, whether morphemes follow the same change schedules from speaker to speaker, and how speakers influence each other's change schedules', as probably requiring extralinguistic types of explanation. Wang's theory is, as he says, not entirely new. He quotes, in particular, remarks by Sturtevant and Sommerfelt in favour of the idea that some words are affected by the same sound change earlier than others. It is, however, contrary not only to the neogrammarian principle of the autonomy of phonetic factors in sound change, but also to the orthodox view among both structural and generative linguists. Saussure was very explicit that phonetic change affects sounds, not words. Bloomfield's dictum 'Phonemes change' does not leave any room for the contrary view that the phonetic shapes of morphemes change one at a time. Generative phonologists, who have been greatly preoccupied with the problems of deriving differing surface forms from underlying base forms of morphemes through the application of sets of ordered rules, and have denied the relevance of autonomous phonemics, have nevertheless mostly adhered to the traditional view regarding the independence of phonological and semantic components, and have assumed that derivational rules - and hence also diachronic sound changes resulting from changes in derivational rules - apply to the former irrespective of the latter. It is true that it has been alleged that one must distinguish in English between morphemes marked in the lexicon as of Latin origin and those of native origin, but even this is a way of setting up general phonological rules that apply to all morphemes of a given class, not a way of isolating and particularizing morphemes for individual treatment. Even King (1969:119), who quotes Wang with approval as representing his own attitude, does so in a context that ignores Wang's essential point. For King equates Wang's 'abrupt implementation and gradual spread' (an earlier formulation, in a draft circulated in mimeograph, of the more precise and explicit formula 'phonetically abrupt and lexically gradual' in Wang 1969:14) with the gradual spread of an innovation through a speech community - a totally different matter which Wang refers to in passing but strangely fails to discuss in any detail. There can be no doubt whatever that this is the essential point. To suppose that all speakers of a language would simultaneously alter even
184
Ε. G. PULLEYBLANK
a minor rule of their grammar or, for that matter, the pronunciation of a single lexical item is an obvious absurdity. Phonetic change must start among individuals and small groups and then spread to other groups with which these are in contact. Potentially any lack of uniformity in a linguistic community could serve as a source for changes spreading to other parts of the community through borrowing; and, in spite of the unavoidable assumption of uniform languages and dialects for methodological purposes, we know very well that no linguistic community, however small or isolated, is ever perfectly uniform. Still less is this true of standard languages spoken over large areas, or of the dialects of large metropolitan cities. Intercommunication between people who speak different variants of the same language is, therefore, not anything exceptional but the normal experience of most of mankind. Matthew Chen, one of those who has tried to demonstrate the theory of lexical diffusion by means of cases drawn from Chinese dialect material, is well aware that other scholars have explained or would explain the same effects by dialect mixture. He admits the theoretical possibility of such influences but argues that the dialect-mixture hypothesis is too facile and all-embracing to be useful. He argues that while one can define evidence which would constitute proof of its occurrence, one cannot define what would constitute proof that it had not occurred, and that, therefore, it is not a well-formed hypothesis (Chen 1971:11). There is a curious double standard here. Wang (1969:21) sets out the conditions for invalidating his theory as follows: 'The conjecture here presented can only be invalidated by demonstrating that all (or at least competing) sound changes are complementary in their periods of operation, or that lexical diffusion is an untenable view of how sound changes spread ... Also, it should go without saying that the conjecture cannot be falsified by demonstrating that certain phonetic laws do not have residues or that certain residues are caused by other factors. (We cannot prove that the platypus does not lay eggs with photographs showing a platypus NOT laying eggs).' Clearly there is no possibility here of ever finally disproving the theory on empirical grounds. No matter how many cases one may examine in which lexical diffusion does not appear to operate, there will always be the possibility of finding some other case in which there is at least no conclusive evidence that it did not operate. One might therefore expect that Matthew Chen would reject the theory of lexical diffusion as not well-formed. It is disconcerting to find that, on the contrary, he quotes Wang's metaphor about the platypus AGAINST the notion of dialect mixture for just the reason that
ABRUPTNESS AND GRADUALNESS
185
Wang used it FOR his own theory. In other words, the impossibility of finding decisive evidence by which to reject the theory of lexical diffusion in ALL cases is regarded as a point in its favour, while the impossibility of excluding the possibility of crosslinguistic or crossdialectal interference in ANY particular instance is regarded as an argument against the notion of dialect mixture. Yet clearly we are in an infinitely better position with the supposition that the historical development of languages is influenced by sociallyand geographically-determined differences in speech than we are with the theory of lexical diffusion. Socially- and geographically-determined differences are found in all languages and must therefore form one of the necessary assumptions about the historical states of languages. As against this omnipresence of dialectal differences, great and small, one will be hard put to find any unambiguous direct evidence for lexical diffusion at a synchronic level. It is well to be warned against the overly facile use of dialect mixture as an explanatory catchall but at least we know that it does occur. It can therefore be an heuristically useful hypothesis, since it may, if the evidence permits, lead to the discovery of the source of the perturbations. The theory of lexical diffusion, on the other hand, leaves one with nothing further to investigate. Though, as Wang says, one cannot definitely disprove the theory merely by showing that the particular case studies that have been alleged to support it fail to do so in a convincing way, such demonstrations should at least make one doubt the validity of the theory in the strong form in which it has been put as applying to MOST types of phonological change. In fact, in none of the alleged instances that have been adduced on the basis of Chinese dialect materials does the theory of lexical diffusion do more than give one, more or less plausible, explanation for certain irregularities in the modern reflexes of Middle Chinese forms. Other possibilities are not eliminated and often are not even seriously considered. Here I wish to discuss only certain problems in connection with Mandarin, for which we are much better placed than for other Chinese dialects in having available historical materials for periods intermediate between Middle and Modern Chinese. As Matthew Chen notes, there are numerous doublets in Mandarin for morphemes which had final -k in Middle Chinese. For example we have (besides many others): 'leg' LMC [kiak], MM [tejaw] [teys]; 'fall' LMC [lak], MM [law] [luo]; 'white' LMC [pfisk], M M [paj] [po]; 'residence' LMC [trfiek], MM [tgaj] [tsv]; 'thief' LMC [tsfivk], MM [tsej] [tsv]; 'colour' LMC [§vk], MM [§aj] [SY]. In Early Mandarin of the
