Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[Swammerdami]

The thread title "Language as a Clue to Prehistory" is a fascinating topic. Historic events like imperial conquests by the Romans, Arabs, and Turks are plainly visible in the present-day distribution of languages. BUT some prehistoric events are invisible in the archaeological record and can ONLY be discovered via linguistic evidence. The Bantu and Austronesian expansions are vividly apparent in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. The Algonquin language family is best known from encounters along the Atlantic coast by early American settlers (the Powhatan of Virginia and Wampanoag of Massachusetts) but many expert historical linguists agree — though this is still very controversial — that this language family originated far to the West, perhaps near Montana.

The most pondered language grouping of all is the Indo-European language family, which extended in pre-history from Ireland to Siberia and India. The homeland and expansion of the I-E family was one of the great mysteries of the social sciences, and has finally been resolved by careful study of linguistic evidence, assisted by DNA evidence.

Do the details of I-E case markers offer clues to I-E development and expansion? If so, please connect the dots. I don't see it.

The I-E Homeland, and its outward radiation beginning with Anatolian (Hittite) ca 4000 BC is now rather well understood. It is STUNNING how much can be deduced, and how well the archaeological, linguistic, and DNA evidence fit together like a hand fits a glove. The corpse called Amesbury Archer found buried richly at Stonehenge (ca 2370 BC) probably spoke a language ancestral to Celtic; his agnatic ancestry can be traced back to West Central Europe, to the Yamnaya (P-I-E) of East Central Europe, and from there to the Samara culture near the Volga River ca 4400 BC.

The big exception is Germanic — its detailed development is uncertain. I commented on this earlier in the thread, though without any apparent interest from fellow Infidels.

Development of proto-Germanic language is a mystery

With one exception the relationships — at least in broad brush-stroke form — can be deduced between the early adventures of the P-I-E people and the eventual placement of the subfamilies of Indo-European language. The exception is Germanic.

When farmers arrived, hunter-gatherers were outnumbered and had to adopt farming themselves, flee to the north, or die out. The "shell midden" people along the Atlantic coast with a very productive littoral economy could hold out longest, but they eventually adopted farming also, celebrating this new success by becoming the "Megalithic" people, doing the initial constructions at Stonehenge and erecting le Grand Menhir Brisé in Armorica (Brittany).

Europe's North was the one place where non-farmers held out. Around the shorelines of Denmark, northern Germany, Sweden and Norway, hunter-gatherers practiced sealing and fishing, and were building log-boats before 6000 BC. These ancient people are among the ancestors of the Germanic people.

The Mesolithic  Ertebølle culture of Scandinavia gave birth to the  Funnelbeaker culture which was unique in several ways. It had little resemblance to the farming cultures of  Linear Pottery culture to its south, nor to the Kurgan P-I-E cultures emerging to its east. The slovenly style of Funnelbeaker (aka TRB) settlements betray its origin from hunter-gatherer culture, yet it led the way in some Neolithic developments. The earliest preserved wagon-wheels are found at TRB sites.

TRB eventually came into competition with the Kurgan-derived Globular Amphora and Corded Ware (aka Battle-Axe or Single-Grave) cultures, but I think care should be taken before generalizing about these vast cultural horizons which stretched from the Rhine to the Volga. The Western portion of Corded Ware was sibling to Bell Beaker and might have spoken a language sibling to Italo-Celtic. The eastern part of Corded Ware had R1a haplogroup compared with R1b in the West, and eventually spoke proto-Baltic. Meanwhile Funnelbeaker persisted and competed with Corded Ware for several centuries in Denmark and northern Germany. Conditions would have been ripe for the creation of a creole language, but if such a language survived it was probably re-creolized 1000 years later! Funnelbeaker (TRB) was also in conflict with the  Pitted Ware culture to its north, a non-farming culture possibly related to the (Uralic speaking?)  Comb Ceramic culture to its east. Although non-farmers, Pitted Ware should not be under-estimated! They were superb hunters, sealers, fishers and sea navigators; had fur-skins and amber to trade for agricultural goods they wanted; and might have been daring raiders and warriors.