186
Ε. G. PULLEYBLANK
Yüan dynasty (1279-1368), as transcribed in the hp'AGS-PA alphabet (an adaptation of the Tibetan alphabet), only diphthongal forms are found: 'leg' gew, 'fall' law, 'white' pay, 'residence' cay, 'thief' tshiy, 'colour' shiy (Ν. B. -hi- is an orthographic convention for representing the Chinese central vowels [e] and [i].) The rhyme dictionary Chungyüan yin-yiin (early fourteenth century) is based on a slightly later form of the same Early Mandarin as spoken at the Yüan capital, present Peking (see Pulleyblank 1970-71). In this dictionary we find the same diphthongal forms but, in addition, other forms, particularly for Middle Chinese [ak], that are apparently ancestral to the alternative forms found in Modern Mandarin, e.g. 'fall' [b] as well as [law]. The usual assumption is that this mixing of forms in both Early and Modern Mandarin is the result of dialect mixture and this is made more plausible by the fact that the diphthongal forms such as [paj] 'white', [law] 'fall', [§aj] 'colour', are marked in the lexicon as 'colloquial' in contrast to the forms [po], [luo], [sv], which are considered to be 'literary' or 'reading' pronunciations. Matthew Chen has, however, developed an ingenious argument by which he tries to show that both forms could have developed internally within one dialect. It is suggested that, as Middle Chinese final -k was lost, it was replaced by a glottal stop, then by a -j or -w glide, depending on the preceding vowel, the vowel retaining a feature -long which distinguished the resulting diphthongs from existing diphthongs with the same segmental features: -ak > -äw, -ek > -aj, -vk > -ej. Thereafter two alternative developments took place: (1) the short diphthongs were monophthongized, after which the -long feature was lost, (2) the -long feature was lost without monophongization. Assuming that the two processes involved, monophthongization and loss of the feature -long, overlapped in time, this could explain, on the theory of lexical diffusion, why some morphemes developed in one way and other morphemes in the other. What is not made clear is how this could have given rise to doublets. One would suppose that by the theory of lexical diffusion any given lexical item that followed either route would thereby be removed from the competition and would no longer be available for the other route. This would result in a randomly distributed mixture of forms but would not yield two forms for the same lexical item. Of course we might suppose that different speakers or groups of speakers treated individual items differently and that the forms were later mixed, but this is just another version of the dialect-mixture theory which is explicitly rejected. The next case that will be discussed is also from the history of Man-
ABRUPTNESS AND GRADUALNESS
187
darin. It has not been noted by the advocates of the theory of lexical diffusion but it is one that at first sight might seem to support their ideas. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that such an explanation will not work and that one must assume the mixture of closely related dialect strains. It is a case in which there were two changes between Late Middle Chinese (ca. 800) and Early Mandarin (ca. 1300) of the type: A ->· B, C -> A. According to strict neogrammarian principles, either the first change is prior to the second, in which case the new forms in category A created by the second change are not affected, or the second change is prior to the first, in which case all the forms that originally belonged to category C become input for the change A -»• B. Either there is a complete merger of original categories A and C, or there is no merger. By the theory of lexical diffusion, on the other hand, the two changes may overlap in time, so that some lexical items go from C to A in time to become input for the change A -*• B, while others do not, and furthermore either or both changes may leave residues of items that did not happen to be affected before the changes ceased to operate. In Late Middle Chinese there was a distinction between palatalized and nonpalatalized labial (as well as velar) initials before -/-. Hence there were such contrasts as [mjisg] 'name' vs. [mieg] 'bright', [pjian] 'everywhere' vs. [pian] 'change', [pjit] 'necessarily' vs. [pit] 'writing brush', [mjit] 'honey' vs. [mit] 'dense; secret', [pjij] 'compare' vs. [pij] 'sad'. At some time between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries the palatal glide was lost after labial initials: (1) j - » 0 / Labial — This was a general rule that applied without restriction. In most cases contrasts such as those mentioned simply disappeared. In the case of words in [ij], however, another change occurred which complicated the picture, namely a rule which changed -i- to -u- after unpalatalized labial initials: (2)
i ->• u / Labial — j
According to the evidence of /zP'ags-pa orthography, this must have taken place before the operation of Rule (1). All words which had had [ij] in Late Middle Chinese after unpalatalized labial initials had become [uj], spelt -ue, merging with words that had had the rhyme [uaj] in Late Middle Chinese. Thus the word for 'sad' was spelt bue, like the word for 'cup', LMC [puaj], but contrasting with the word for 'compare' which was spelt bi. Rule (2) had also affected words which
188
Ε. G. PULLEYBLANK
had had final -t or -k in Late Middle Chinese, such as LMC [pit] 'writing brush' > [pij] > [puj], and LMC 'press upon' [pivk] > [pij] > [puj], both spelt bue, in contrast to LMC [pjit] 'necessarily' > [pjij] > [pij], and LMC [pjiaik] 'wall' > [pjij] > [pij], both spelt bi. The rhyme dictionary Chung-yiian yin-yiin, coming half a century or so later, shows predominantly the same pattern as the AP'ags-pa, but there are exceptions. Thus the word for 'low', LMC [pjij], is treated as a homophone of the words for 'sad' and 'cup' and must therefore be interpreted as [puj], as if it had lost its -j- glide earlier than the rest of the words in its category and in time to be affected by Rule (2). On the other hand, some words which should have shifted from [ij] to [uj] have failed to do so, as if they were a residue left over as a result of the incomplete operation of Rule (2). Since there are other reasons for thinking that AP'ags-pa spellings have sometimes been artificially normalized, it might be argued that the rhyme dictionary gives a truer picture of the actual situation in Early Mandarin, and that the apparent mixture of forms could be explained by the hypothesis that operation of the two changes had overlapped in time. When, however, we compare the situation as revealed in the Chungyiian yin-yiin with what we find in Modern Mandarin, this line of argument is seen to be invalid. In Modern Mandarin we still have two categories corresponding to Early Mandarin [uj] and [ij] after labial initials. The former has become [ei] by a general rule deleting -u- after labial initials in all syllables ending in a nasal or glide. The latter has become [i], having lost its final glide and no longer rhyming with [ei]. The membership of the two categories in Modern Mandarin does not, however, in many cases correspond to what we find in the Chung-yiian yin-yün. Many more words with unpalatalized initials in Middle Chinese fail to show loss of -i-. This applies in the first place to all words which originally ended in a stop. Thus the word for 'writing brush' is [pi], like the word for 'wall', and is no longer a homophone of [pej] 'north', LMC [pvk]. The same is true of many words which did not have a final stop in Middle Chinese, such as [pi] 'that' < LMC [pij], [p'i] 'great' < LMC [p'ij]. Some of the words with palatalized labial initials in Late Middle Chinese which irregularly show loss of -i- in the Chung-yiian yin-yün continue to do so in Modern Mandarin, e.g. [pej] 'low' (there is a taboo reason for avoiding the pronunciation [pi] in the first tone, Stimson 1966). Others do not, or we have double readings. The table shows how the Chung-yiian yin-yiin treats Late Middle Chinese [jij] and [ij] after labial initials and how Modern Mandarin treats these same forms. The