It is said that the Nordic Bronze Age began in Denmark or southern Sweden, as a result of a union between the Corded Ware-Battle-axe culture and Pitted Ware. Again there was opportunity for language creolization, or at least the emergence of a strong Pitted Ware substrate in the language that became proto-Germanic.

I detail the above just to argue against a glib equation of proto-Germanic with Corded Ware. The Germanic languages are most divergent from other I-E branches based on grammar, lexicon and phonology, and show evidence of inheritance both from Italo-Celtic and from proto-Baltoslavic. The development of proto-Germanic language is a complicated, largely-unknown story.

Yes, Germanic's sources include both a "core" language (Satem like Balto-Slavic, or para-Satem like Albanian) and a Western Centum language (Italic or Celtic), but there must have been a THIRD source as well. I think the third source was a sea-faring Baltic people, either the  Pitted Ware culture or the  Pit–Comb Ware culture.

The sea-faring terms Ship, Sail, Sea, Seal, Keel, Eel possibly Ice and perhaps even Boat are all non-IE words found in both West Germanic and North Germanic. The Finnic (or Fennic) language is often associated with these Scandinavian seal-hunters but I don't think any of the eight words just mentioned has a clear Uralic cognate. Although 'Boat' has a possible PIE etymology (*bheid- "to split"), cognates of Boat in Romance languages are considered borrowings from Germanic. (And Irish bád is borrowed from Old English.)

Basic vocabulary words found in both Western and Northern Germanic but not in other I-E languages include finger, toe, neck, bone, wife, oak, berry and even horse.

Ocean-going ships were in use in the Baltic as early as 2500 BC, about the same time as Corded Ware farmers arrived in Sweden. But some fisher-gatherers of Sweden rejected farming and adopted a rich economy on the shores of the Baltic. They could trade furs and amber for agricultural products; or even use their sea-going skills as pirates to raid and steal what they wanted.

The Nordic Bronze Age was centered in Sweden, not Germany or Denmark. I think the "proto-Vikings" — whose existence isn't even hinted at in Barry Cunliffe's otherwise excellent Europe Between the Oceans — gained control during that Age. (Perhaps their sea-faring skills gave them access to the English tin needed for bronze.) At some point they switched to the I-E (Corded Ware) language of those they conquered but they retained some of their old language, calling their king Kuningaz instead of Rēx, and so on.

The origin of the Germanic people and their language is surely a fascinating story but one we'll never be able to reconstruct. Still, I think linguistics may offer some clues.

 

[Tharmas]

BUT some prehistoric events are invisible in the archaeological record and can ONLY be discovered via linguistic evidence. The Bantu and Austronesian expansions are vividly apparent in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. The Algonquin language family is best known from encounters along the Atlantic coast by early American settlers (the Powhatan of Virginia and Wampanoag of Massachusetts) but many expert historical linguists agree — though this is still very controversial — that this language family originated far to the West, perhaps near Montana.

Some time ago in the "What Are You Reading" thread I strongly recommended Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich. It is a fascinating account of how analysis of historic (or prehistoric actually) DNA opens a window on past migrations and other human history. The answers may still be somewhat conjectural, but the approach gives an empirical foundation to linguistic analysis.

 

[lpetrich]

I earlier mentioned  Deponent verb - intransitive verbs conjugated in the (medio)passive in Latin, Greek, and North Germanic, like Latin loqui "to speak". Much like  Reflexive verb - intransitive verbs with reflexive constructions in Romance and Slavic and some Germanic languages.

English has a reflexive construction, but it is not used as much as in these other languages. Like:

• Autocausative verbs: "get married" often becomes "marry oneself"
• Anticausative verbs: "the door opened" often becomes "the door opened itself"
• Impersonal verbs: "it is thought that..." often becomes "it thinks itself that..."

Some verbs only exist in reflexive construction, like Romance and Slavic and German translations of "to complain", much like deponent verbs.

Some examples:
He complained about people insulting him.
He got married earlier today.
The door slowly opened.
It is thought that Uralic may be related to Indo-European.

Spanish, from Google Translate:
Se quejó de que la gente lo insultaba.
Se casó hoy temprano.
La puerta se abrió lentamente.
Se cree que el urálico puede estar relacionado con el indoeuropeo.

Croatian, from Google Translate:
Žalio se na ljude koji ga vrijeđaju.
Oženio se ranije danas.
Vrata su se polako otvorila.
Smatra se da bi uralski mogao biti povezan s indoeuropskim.

Notice the "se" in all these translations.

 

[lpetrich]

Proto-Indo-European verbs had a system of aspects that was originally sets of related but lexically separate verbs. This is something like the aspects of Slavic verbs, though those aspects are formed in a completely different fashion. That aside, let us take a look at Slavic verb aspects before continuing to PIE ones.  Grammatical aspect in Slavic languages

Slavic verbs have two aspects, imperfective, for continuous or repeated actions, and perfective, for momentary or completed actions.

For most verbs, the primary form is the imperfective form, and the perfective form are most often made from it with some preposition prefix. Such prefixes are common in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and some Germanic languages have an odd twist: the prefix can come loose and follow the verb in some of the inflected forms: "separable verbs" in Dutch and German. Modern English goes a step further, with prefixes following verbs full-time, "phrasal verbs". So such prefixes are an ancestral Indo-European feature.

For some verbs, however, the primary form is the perfective form, and the imperfective form is usually formed from it with some suffix, usually -ava- or -ova-. Some perfective verbs are also made with suffixes.

Some verbs change conjugation class, like -a- ~ -i-, and some use different roots: suppletion.

Of the inherited Indo-European verb conjugation, Slavic languages tend to keep only the imperfective present as the imperfective present and perfective present/future tenses, with the other tenses usually being new compound tenses rather than inherited ones.

Some imperfective verbs can be made perfective with additional prefixes, and those perfective verbs can then be made imperfective with some imperfective suffix.

Verbs of motion have some additional complexity in the western and eastern Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Russian, ...). They are either determinate (going somewhere) or indeterminate (repeated or having no goal). Both types are imperfective, being made perfective with the prefix po-. They take prefixes for direction of motion and the like, with the indeterminate verb becoming imperfective and the determinate verb becoming perfective. They also have separate verbs for going on foot and traveling by vehicle.

Looking in the Slavic languages' closest relatives, the Baltic languages, Lithuanian also has aspects, but they are lexically separate and they have the full conjugations.

 

[lpetrich]

Turning to  Proto-Indo-European verbs PIE's verbs are reconstructed as having a complicated aspect system, but formed very differently from Slavic aspects. They likely had a similar sort of origin, as lexically separate verbs produced by various derivation processes.

PIE verbs had three aspects: imperfective (incomplete actions), perfective (complete actions), and stative (steady state).

For the imperfective aspect, the primary endings were for the present tense, and the secondary endings for the imperfect past tense. The perfective aspect used the secondary endings, and the stative aspect separate endings. The primary endings are likely an elaboration of the secondary endings.

The aspects were derived from each other in a variety of ways, and part of those derivations were a process called ablaut: vowel shifts. Vowels could alternate between none, e, o, ê, and ô, and that was often a result of the position of the accent in the word. Which vowel was present is often called (vowel)-grade: zero-grade, e-grade, o-grade, etc. Ablauting also occurred in noun declensions, like this for *ph2ter- "father":

Nominative *ph2têr, accusative *ph2term, genitive *ph2trós
The vowel disappearing in the last one was from the accent moving to the last syllable.
Source: Appendix: Proto-Indo-European declension - Wiktionary

A relatively recent appearance of this effect is in Spanish "boot verbs": Spanish Stem-Changing Verbs - Lawless Spanish Boot Verbs - they have vowel shifts that did not occur in their Latin ancestors, and that do not occur in most other Romance cognates.

"I want, we want" - ie/e: quiero, queremos - Latin quaerô, quaerimus
"I fly, we fly" - ue/o: vuelo, volamos - Latin volô, volâmus
"I serve, we serve" - e/i: sirvo, servimos - Latin serviô, servîmus

I must note that a common grammatical device in PIE was reduplication: repeating the first consonant of a root. This was common in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, but for the most part, it dropped out of the more recent IE languages. English "did", past tense of "do", is likely a survival of reduplicated *dheh1-.