189
ABRUPTNESS AND GRADUALNESS
totals do not correspond exactly because a few Early Mandarin items are no longer current, and because some words have been counted twice since they have double readings in Mandarin. LMC [ij] [jij]
CYYY 31 [uj] 4 [ij] 8 [uj] 26 [ij]
M. [ej] [i] [ej] [i]
Mandarin 16 24 5 29
Since no words from the LMC [uaj] category, like [pej] 'cup', have developed [i] in Modern Mandarin, there is no possibility of explaining the forms which now have [i] from LMC [ij] as having developed out of forms in [uj] in Early Mandarin. We are therefore forced to the conclusion that they are derived directly from Middle Chinese through another form of early Mandarin not recorded in our sources. And since we must postulate more than one form of Early Mandarin to account for the forms of Modern Mandarin, it seems highly probable that the same explanation applies to the mixture of forms that we already find in the Chung-yüan yin-yün - only the proportions of the mix are not the same. As has been noted by Hashimoto (1969) and Stimson (1962a), there is another incongruence between the Chung-yüan yin-yün and Modern Mandarin which calls for a similar explanation, namely the way in which Grade II words with velar initials in the keng-rhyme group of Late Middle Chinese are treated. The predominant pattern for these words in Modern Mandarin is [ag]. A few words, particularly in the colloquial layer, have [ig], as in [eig] 'to go, act', or have alternative readings as in [ksq] ~ [teig] 'plough' (the latter reading being considered colloquial). In Early Mandarin, on the other hand, the predominant pattern was [ig]. AP'ags-pa shows this exclusively. Chung-yüan yin-yün shows mostly [ig] but has a few cases of [ag]. Since in Early Mandarin words which had [ig] after velar initials from other Late Middle Chinese categories still have [ig], the forms in [sg] again imply the existence of a different dialectal source for the forms which now have [sg]. It is striking that in this case, too, the Chung-yüan yin-yün, while showing a mixture of forms, agrees more with /zP'ags-pa than with Modern Mandarin, and with the colloquial, as opposed to the literary layer of Mandarin. The version of Early Mandarin represented by the AP'ags-pa transcriptions and by the dominant pattern in the Chung-yüan yin-yün was, presumably, based on the local dialect of Peking, which had been a capital under the preceding Liao and Chin dynasties in north China.
190
Ε. G. PULLEYBLANK
The rhyme dictionary shows that by the early fourteenth century this was beginning to be overlaid by another dialect, which must have had a certain degree of prestige since it influenced especially the literary layer. The source of this intrusion is unknown at present but one would guess that it had to do with the influx into Peking of literary men from Chiangnan after the completion of the Mongol conquest of Southern Sung in 1279. It is possible that a careful study of the evidence from early Ming times could throw light on this. No doubt other intrusions, coming at later periods, have also left their traces. While we shall probably never be able to separate out all the varied influences that have left their mark on present-day standard Mandarin, it would be rash to assume, particularly in the light of our present meagre knowledge about other Mandarin dialects, that we shall not be able to sort out at least the major strands. It is not, of course, suggested that dialect mixture is the only source of irregularities in the operation of laws of phonetic change. For example, there is an intriguing phenomenon in the history of Chinese noted by Demieville (1950), namely an apparent tendency for very common words, such as grammatical particles, to have pronunciations that one can describe as 'archaic'. No explanation has been worked out for this phenomenon and some people might be inclined to see in it the sporadic exemption of individual lexical items from regular phonetic changes. On the other hand, there is good reason to suspect that accentual features, which are of course not revealed by the script, may have been responsible (cf. Csongor 1959). One will never be able to explain everything in the history of languages, any more than in any other historical investigation, but there are many possibilities for rational explanation in terms of regular sound laws before one need be forced to accept that individual lexemes follow their own rules. University of British
Columbia
NOTE 1
Late Middle Chinese (LMC - ca. A. D. 800) forms are given in square brackets according to the 'practical phonetic transcription' outlined at the end of Pulleyblank 1970-71, with, however, ε and ο instead of as and h instead of h and § instead of δ. Early Mandarin (EM - ca. 1300) and Modern Mandarin (MM) forms are given according to a corresponding system. The hP'ags-pa alphabet is transcribed as in Pulleyblank 1970-71.
ABRUPTNESS AND GRADUALNESS
191
REFERENCES Bloomfield, L. 1933. Language. London: Allen and Unwin. Chen, Matthew. 1971. The time dimension: contribution toward a theory of sound change. Project on Linguistic Analysis 12. Phonology Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. Chen, Matthew and Hsin-i Hsieh. 1970. The time variable in phonological change. Journal of Linguistics 7. Csongor, Barnabas. 1959. A contribution to the history of the ching-yin. Acta Orientalia Hungarica 9.15-83. Demi6ville, Paul. 1950. Archai'smes de prononciation en chinois vulgaire. T'oung Pao 40.1-59. Hashimoto, Mantaro J. 1969. Internal evidence for Ancient Chinese palatal endings. Lg. 46.336-65. Hockett, C. F. 1958. A course in modern linguistics. New York: MacMillan. King, R. D. 1969. Historical linguistics and generative grammar. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall Pulleyblank, E. G. 1970-71. Late Middle Chinese. Asia Major 15.197-239 and 16.121-68 Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1915. Cours de linguistique generale, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Paris: Payot. Stimson, Η. M. 1962a. Phonology of the Chüng-yüän ynl-yun. Tsinghua. Journal of Chinese Studies, n.s. 3.114-59 —, 1962b. Ancient Chinese -p, -t, -k endings in the Peking dialect. Lg. 38.376-84. —, 1966. A tabu word in the Peking dialect. Lg. 42.285-94. Wang, William S-Y. 1969. Competing change as a cause of residue. Lg. 45.9-25. —, 1970. Project D O C : its methodological basis. JAOS 90. 57-66. Wang, William S-Y. and C. C. Cheng. 1970. Implementation of phonological change: the Shuang-feng case. Project on Linguistic Analysis 10.1-9.