 

[lpetrich]

Now how to make the PIE aspects, from  Proto-Indo-European verbs That article uses the convention 3rd person singular and plural forms as its reference forms.

Imperfective

Root or simple athematic verbs (no stem vowel):
CéCti ~ CCénti
(Rare: "Narten"): C(é/ê)Cti ~ CéCnti

Root or simple thematic verbs (with stem vowel):
CéCeti ~ CéConti
(Rare) CCéti ~ CCônti

Reduplicated athematic:
CéCeCti ~ CéCCnti
CiCeCti ~ CiCCnti

Nasal infix (inserting a n; athematic):
CnéCti ~ CnCénti

Suffixed -nu- (related to the nasal infix; athematic):
CCnéwti ~ CCnuénti

Suffixed -ye- (thematic):
CéCyeti ~ CéCyonti
CCyéti ~ CCyônti

Suffixed -ske- (for durative (long time) or iterative (repeated) and maybe also for inchoative (starting); thematic):
CCskéti ~ CCskônti

Suffixed -se- (thematic):
CéCseti ~ CéCsonti

Suffixed -eh1- (stative with imperfective form)
CCéh1ti ~ CCéhnti

Suffixed -eye- (causative or iterative; thematic)
CoCéyeti ~ CoCéyonti

Suffixed -(h1)se- (desiderative (for desiring something); thematic)
CéC(h1)seti ~ CéC(h1)sonti
CiCC(h1)seti ~ CiCC(h1)sonti (reduplicated)

Suffixed -sye- (desiderative; thematic)
CCsyéti ~ CCsyónti

The article then listed some suffixes for forming verbs from nouns and adjectives; all imperfective.

Perfective

Root:
CéCt ~ CCént

Root (very rare):
CéCet ~ CéCont

Reduplicated thematic (only one verb):
CéCCet ~ CéCCont

Suffixed -s- (Narten-like; the usual way of making perfective verbs from imperfective ones: in Greek, the sigmatic or s-aorist):
CêCst ~ CéCsnt

Stative

Root (only one verb):
CóCe ~ CCêr

Reduplicated (the only way of making stative verbs from other kinds of verbs):
CeCóCe ~ CeCCêr

 

[lpetrich]

So in summary, PIE had several ways of making imperfective verbs, one main way of making perfective verbs (suffixed -s-), and only one way of making stative verbs (reduplication).

Some verbs were suppletive, with different roots in different aspects, notably "to be": imperfective *h2es-, perfective *bheuH-, ancestors of English words "is" and "be".

What happened in the dialects?

Ancient Greek and Sanskrit had all three aspects, but most others had some reduction of the aspect system.

Modern Greek has only the imperfective and perfective aspects, with some loss of reduplication, and in Pali, a descendant of Sanskrit about 2,300 years old, only those two aspects were in common use, with the stative being rare. Present-day Indic languages have lost all of the original Indo-European conjugation, as far as I can tell.

Germanic: the imperfective aspect became the present tense and the stative aspect the simple past tense, though with loss of reduplication. That explains the vowel-shift past tenses in the "strong" verbs. The Germanic "weak" verbs, those with the -ed conjugation and its cognates, have a conjugation with an obscure and much-debated origin. One possibility is generalizing the reduplication in "did", Proto-Germanic *ded-.

Latin: the imperfective aspect became the present tense and the perfective and stative aspects the perfect tense. Some reduplication persists, and some perfect-tense forms have lengthened vowels, though I don't know if that goes back to PIE.

Slavic: the imperfective and perfective aspects survived, though the perfective aspect then dropped out of the western and eastern branches.

 

[lpetrich]

Verbs can have have moods or modes, and the default one is the indicative: a simple statement of something.

PIE had an imperative mood, for commands, a subjunctive mood, for hypothetical statements, and an optative mood, for something desired.

 Subjunctive mood -  English subjunctive - "Definition and scope of the concept vary widely across the literature, but it is generally associated with the description of something other than apparent reality."

An English subjunctive construction: "it's necessary that he do that" vs. "he does that" and "it's necessary that you be doing that" vs. "you are doing that".

But subjunctives are much more prominent in the Romance languages, for instance.

In PIE, subjunctives were constructed with e-grade ablaut and a -e- added to the stem. Athematic verbs look like thematic ones and thematic ones have long stem vowels.
CxC- becomes CeCe-
CxCe- becomes CeCê-

 Optative mood - for something wished or hoped for. As with the subjunctive, English has optative constructions like "may you do that". In PIE, it was expressed using a zero-grade stem and an ablauting suffix: -yéh1- ~ -ih1-
CCyéh1ti ~ CCih1énti

It looks like it was originally a separate verb.

Sanskrit and Ancient Greek had an optative mood, though in later Greek it dropped out. Optatives in the ancestors of Latin and Germanic became those families' subjunctives, displacing their original ones.

 

[Copernicus]

Bear in mind that all of these reconstructions for PIE do not reflect plausible pronunciations or even probable morphosyntactic constructions. They just reflect patterns that we see across presumed sets of cognate words in the oldest recorded words and expressions in daughter languages. The cognate sets are not necessarily synchronic, since some branches have older records than others. All of these reconstructions are complicated by the fact that there were influences from non-IE languages on those daughter languages, and they influenced each other. One needs to study diachronic linguistics for years in order to begin to understand what all of these claimed reconstructions actually mean and how reliable they are. That's why they look so strange. Basically, they are Frankenstein forms--constructions built out of pieces of deceased Indo-European language branches.

 

[lpetrich]

Language change sometimes runs in cycles.

A commonly-proposed cycle is isolating to agglutinative to fusional to isolating again.

What are the language states of these cycles?

In an isolating language, all the grammar is done as syntax, without word morphology, and grammatical-function words and content words are all separate entities.

In an agglutinating language, words are formed as word roots with affixes (prefixes, suffixes, infixes) that have various grammatical functions. But the words can be interpreted as isolating-language phrases made into compound words.

In a fusional language, word parts can have multiple functions with those parts not being decomposable into subparts with those functions.

These are obviously ideal types, and most languages are a mixture of these types.

English is largely isolating, but with some agglutinative and fusional features. Consider English verbs' past tenses. The regular form has -ed (/-t, -d, -id/), thus being agglutinative, while irregular forms usually have vowel shifts, thus being fusional.

A related classification is analytic and synthetic, where analytic is isolating and synthetic is any combination of agglutinative and fusional. Synthetic languages may be polysynthetic, having words that are complete sentences.

The cycle goes:

• Isolating to agglutinative: running words together
• Agglutinative to fusional: running word parts together
• Fusional to isolating: erosion of words, like final sounds dropping out

That seems rather grossly oversimplified to me. Consider Latin and the Romance languages, especially the Western ones, which I will discuss. They lost noun cases, completely for their nouns and partially for their pronouns, filling in the gap by inventing more prepositions. They also dropped the passive verb endings, creating new compound past tenses. They also created a compound perfective aspect with "to have", much like in English and other present-day West Germanic languages. Going in a more analytic direction, yes, but there are ways where they went in a more synthetic direction, like preposition-article compounds. Italian has a *lot* of them. Also a new future-tense construction, expressing "I will go" as "to go I have".

 

[lpetrich]

Historical linguist Joseph Greenberg proposed a "definiteness cycle":

1. Demonstrative adjective
2. Definite article
3. Marker of specificity (non-genericness)
4. Marker of noun class

Getting more and more used until it is no longer very distinctive. English is in stage 2, and French is pretty much in stage 3. By stage 4, the definite article has effectively disappeared, and it may then be reinvented, restarting the cycle.

 

[lpetrich]

Preposition-article contractions in the Western Romance languages. Some of them have a *lot* of them, and none of them existed in Latin.

Italian preposition with definite article « learn Italian language
I'll give an example: di "of":

• di + il -> de-l -> del
• di + lo -> de-llo > dello
• di + l' -> de-ll' > dell'
• di + la -> de-lla > della
• di + i -> de-i > dei
• di + gli -> de-gli > degli
• di + le -> de-lle > delle

Preposition in also changes, to ne-, but prepositions a, da, and su do not change.