A LATIN CONSPIRACY MARIO D. SALTARELLI
In a classic article N. C. W. Spence (1965) reviews the major theories proposed to explain in structural terms the Vulgar Latin change from a vowel system based on quantitative oppositions to one based on qualitative ones: Lausberg's (1947) substratum theory, Juilland-and-Haudricourt's (1949) symmetry of the system hypothesis, and Weinrich's (1958) proposal based on the reduction of possible types of vowel plus consonant as regards the feature length. In this paper I assume the position, proposed elsewhere (Saltarelli 1970), that the quantity-to-quality change is a theoretical artifact. I argue, on the other hand, that the prime mover in the development of Neo-Latin speech is the reduction in the length types of VC syllables, and that to this change in phonetic constraints we can look for an explanation of some phonological processes. Conversely, one can say that certain phonological processes conspire against underlying representations which do not conform to a VÜ/VC type of syllable structure. The argument is held with synchronic as well as diachronic implications. The facts relevant to the reduction of syllabic length types in NeoLatin speech, as far as known, can be summarized as follows: (1)
(early Latin late Latin Italian
(
V C Ϋ C Ϋ C
nüllus, villa fidem, gulam, focum pullam, fissum, buccam
{Spanish V C mürum, cärum, vinum, vöcem The consonant clusters represented in the above examples illustrate only geminate types. The Latin VC type included, however, also nongeminate clusters, as in früctus, which appears to have resisted change longer than the geminate type. In Romance we find that it coalesced with the VC type in Spanish and Italian. In the latter language there was regressive assimilation of certain consonant clusters like ct and mn. In Spanish
194
MARIO D. SALTARELLI
the only VC subtype of geminate clusters which survives is rr: Lat. currere > Sp. correr.
In brief, in Romance the four logically and empirically possible types of Latin [VC, VC,, VC, VC] have been reduced to [VC, VC]. The length congruent types have been collapsed with the congruent types in the case of Spanish and Italian in the following manner: (2)
Latin VC pilum VC früctum
Italian VC pelo VC frütto
Spanish VC pelo VC früio
The purpose of this paper is twofold. I show that a phonological phenomenon in Romance RAFFORZAMENTO, or strengthening of word initial consonants in Italian, is a predictable consequence of a more general phonetic phenomenon: the collapsing of the length syllable types. Furthermore, I suggest on the basis of this data that the rules of a phonological system, as conceived in current generative grammars, divide themselves into two major sets, significantly different in nature: the set of rules characterizing phonetic constraints (to which we shall refer as PC rules), and the set of rules characterizing phonological (lexical) processes (PR, henceforth). It is proposed, in this connection, that synchronically only PC statements can claim some kind of mental reality as they define open sets, as opposed to PR statements which generalize over closed lexical sets. Furthermore, diachronically only PC rules are proper characterizations of the notion of SOUND CHANGE, as PRs are roughly predictable functions of historical developments in PCs. The relevance of the function of phonetic length obtaining between a vowel and the following consonantal group has long been recognized in Romance (cf. Weinrich 1958). In the case of Italian it was characterized by Porena (1908) as a METRIC SYLLABLE, a unit in the speech sequence which the ear can perceive as a well-defined measure. The word amore 'love' is -am-or-e in terms of Porena's metric syllable. Notice the -e does not constitute alone a metric syllable, but in running speech it will form a syllable with the initial consonant of the following word. Thus amore fedele 'faithful love' would be
#-am-or-e#f-ed-el-e#.
The importance of this perceptual/acoustic unit has been widely investigated since the earliest studies of Italian pronunciation, by Bembo
A LATIN CONSPIRACY
195
(1549), Panconcelli-Calzia (1911), Josselyn (1900), Parmenter and Carman (1932) among others (cf. Saltarelli, 1970:11). As we mentioned in the previous section, the only possible VC syllables in Italian are the complementary types VC/VC, where a long consonant symbol C represents, in addition to the phonetically long geminates as in palla 'ball', also clusters of consonants as in festa 'feast'. Furthermore, it must be noted that, next to a pause, a final unstressed vowel in plurisyllables is phonetically short, as is an initial consonant next to a pause. In other words, in Italian: (3) (a) VC sequences are of only two types: vC/Vc (b) pause initial and final segments are short Thus we have instances of VC in amore, fedele, and VC in palla, festa when these items are in isolation. Moreover, in the same words the final vowels and the initial consonants are short by definition, as they are not part of the length alternating syllabic unit VC/VC characterizing the phonetics of the language. Now notice that the final -e in amore will form a syllabic unit with the inital /- of fedele in the noun phrase amore fedele, namely the -ef. Since, as we have discussed, the value of the feature length is minus for both segments in their respective isolated words, we would expect a syllabic unit of the form VC. Instead, in running speech, the length composition obtained is -ef. An adjustment has therefore occurred in the syllable structure from VC to the phonetically well-formed complementary type VC. On the face of it, one can theorize that the underlying lexical representation has been subject to, or, to use another term, has been governed by the constraint that all VC units must conform to the alternating length type. It would follow then that at least some PRs, the rules relating underlying representations to corresponding broad-surface representations are reducible to PCs, like the alternating syllable constraint, and therefore predictable from them. The constraint is informally stated as follows: (4) Underlying representations must conform to an Alternating Length Syllable (ALS) structure We shall assume tentatively that the primacy of PCs over at least some PRs is a correct generalization. That the syllabic adjustment VC VC is not a phonological process independent of the ALS constraint is supported by the fact that in noun phrases like amore stanco 'tired love' the lexically short -e remains unchanged as it forms a syllabic unit with
196
MARIO D. SALTARELLI
the consonantal cluster st- of the following word. An explanation for the behavior of the final -e in amore is readily available in terms of the ALS constraint. In fact in the latter case the resulting syllable -est- is phonetically well-formed, i.e., VC. The ALS constraint governs, in an equally clear manner, the process by which word initial consonants are lengthened in Italian, better known as RAFFORZAMENTO or RADDOPPIAMENTO. Although it has been identified as a phonetic process in many studies of Italian pronunciation (cf. Saltarelli 1970:15), recent structural descriptions (notably Hall 1948, 1971:53) offer no phonological explanation but a syntactic (lexical) account. It is presented as an independent phenomenon governed by a list of lexical items. I have shown elsewhere (Saltarelli 1970:28) that the syntactic account of RAFFORZAMENTO misses a wider generalization observed in the phonetics of the language. Here I maintain furthermore that this phenomenon is another consequence of the ALS constraint. In fact, in phrases like parlo forte Ί speak aloud' and parlo forte 'he spoke aloud', we find, as in the cases discussed earlier, a word-final short vowel -o which forms a YC syllable with the initial consonant /of the following word. In both phrases the result is a unit which does not conform to the ALS constraint, i.e., VC in the former and VC in the latter. A PR definition of the adjustment processes will have to yield opposite results. VC is adjusted to the VC type: parl[öi]orte. VC, on the other hand, changes to VC: parl[ol]orte. It is this latter type of phenomenon that has been singled out as RAFFORZAMENTO. However, on the strength of the arguments just presented, it is clearly an instance of a more general phonological process of length adjustment governed by the ALS constraint. The phonological regularity for Italian (Saltarelli 1970:86) is informally stated as follows: (5) (a) C are C after V (b) V are V before C The ALS constraint, a general characteristic of Neo-Latin speech, governs a similar length adjustment process in Spanish (cf. Saltarelli 1971). Crucial examples of RAFFORZAMENTO which seem to have led structural descriptions to disregard this phenomenon as explainable in phonetic terms involve monosyllabic items like a 'to', e 'and', da 'from', tra 'between', in 'in', la 'the', etc., as in the following phrases:
A LATIN CONSPIRACY
(6) a casa [äkasa] e come [ekome] tra noi [tränoi]
197
da casa [däkasa] la casa [läkasa] in alto [inalto]
In view of a grammatical description embodying the phonological rule 5 governed by the phonetic constraint 4, data of the type 6 find direct explanation, in agreement with the statements proposed in early grammarians like Bembo (1549) and phoneticians like Panconcelli-Calzia (1911). Such grammatical description implies, in addition, that the underlying representation of the monosyllables in 6 includes vowel length as a predicate as opposed to stress, i.e., / ä, dä, e, lä, trä, /. In conclusion, a vowel-length-based synchronic description of Italian allows us to capture relevant grammatical generalizations not possible in a stress-based description. The diachronic inference we can draw from this is that, as regards the feature length, the only type of sound change for which there is plausible structural evidence is the reduction to a complementary syllable type. No descriptive empirical arguments of this kind have been proposed, to my knowledge, which would support the contrary. Arguments presented in this paper support the position that the quantity-to-quality sound change has no descriptive or empirical basis. University of Illinois REFERENCES Bembo, P. 1549. Prose della volgar lingua. Hall, R. A. 1948. Descriptive Italian grammar. Ithaca: Cornell U. Press. Hall, R. A. 1971. La struttura dell'italiano. Roma: Armando. Josselyn, F. 1900. Etude sur la phonitique italienne. Paris. Juilland, Α., and Haudricourt A. 1949. Essai pour une histoire structurale du phon6tisme frangais. Paris. Lausberg, Η. 1947. Zum romanischen Vokalismus. Romanische Forschungen L X Panconcelli-Calzia, G. 1911. Italiano. Leipzig. Parmenter, C., and Carman, J. 1932, Some remarks on Italian quantity. Italica 9. Porena, M. 1908. Sillabe brevi e sillabe lunghe nella poesia italiana. Note di lingua e stile. Napoli. Saltarelli, M. 1970. A phonology of Italian in a generative grammar. The Hague: Mouton. Saltarelli, M. 1973. Italian qua Neo-Latin. Generative studies in Romance linguistics, ed. by J. Casagrande and B. Saciuk. Spence, N . C. W. 1965. Quantity and quality in the vowel-system of Vulgar Latin. Word 21. Weinrich, H. 1958. Phonologische Studien zur romanischen Sprachgeschichte. Münster.
SOME MODAL FEATURES COMMON TO ENGLISH, GERMAN, AND SCANDINAVIAN LAURITS SALTVEIT
A contrastive view in linguistics may clear up particular points in the languages concerned. In addition to this it can often throw light on some linguistic problems of general interest. P. Kiparsky (1970:267if.) has already touched on the problem of modals by comparing English and Swedish. He points out that the modals frequently have two different deep structures represented by a single surface structure. He is also concerned with the rather unpleasant situation arising from the fact that it is impossible to find transformation rules and surface-structure interpretation rules that might explain the occurrence of the modals in two kinds of deep structures, while the surface structures in which they are found happen to coincide. Referring to previous works by Ross (1967) and Perlmutter (1968), he states in a very sound critical way that in such cases the relation between the two kinds of deep structure supposed is unclear: 'Certainly no one can be satisfied with calling it simply accidental homonymy', nor can it be regarded as transformational derivation 'since neither is a plausible source for the other and the meanings in any case differ' (269). Kiparsky seems to agree with Ross and Perlmutter in describing the two meanings in the deep structure as one expressing obligation with a transitive modal verb, Ottokar muss singen (Ross 1967:9), and another one expressing probability with an intransitive modal verb, Ottokar muss Krebs haben (Ross 11). The main trouble is caused by the fact that the modal is the same in both cases. But the dichotomy transitive-intransitive does not seem to give a plausible explanation at all, since, as the discussion after the presentation of Kiparsky's paper shows (Kiparsky 1970:288 ff.), and as I have had the opportunity to check myself, the sentence: Brevet kan gä förlorat och boken kan det ocksä is not ungrammatical in Swedish. On the other hand, the expanded German sentence given by Ross (11): Ottokar muss Krebs haben, und das musst du auch really seems to have a low degree
200
LAURITS SALTVEIT
of acceptability, but the reason for this is first of all the brutality of the expression in addressing a person. A less dangerous illness makes it more acceptable: Otto muss die Masern ('the measles') haben, und das musst du auch·, or: ... und dasselbe musst du. Probably ungrammatical is: ...*und du musst es auch, with the unstressed pronoun es, but this does not prove that the opposition transitive-intransitive is relevant to the problem. Perlmutter (1970:115) regards must in the sentence: Clyde must work hard as 'a transitive-intransitive verb doublet', and in a similar manner Langendoen (1970) characterizes the sentence The student must know the answer as 'in fact ambiguous', and considers that it 'imposes on its argument either the specification that it is an obligation or that it is certainty' (115-16). (In the latter case I should prefer to speak of probability, but with some degree of certainty.) In European linguistics the problem has been already dealt with in several - traditional or independent - ways. The two basic meanings are often called OBJECTIVE and SUBJECTIVE respectively,1 or the distinction is made more or less definite in other terms. 2 Taking as my starting point the German werden with infinitive (the so-called German future), I have treated the same problem in several works (Saltveit 1957, 1960, 1962, 1969, 1970). Instead of focusing on the ACTIONALITY (used for Ger. AKTIONSART or AKTIONALITÄT) of the infinitive verb (IV). The following is a brief summary of my results: 1. The meaning of necessity (or obligation), the 'objective' meaning, is combined with a distinct reference to the future (Ger.: Er wird kommen). 2. The meaning of probability, the 'subjective' meaning, is combined with an equally distinct reference to the non-future, i.e. present or past. 3. The reference to the future can be produced in two different ways: (a) by the punctual (perfective) actionality of the infinitive verb (IV marked with +p). Hence the example quoted above, Er wird kommen, will always refer to the future, whereas the same construction with a durative verb (IV marked with -p), Er wird da sein, refers to the present if no other meaning is implied by context or situation. In combination with a past participle it refers to the immediate past: Er wird gekommen seinjda gewesen sein, (b) by elements in the context or situation referring to the whole phrase ( + K ) : Er wird morgen da sein/gekommen sein are just as prospective (and necessary) as Er wird kommen.3 This system is complicated by the fact that the actionality in the sense used above is not always linked with the verb itself and, if it is, not