• Spanish: de + el -> del, a + el -> al
• French de + le -> du, de + les -> des, à + le -> au, à + les -> aux.

Catalan and Portuguese both have more contractions, but they can be decomposed in the fashion of he Italian ones.

• Catalan: a > a-, de > de-, per > pe-, ca > ca- (with) el > -l, els > -ls
• Portuguese (definite): a > a-, de > d-, em > n-, por > pel- (with) o, a, os, as
• Portuguese (indefinite): de > d-, em > n- (with) um, uma, uns, umas

In the Portuguese contractions, aa becomes à. Also, the -l- in pel- may be a relic of definite-article beginning l-, otherwise lost from the language.

What the prepositions mean:

• French: à "to, at, in", de "of, from"
• Catalan: a "to, at, in", de "of, from", per, "because of, for, by (w/pass)", ca "at the home of, like French chez"
• Spanish: a "to, at", de "of, from"
• Portuguese: a "to, at", de "of, from", em "in, at, on", por "for, through, by (w/pass)"
• Italian: a "to, at, in", di "of, from", da "from, by (w/pass)", in "in", su "on"

The Portuguese indefinite article um also means "one", and its plural means "some". That is also true of Spanish uno.

 

[lpetrich]

I will now do "to love" and "I will love".

French: aimer, j'aimerai; Catalan amar, amaré; Spanish amar, amaré; Italian amare, amerò; Latin amâre, amâbô

Proto-Indo-European did not have a distinct future tense, and that tense was separately invented in the dialects. In Latin, it was -bi- alternating with the subjunctive, and Latin also had a new imperfect past tense with -ba-.

 

[lpetrich]

A grammatical category that is universal or close to it is negation. Something that reminds me of a bit of Document21 - Russell, Bertrand - The Metaphysician's Nightmare.pdf

What was known was that he consistently avoided the word 'not' and all its synonyms. He would not say 'this egg is not fresh', but 'chemical changes have occurred in this egg since it was laid'. He would not say 'I cannot find that book', but 'the books I have found are other than that book'. He would not say 'thou shalt not kill', but 'thou shalt cherish life'.

Which I note because it seems so impractical.

Associated with it is another historical-linguistic cycle,  Jespersen's Cycle - when a marker of negation becomes very weakened, another one is invented and it takes the original's place. The new one is often an extension of the old one, but a completely different word may be substituted.

Old French inherited from Latin "ne", and some time later, "pas" is added to it to strength it, that word literally meaning "step". In present-day colloquial French, the "ne" is dropping out, leaving the "pas" as a marker of negation.

"I don't speak"
Old French: jeo ne dis - "I not speak"
Standard French: je ne dis pas - "I not speak step" > "I not speak not"
Colloquial French: je dis pas - "I speak not"

 

[lpetrich]

This cycle has happened elsewhere in Indo-Europeandom.

Proto-Indo-European had a negation adverb *ne and a related negation prefix *n-

The prefix became Germanic un-, Latin in-, Greek a(n)-, and Sanskrit a(n)-. Balto-Slavic ne- may be derived from prefixing the negation particle.

That adverb survives as "ne" in the Balto-Slavic langs, and the Russian word for "no", nyet, is from Proto-Slavic *netu < *ne + *ye + *tu "not is that".

Turning to Latin and the Romance langs, Latin's negation particles are nê "not" with a lengthened vowel, and nî "neither / nor", and nôn "no" < *ne *oynos "not one".

Latin nê and nôn survived into the Romance langs. French has descendants of both, and Spanish and Catalan no, Portuguese não, Italian non, no, and Romanian nu are all derived from Latin non.

 

[lpetrich]

The Germanic languages have a rather complicated history of negation markers.

First the West Germanic ones.

English "not" is from Middle English as a variation of "nought", meaning "nothing", and that is from Old English nâwiht, German nicht is from Old High German niowiht, and Dutch niet has a similar origin. All are from Proto-Germanic *ne + *aiwaz + (*wihtiz / *wihtą) "not" + ("eternity, age" > "ever") + "thing".