SOME MODAL FEATURES
201
carried by special elements in the same manner as the aspect in the Slavic languages. On the contrary, it is very often produced by contextual elements referring very closely to the verb and frequently connected with it orthographically. Thus the derivatives abfahren and nach Hause fahren, unlike the durative fahren, must be regarded as punctual, this being exclusively due to the elements ab and nach Hause (k), which for this reason must be considered as equivalents to p. Hence the meaning of futurity (F) of a sentence containing werden + inf. may have two seperate causes: (a) The process can be lifted from the present into futurity by means of an element Κ such as morgen: [w + IV] + Κ = F. We call this MACROSYNTAGMATIC determination, (b) The IV may be originally punctual (+p), or an originally durative (—ρ) or indifferent (=Lp) verb may have adopted an element k, which qualifies it as a punctual verb. In the sentence Die Uhr wird gehen, the verb gehen is obviously durative, if no further influence arises from context or situation (compare footnote 3 above), and the time reference of the sentence is present. But in der Zug wird abgehen/in die Halle gehen, already the subject der Zug predisposes us for some degree of punctuality, which is completed by ab or in die Halle. In both cases the expressions are prospective, just like der Zug wird kommen. We might here speak of MICROSYNTAGMATIC determination: [w + IV + k] = F. 4 In the following we therefore take into account only one factor called p/k. These rather simple and clear facts in German cannot be transferred directly either to English or to Scandinavian, because a verb functionally corresponding to Ger. werden is lacking in those languages. But as I have shown in previous works (Saltveit 1962:254, footnote, and 1969:180f.) the modals do not in principle behave differently from werden in German. If we choose as a starting point the German modals sollen and müssen, which seem to be the most typical, we are justified in making the following statement: Sentences with durative IV, e.g. er soll hier sein/wohnen and er muss hier sein/wohnen, both of them without any element K, denote that something is taking place in the present. They are not mutually synonymous, and neither of them is synonymous with the corresponding expression with werden: er wird hier sein/wohnen. The latter denotes probability as a pure supposition, soll + IV — p/k probability based upon testimony or rumour, and muss + IV — p/k probability founded upon more impersonal basis. If we try to handle wollen in the same manner, we notice at the outset that the sentence er will hier sein jwohnen does not fit into the same pattern: It is prospective and, on account of the volitional element inherent in
202
LAURITS SALTVEIT
wollen, denotes volition. But under particular circumstances we can even here have a meaning of present combined with a SUBJECTIVE modal content 'pretend to', e.g. er will sehr klug sein. Perhaps this double meaning of wollen + IV — p/k is the most difficult point of our analysis. With IV + p/k the three modals are all prospective, indicating as they do a regular OBJECTIVE meaning corresponding to their lexical sense: er soll kommen duty, er muss kommen necessity, er will kommen volition, to put it very simply. This double set of meanings is in principle the same with [IV — p/k] + K: er soll/muss/will morgen hier sein/wohnen. The same relations manifest themselves in the Scandinavian modals: 5 han skal vcerejbo her and han ma vcerejbo her have exactly the same modal and temporal content as the corresponding German sentences, and combined with komme the modals adopt in a similar way the OBJECTIVE modality and the temporal meaning of futurity. The modal ville, like Ger. wollen, can have the content of SUBJECTIVE modality and present time, especially with the IV vcere 'be', but it does not assume the sense of 'pretend', as in German. On the contrary, Norw. detjhan vil vcere kjent denotes pure probability in the present time, and is synonymous with Ger.: esjer wird bekannt sein. Equally with another durative verb Norw. som De vil vite means exactly the same as Ger. wie Sie wissen werden, but this use seems to be especially frequent with the so-called copula-verb 'be'. The inertia of this verb in connection with 'subjective' modality and the meaning of present time may be due to the stative and nondynamic character of this verb. Experiments with German verbs have shown that this feature of stativeness as a factor of durative actionality is often more decisive than pure duration in time (Saltveit 1969:181). This partial restriction of the 'subjective' function upon the verb be that we have just noticed with Scand. ville seems to be characteristic of English modals in general. The reason may be that the opposition punctual-durative is approximately neutralized in English single verbs, perhaps because the so-called PROGRESSIVE FORM has taken over the semantic category that is covered in German by single durative verbs. It should be noted that the principal constituent in this periphrastic form is precisely the verb be. With this verb most English modals can form infinitive constructions with 'subjective' modality and the temporal content of present time. To the question who is knocking at the door ?, the following answers may be given: it must/can/may bejought to be)will be Mr. Brown, all of them denoting different degrees of present-time probability. To what extent
SOME MODAL FEATURES
203
this semantic element may be retained with other verbs expressing some degree of duration and with a personal subject is difficult to say for a nonnative speaker, but it seems to be possible with certain verbs denoting a minimum of activity and dynamics such as live. In the cases with personal subject we probably have to exclude the modal will, which in combination with such a verb always tends towards a prospective meaning: he will bejlive there, denoting future and a minimum of volition, whereas he must/can/may j ought to bejlive there may all have a 'subjective' modality and a meaning of present time. But it must be regarded as symptomatic that be living more easily than the simple live adopts the meaning of present-time supposition. If in certain cases he will be living there denotes volition and futurity, it can be explained by the fact that be living at times is interpreted as a continuative verb (= stay, compare above footnote 3). Marked with + K , all sentences above are either ungrammatical, *it mustj canjmay bejought to be Mr. Brown tomorrow, or they adopt the meaning of futurity and the 'objective' modal meaning at the same time: he must/can/may bejought to bej will be there tomorrow. (The two modal meanings of may must be rather close to each other). One modal is missing in the list above: shall. The sentence *it shall be Mr. Brown is apparently ungrammatical, and he shall bejlive there exhibits the semantic elements 'future' and, more or less definitly, 'duty'. English here seems to have a feature in common with Swedish, which has replaced skal + IV — p/k by lär + IV — p/k (compare Kiparsky 1970:269, and above footnote 4). For some reason or other English, instead of the corresponding construction with shall, obviously makes use of other expressions, such as be supposed to. Norwegian and Danish have skal and German soil in this function. In conclusion, the transformation problem posed by Kiparsky seems to be reduced to a question of lexical transformation. By labelling the IV as —p/k on the one hand, or as +p/k on the other, we obtain two sets of meanings, one containing the two elements 'subjective' modality (i.e. different degrees of probability) and present time, and another containing the 'objective' modal elements 'necessity', 'duty', and 'volition' (according to the modals used) and the temporal element of future. In the latter case the modal element of Ger. werden + IV + p / k apparently can be regarded as an almost totally abstract necessity, which makes it suitable for the use as a future tense: er wird kommen. In the first case the verbal group, if labelled + K (i.e. macrosyntagmatic futurity)