English "no" is from Middle English as a variaion of "none", from Proto-Germanic *nainaz, from *ne + *ainaz, "not"+ "one". Dutch nee and German nein, for the interjection, also have that origin.

German kein "no" (adjective) is from Old High German nihein, from Proto Germanic *nehw *ainaz, "nor one". with *nehw from *ne + *-hw, "not and". The latter one is from PIE *-kwe, with descendants like Latin *-que. Dutch geen has a similar origin.

That aside, the ni- was lost along the way to modern German and Dutch, thus removing the original negation part.

Now the North Germanic ones.

"Not": Swedish inte, ej, icke / Norwegian ikke, ikkje, ei / Danish ikke, ej / Icelandic ekki, ei, eigi

"No" (adj): Swedish, Norwegian, Danish ingen / Icelandic enginn

For "not", Swedish inte is descended from Old Norse enginn, from einn "one" + -gi "not". The second one is in turn descended from Proto-Germanic *-gin, and that is possibly from PIE *kwos 'which, what" + *ne "not". Also descended are Swedish icke and Danish and Norwegian ikke.

Also for "not", Swedish ej and its North Germanic cognates are descended from Old Norse eigi, earlier ne eigi. The second eigi is from Proto-Germanic *aigô "possessor, owner", from *aiganan "to possess, own" + *-ô (n-stem) an agent-noun suffix, both from PIE. The latter one is cognate with Latin -ô, -on- and Greek -ôn, -on-.

For "no" (adj), Swedish ingen and its NGMc cognates are also descended from Old Norse enginn.

For "no" (intj), Swedish has nej, and it and its NGmc cognates are descended from Old Norse nei, and ultimately from PIE.


So what has often happened is that the original negation marker has been extended to make some form meaning literally "nothing" or something similar. Then it gets eroded down, with the erosion sometimes involving dropping the original negation marker, leaving only the "thing" part. Thus, "thing" > "not".

 

[lpetrich]

I found something on the Modern Greek (medio)passive voice. Modern medio-Passive voice | WordReference Forums

Αγγελος - Angelos "Angel"

I don't know about conjugators, but the medio-passive voice is very common in Modern Greek, including in some very common cases where the passive form would NOT necessarily be used in English, such as
-- spontaneous processes: το αλάτι διαλύεται στο νερό = salt dissolves in water, καίγομαι = I'm on fire!
-- expressions of possibility: το σπίτι φαίνεται από δω = the house is visible (=can be seen) from here, το βιβλίο διαβάζεται εύκολα = the book reads (=can be read) easily,
-- reflexive verbs: πλένομαι = I wash myself, ξυρίζομαι = I shave myself
-- deponent verbs (έρχομαι, εύχομαι, φοβάμαι...)

Note also some inconsistencies, such as ζεσταίνομαι = I'm hot (passive of ζεσταίνω = heat up) vs. κρυώνω, which means both 'I cool' and 'I am cold' (there is no *κρυώνομαι).

Perseas

F.ex. Ο γεωργός οργώνει το χωράφι (οργώνει: active voice & active disposition) <<The farmer ploughs the field>>
Ο Γιάννης ντύνεται (ντύνεται: passive voice & middle disposition) <<Yannis is dressed>>
Χρειάζομαι χρόνο (Χρειάζομαι: passive voice & active disposition) <<I need time>>
Το παιδί κοιμάται (κοιμάται: passive voice & neutral disposition) <<The child sleeps>

My examples:

He complained about people insulting him.
He got married earlier today.
The door slowly opened.
It is thought that Uralic may be related to Indo-European.

Παραπονέθηκε για ανθρώπους που τον προσέβαλαν.
Παντρεύτηκε νωρίτερα σήμερα.
Η πόρτα άνοιξε αργά.
Θεωρείται ότι τα ουραλικά μπορεί να σχετίζονται με τα ινδοευρωπαϊκά.

Google Translate turned all these examples into mediopassive voice except for "opened".

So Modern Greek is much like the Romance and Slavic languages with its use of the mediopassive, with reflexive, passive, spontaneous-action, and impersonal uses -- also in having deponent verbs (mediopassive-only).