204
LAURITS SALTVEIT
as a whole, changes automatically its modality from 'subjective' to 'objective'. Some trouble is caused by Ger. wollen in: er will klug sein and er will hier sein, two utterances with the same modal and both with the IV sein, but obviously belonging to different types. Equally difficult are the two sentences above, taken from Perlmutter and Langendoen: Clyde must work hard, and The student must know the answer. In the attempt to explain this phenomenon, which really looks like 'simply accidental homonymy', it might be useful to turn back to the factor of STATIVENESS as an important semantic part of the notion DURATIVE. If we study the PRESUPPOSITION for the German sentence, no doubt the abstract klug sein is more 'stative' than the local hier sein. The first presupposes that the speaker in his own opinion is clever, the second that somebody is not here yet, but HAS TO COME, which seems to be rather dynamic. In other words, hier sein in this case implies a good deal of activity. Perlmutter paraphrases his sentence in the 'subjective' meaning as: 'It must be the case that Clyde works hard.' This evidently indicates stativeness. The 'objective' meaning presupposes that he does not work hard, but should do so. In a corresponding manner, Langendoen's sentence in the first case indicates a stative knowledge whose only presupposition is that the speaker is not mistaken. In the second case the verb know, like the verb in the preceding example, presupposes the notion that the student HAS TO FIND the answer if he doesn't know it yet. Symtomatic of German might be the sentence, taken from Ross, Ottokar muss singen. This ordinarily expresses future and obligation, except in a rare case where singen is used to mean 'be singing'. This may possibly occur if the sentence is pronounced as an answer to the question: Was sind denn das für merkwürdige Töne? - Ah, Ottokar muss singen ('must be singing'). But it does not sound very natural, and more currently one should say: Es muss O. sein, der singt. Here emerges an essential difference between English and German: The English verb slides down into the condition of stativeness by connecting be with the pres. part, of the verb in question, must be singing', the German by means of a modal + IV sein ('be') + an embedded relative clause with the verb in question as a predicate. The Scandinavian here has the same rule as the German, e.g. Norw.: det m& vcere O. som synger.6 This leads us to the conclusion that sometimes in German and Scandinavian, and often in English, we have to add the factor + STATIVE
SOME M O D A L FEATURES
205
to —p/k in labelling the IV for the 'subjective' meaning of a modal construction. In English this seems to be the predominant factor for seperating the two main meanings, and in general it is in all the languages concerned characteristic for the verb 'be', but not equally present in all occurrences of this verb. As the stative factor always presupposes the absence of p/k, it should be possible to simplify the procedure outlined above in such a way that as a general rule a modal + IV marked +stative produces SUBJECTIVE modality (probability) and present time, and a modal + IV marked —stative produces OBJECTIVE modality (duty, necessity, or volition, according to the sense of the modal in question) and future. This would be a microsyntagmatic determination. That the modality of probability implies the meaning of present time is confirmed if we label the English sentences with + K , e.g. the adverb tomorrow: The student must know the answer tomorrow and Clyde must work hard tomorrow can obviously only be understood as obligation. The same is shown in a negative way if we add the corresponding adverb to the above German sentence denoting modality of pretention: *Er will morgen klug sein is ungrammatical. This (not always meaningful) labelling of the whole phrase with + K and — Κ respectively seems to be the second, macrosyntagmatic type of determination leading to the transformations wanted. I hope that these somewhat scattered remarks may have helped to enlighten some difficult but interesting problems of a general nature, and I also hope to have shown that not only is the comparison of languages in linguistics important, but also that a confrontation of methods can lead to fruitful discussion between scholars holding divergent views on methodical problems. I am especially pleased to say this in a publication in honor of a person whose openmindedness is well-known. University of Oslo
NOTES 1
As by Welke (1965), Schulz and Griesbach (1965), Jorgensen (1966), Fourquet (1970), the latter only with 'subjektiven' in the heading, and without mentioning the 'objective' meaning. 2 Admoni (1970:165f.) calls the first LOGISCH-GRAMMATISCH, the second KOMMUNIKATIV-GRAMMATISCH; I myself, considering only the Ger. werden + inf., designate the first as a theoretical MODAL ZERO (or MODUS RECTUS), the second as modalities differing from this point (Saltveit 1962:114ff.). Among American scholars Hofmann
206
LAURITS SALTVEIT
(1966) and Newmeyer (1969:120ff.) use the terms ROOT and EPISTEMIC relatively (not as meanings, but as separate modals), Kiparsky (1970:2) DEONTIC and EPISTEMIC. None of the terms are quite clear, but for practical reasons I use henceforth OBJECTIVE a n d SUBJECTIVE. 3
I also operate with a third category, continuative, producing a somewhat different kind of futurity, such as bleiben and compounds of duratives and special particles like weiter, fort (e.g. weiterleben) in German, and periphrastic constructions with keep in English (e.g. keep crying). This actionality also may occasionally be produced by the situation, but as it does not seem to be very frequent I did not take it into consideration here. 4 I have adopted the terms MICROSYNTAGMATIC, and MACROSYNTAGMAHC from Sherebkov 1967 because I find them rather plausible and clear. But I disagree with him on several fundamental points. It is difficult to place the influence from the grammatical person in this duality. The first person very often can make the meaning of a construction prospective. Possibly this is in reality an influence of the situation, effected by the use of person (Saltveit 1962:132, 140). As I prefer not to burden this short exposition with such a marginal problem, I bring all examples in the third person here. 5 For good reasons I have chosen my mother tongue Norwegian as representative for the Scandinavian languages. The only deviation from Swedish of any weight is the construction lär + inf. with a 'subjective' modal meaning, mentioned by Kiparsky. The verb seems to have developed from lära 'lern', and the corresponding verb has in some German dialects (especially in Thuringia) a similar function (Spangenberg 1967:240). This interesting detail does not affect the system as a whole, nor does it the fact that Swed. mäste is etymologically different from Dan./Norw. md. 6 I do not ignore the fact that this manner of embedding a relative clause is also possible in English and may have an additional emphatic function. Examples of a modal + be + embedded /Aai-clause are found in Newmeyer 1969:126f., which also brings up several other interesting details - and some confusing ones, such as when he puts the preterites could, should together with can, shall (122) without considering that they (and perhaps even might) in a context of present time may have an additional modal meaning (Saltveit 1969:174ff.).
REFERENCES Admoni, Wladimir. 1970. Der deutsche Sprachbau. München: Beck'sehe Verlagsbuchhandlung. Fourquet, Jean. 1970. Zum 'subjektiven' Gebrauch der deutschen Modalverba. Sprache der Gegenwart 6, ed. by Hugo Moser et al, 154-61. Düsseldorf: Schwann. Hellquist, Elof. 1957. Etymologisk ordbok. Lund: Gleerup. Hofman, T. Ronald. 1966. Past tense replacement and the modal system. Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, Mathematical Linguistics and Automatic Translation. Report No. NSF-17. Jorgensen, Peter. 1966. Tysk Grammatik. Vol 3. Copenhague: Gad. Kiparsky, Paul. 1970. Semantic rules in grammar. The Nordic languages and modern linguistics. (Proceedings of the International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics. University of Iceland, Reykjavik, July 6-11, 1969.) Reykjavik: Visindafelag Islendinga. Langendoen, D. Terence. 1969. The study of syntax. The generative-transformational approach to the structure of American English. New York: Holt. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1969. English aspectual verbs. (Studies in linguistics and language learning, 6.) Seattle: University of Washington.
SOME MODAL FEATURES
207
Perlmutter, David M. 1968. Deep and surface structure constraints. MIT dissertation. —, 1970. The two verbs Begin. Readings in English transformational grammar, ed. by Roderick A. Jacobs, and Peter S. Rosenbaum, 107-19. Waltham, Mass./ Toronto/London: Ginn and Company. Ross, John Robert. 1967. Auxiliaries as main verbs, preliminary version. [Cambridge, Mass.]: MIT (mimeogr.). Saltveit, Laurits. 1960. Besitzt die deutsche Sprache ein Futur? Der Deutschunterricht 12,5:46-65. —, 1962. Studien zum deutschen Futur. Ärbok for Universitetet i Bergen. Humanistisk serie 1961 No. 2. Bergen/Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press. —, 1969. Das Verhältnis Tempus-Modus, Zeitinhalt und Modalität im Deutschen. Festschrift für Hugo Moser, ed. Ulrich Engel et al. Düsseldorf: Schwann. —, 1970. Synonymik und Homonymie im deutschen Tempussystem. Sprache der Gegenwart 6, ed. by Hugo Moser et al, 137-53. Düsseldorf: Schwann. Schulz, Dora, Griesbach and Heinz. 1965. Grammatik der deutschen Sprache. München: Hueber. Sherebkov, V. A. 1967. Zum Zeitbezug beim deutschen Modalverb. Deutsch als Fremdsprache 4:357-61. Spangenberg, Karl. 1967. Thüringisches Wörterbuch. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Welke, Klaus. 1965. Untersuchungen zum System der Modalverben in der deutschen Sprache der Gegenwart. Schriften für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 10. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
THE PREVERBAL GOTHIC ga-1 PHILIP SCHERER
PHASE 1
1. The present study elaborates a new theory of the function of the preverbal ga-: it is the theory of contextual design, CD, which thus replaces the author's earlier syntactic model, SM (Scherer 1964, 1970); either of these theories considers irrelevant Streitberg's imputation of an aspectual function, AF (Scherer 1954; Pollak 1971). 2.0 We shall, to begin with, test the theories of AF and SM by applying each of them to a pair of Gothic utterances that are in near-minimal contrast (§ 2.0-.2); then, after outlining its structure and applying the CD to the same example, suggest the feasibility of the CD as a working hypothesis (§3.0-.l); finally, elaborate this theory in its systematic application to a particular class of verbs (§§3.1-5.). (Mk 8.8): #gamatidedun pan jah sadai waurpun# 'ephagon kai ekhortästhesan: they then ate and were sated' vs. (L 9.17): φ jah matidedun jah sadai war pun allai# 'kai ephagon kai ekhortästhesan päntes: and they all ate and were sated'. 2.1 (AF): Streitberg (1910:92) speaks of the ga- form as an 'effective perfective' and, parenthetically, of the simplex as opposed to it, '(vgl. dagegen das Simplex L 9.17)' (ibid.) One wonders at the basis for his assumption of divergence of function corresponding to divergence of form. Can it be that the basis for it is in an assumed parallelism between the Gothic and Greek tense systems which would then in equal measure support the designation of either the ga- form or the simplex as 'effective perfectives'?2 Yet merely to suggest such a possibility reveals its farfetched quality since divergence of function accompanying divergence of form may be taken to reflect the Gothic system as much as identity between function and form presumably reflects the Greek system. Clearly indicated is the quest for the understanding of function from within the given Corpus.
210
PHILIP SCHERER
2.2 (SM): This was an attempt in line with such an indication, as it limited itself in its study of function to the syntactic frames of Gothic alone. It distinguished two such frames, a combinative frame which generated either ga- or zero- forms, whose function was one of temporal modification - of anteriority, of subsequence, or of occurrence - and an isolate frame which restricted itself to the zero form functioning in unmodified temporality. Of the two, the ga- form was marked since it functioned only in temporal modification, while the simplex was unmarked; alone in the isolate frame, in free variation with the ga- form in the combinative frame. The SM considers both the marked gamatidedun and the unmarked matidedun in anteriority to the past of sadai waurpun: they (first) ate and (then) they were sated. There are two weaknesses in this approach. One of them is the introduction of an uncontrolled element such as free variation into the structure of basic theory. In a Corpus such as Gothic which but for a tentative adumbration of them in the future tense lacked explicit formal means that functioned in tense modification, the uncontrolled operation of free variation might in the long run result in the elimination of the marked form from the combinative frames along with the obliteration of its function of tense modification. The other weakness of the SM is its assumption that the syntactic possibilities are sufficiently wide to account by themselves alone for the frequently contradictory marking of the categories of tense modification: in our example, the marked anteriority of gamatidedun as against the unmarked subsequence of waurpun,3 or in the citation below (§4.11), the unmarked anteriority of mat ja jah drigka 'phägö kai ρίδ' as against the marked subsequence of gamatjis jah gadrigkais 'phdgesai kai piesaV. Assuredly, within the SM gamatidedun is inadmissible within an isolated utterance, such as #gamatidedun*pan# or #jah gamatidedun* #. Yet such forms as these do occur in the Corpus and they find an explanation if we abandon the hypothesis of tense modification with its narrow syntactic frame and substitute for it the hypothesis of Linkage within an expanded contextual framework: in other words, the theory of contextual design, CD. 3.0 (CD): It introduces the verbal situation, which is a semantic aggregate, as its core unit of analysis. This is labeled VS, and its components are two verbal events, an initial linked verbal event VEi or Discriminate, D-ate, and a linking verbal event, VE2 or Discriminant, D-ant; the entire VS is a Discriminate VS which is thus distinguished from a non-
THE PREVERBAL GOTHIC ga-
211
Discriminate VS that comprises only an initial non-linked VE; the linked VEi shall be referred to as +D-ate, and the non-linked YE as —VE or —D-ate; the Discriminate YS as +VS, and the non-Discriminate VS as —VS. Further, the linking D-ant either precedes the D-ate, D-and -L -»· D-ate, or it follows it, D-ate