As far as I can tell about Ancient Greek, its middle and passive voices had similar uses. They were different in the aorist (simple past) tense, but not in the present tense.

 

[lpetrich]

Swedish:
Han klagade över att folk förolämpade honom.
Han gifte sig tidigare idag.
Dörren öppnades sakta.
Man tror att uraliskt kan vara släkt med indoeuropeiskt.

"Complain" is an active verb, like in English. "Get married" becomes a reflexive (sig ~ him/her/itself) -- "marry oneself", like in Romance, Slavic, and Greek. "Opened" gets the s-passive. "It is thought" becomes "One thinks" (impersonal).

Also, that -d- in the verbs is a cognate of English -ed.

 

[lpetrich]

Although the ancestral Indo-European noun declension has been eroded away in many of the present-day dialects, there are some pattens in its erosion.

I'll look at Latin to Romance.

The o-stem nouns (-us, -î) got reduced to -o or -, and their plural to -i or -os or -s. The singular likely comes from the accusative -um, while the plural from the nominative -î or the accusative -ôs.

The a-stem nouns (-a, -ae) got reduced to -a or -e, and their plural to -e or -as or -es. The singular can come from the nominative and the accusative merging, and the plural from either case.

Languages will consistently use either the nominative plurals (Italian -o -i, -a -e) or the accusative plurals (Spanish -o -os, -a -as).

Latin's third declension of nouns is a mixture of i-stems (panis "bread") and consonant stems. Many of the consonant-stem forms have special nominative-singular forms, essentially contractions of (stem)-s. Like nox "night" < *noct-s, -tâs "-ness, -ty" <*-tât-s, etc.

Many of them go into the Romance languages from the accusative, panem, noctem, ... though -tâs usually as *-tât or *-tâ. Plurals are usually from the merged nominative and accusative cases: -es.

There are various complexities, like some dialects sometimes doing -o -a, like Latin ovum, ova "egg, eggs" > Italian uovo, uova.


The same thing happened in Greek, with the o-stem and a/e-stem declensions going forward, and the rest getting moved into these declensions, usually from the accusative. patêr "father" (acc. patera) became pateras, elephas "elephant" (acc. elephanta) became elefantas, phusis (acc. phusin) "origin, nature, property" became fisi, etc.

Like Latin, Greek also had plenty of contracted nominative singulars, like elephas < *elephant-s.

 

[Swammerdami]

The cycle goes:

• Isolating to agglutinative: running words together
• Agglutinative to fusional: running word parts together
• Fusional to isolating: erosion of words, like final sounds dropping out

Is it much much too simplistic to say that each of these three tendencies is a tendency toward efficiency?
* Providing affixes to mark plurality, past-tense, etc. streamlines a language and reduces ambiguity.
* Combining several affixes together reduces the syllable count.
* Replacing inflected forms with a single root word makes the language easier to learn.
But each move toward efficiency introduces a new problem, solved by the next step in the cycle.

I think it takes at least THREE modes to get this sort of oscillation; TWO modes isn't enough.

The Rock < Paper < Scissors (< Rock) game is an example of such a 3-cycle in a pecking-order graph. A famous military analog is pikemen > horse_riders > archers > pikemen which becomes light_infantry > motorized_infantry > artillery > light_infantry in a modern context.

Yes, this is a particularly fascinating one. These 3 arms of the military have existed since records began, and persist to this day. Infantry, cavalry, and artillery....

I have heard it said that one of Napoleon's great gifts was the ability to get the right arm facing the enemy's "natural inferior" arm. If one could do this every time, all the way along the line, one would win every battle by a massacre!

I have (IMHO) found a "deeper" reason why this particular inconsistent triad is the way it is, but that will have to wait till a later time.

The quote is from the e-mail of a math professor one of whose interests is such cycles in pecking-orders. I've exchanged much e-mail with him, as this is also a topic of interest to me. But no, I don't think he ever elaborated on the '"deeper" reason why this particular inconsistent triad is the way it is.' He did show me a 7-cycle — A > B > BC > C > D > F > E ( > A) — which applies to 20th-century navies.