Proto-Indo-European Morphology and Syntax

A look at the puzzling lack of *dativus possessivus* forms in our corpus of Mycenaean Greek, with a possible pragmatic explanation for this phenomenon.

Presented at the Greek and Latin Linguistics panel of the 2016 SCS meeting in San Francisco.

A word-by-word explanation of the translation of the so-called creation hymn of Rigveda. The translation is very different from traditional ones.

As I demonstrate, the hymn has been completely misunderstood by previous translators.

The hymn has nothing to do with the origin or creation of the Universe. It is in fact, simply a prayer to God.

Grammaire compacte de proto-indo-européen : phonétique, déclinaisons, conjugaisons, dérivation et un lexique complet de plusieurs centaines de mots avec accentuation et flexion indiquées.
Remerciements à P.Carpentier pour la mise en page
(à jour août 2023)

A fresh and original translation from Sanskrit of the dashrajnya hymn (hymn 7.18 of Rig Veda) describing this defining battle between Aryan king Sudas and his Aryan as well as non-Aryan foes. The decisive battle led to the uprooting of many tribes from the Sapta Sindhu area.

Many existing beliefs are shown to be merely due to misunderstandings. Further, it is shown that the existing translations fall well short of the true meaning.
For example, no Matsya tribe was involved in this battle.

One of the reasons for the hesitation of scholars  to accept
the Indus valley civilisation as vedic is that the Rg veda has
several passages referring to Asva-the horse and the veda
itself states that its horse has 34 ribs whereas modern horse
usually has 36 ribs.
According to the  prevalent history of Bharata varsha as told by western scholars the Indus valley civilisation belonged to the
Dravida/Munda people and the vedic people(Aryans) reached India around 1900 BCE only . But in reality the Indus civilisation is vedic and the vedic people were in the Indus Valley at least from 6000BCE as seen from the excavations.
If an unknown script can explain the known myth and known history of a nation,what more proof is required to show that the script belongs to the same people.The script of Egypt explains
their myth and history.The script of Sumer,Akkad or Elam does the same.So it is natural for the Indus script to denote the myth
and history of the Hindu/Sindhu / Sarasvati/ vindu/vipra/sura/ bhuusura/bhudeva/bharata/kuru/pancala/Somaka  people.Hence we shall try to understand a bit of Indian history through the Indus script.We shall presently see  evidences pointing to the existence of the Aryans in the Indus Valley several millennia prior to the so called Aryan
arrival in the Indus valley.

In the last  articles we have looked into the writing of the Harappans in the early Ravi/Kot Diji phases and concluded that they are the same vedic people of the mature Harappan phase;we have  compared an inscribed  Ravi sherd showing  presence of the Pancalas/ Bharatas in the Indus valley before 3300BCE and a Taxila coin showing their presence in Taxila around 200 BCE confirming the continuity of the vedic civilisation in the Indus Valley from the early Harappan days;we have seen how an indus seal
portray the story of Ahalya described in later literature;
we have explored the universal idea of the mount of the dead Concept In The  Worship Of The Sun God .
In this article we are going to look into the issue of the vedic
horse and the number of its ribs. This is the asvamedha
of the Indus script.All of us will now realise how many vedic horses we are riding daily!

This is the sixth and final “The Source Code 2.x” document stemming from “The Origin of the Indo-European Languages1” (2012), where it was shown that each phoneme in PIE roots had its own meaning and that PIE roots actually were descriptions of the concepts that they referred to. As explained in that original document, PIE roots (each one of them with its own lexical meaning) had a CVC basic structure where each phoneme had its own general sense which, for consonants, changed to just the opposite, within the same concept, when placed at the end of the root. The concept that the word referred to was indicated by the initial consonant while the closing one determined the final meaning of the word.

For example, the PIE consonant usually represented as bh indicated “expansion, growth, external addition” as initial element while it meant “absorption, inwards addition” as final consonant. A related phoneme, p, conveyed a sense of “body, physical accumulation” at the beginning of the root which shifted to “physical lack / loss” at the end of the root. The meaning of each phoneme is shown in a simple equivalence table (the “Source Code”) in page 5 below.

This new document, focused only on PIE roots, explains the meaning of over 2500 of them, adding more than 400 roots to the previous list and significantly improving the equivalence table included in previous versions.

Section 1 revisits the structure of the PIE words, indicating the meaning of each phoneme while Section 2 includes a list of “deciphered” PIE roots with some of their derivatives in old and modern languages.


Fernando Villamor
atin.belaur@gmail.com

Proto-Indo-European exhibited an elaborate inflectional aspect system including over twenty specific aspect categories. Many of these aspect categories later were semantically broadened and merged, and their number decreased. The aspect system was “fused” with tense distinctions and was thus remodelled to a tense and aspect system including, among others, a prominent PRESENT IMPERFECTIVE tense and aspect category.
Keywords: Proto-Indo-European verb morphology, aspect, Aktionsart, tense.

This paper argues that the Proto-Indo-European voice system, despite undergoing several waves of morphological renewal on the way to the daughter languages (Jasanoff 2003), was typologically that of early IE languages like Vedic and Greek, and contemporary languages such as Modern Greek, and that the syncretic voice systems of these languages share the property of having deponents. While previous discussions of middle-only verbs have focused on a few morphologically archaic but semantically unsurprising middles, I show that PIE also had agentive, syntactically active middles that escaped the expected remodeling as formally active verbs and surface as deponents in the IE daughter branches. Reconstructing verbs with " unexpected " voice morphology may seem counter-intuitive, but is necessary to cover the empirical facts and may also serve as a diagnostic for the relative chronology of the morphological innovations that occurred in the domain of PIE voice morphology.

Indo-European -i-Presents have up to three different origins. They go back to verbs with a derivational suffix (“enlargement”) -i- and to denominatives. This brief report argues for the hypothesis that there is an additional original function: Indo- European -i-Presents also go back to Proto-Indo-European forms inflected for progressive aspect.

The Vulgar Pre-Indo-European new lengthened grade marking nominative and locative singular forms must be distinguished from a Proto-Indo-European geminate transfix *_VV_ which was realized as a long vowel in the root vowel slot. The new lengthened grade arose by laws of Auslaut and was secondarily employed as an additional marker of nominative singular and locative singular forms. It cannot plausibly be dated to a period prior than the Vulgar Pre-Indo-European dialect or variant cluster. The geminate transfix *_VV_, however, was a proper Proto-Indo-European marker of nominal and verbal PLURATIVITY.

Keywords: Lengthened grade, Szemerényi’s law, Nussbaum’s law.

Cet article dégage les principes de base de la phrase proto-indo-européenne; on y voit qu'il ne s'agit pas vraiment d'une question portant sur l'ordre entre verbe, sujet et objet, mais de la présence de certains éléments dans le "groupe verbal", le tout étant rythmé par une loi de limitation.

This is the fifth “The Source Code 2.x” document stemming from “The Origin of the Indo-European Languages1” (2012), where it was shown that each phoneme in PIE roots had its own meaning and that PIE roots actually were descriptions of the concepts that they referred to. As explained in that original document, PIE roots (each one of them with its own lexical meaning) had a CVC basic structure where each phoneme had its own general sense which, for consonants, changed to just the opposite, within the same concept, when placed at the end of the root. The concept that the word referred to was indicated by the initial consonant while the closing one determined the final meaning of the word.

This is the fourth “The Source Code 2.x” document stemming from “The Origin of the Indo-European Languages” (2012), where it was shown that each phoneme in PIE roots had its own meaning and that PIE roots actually were descriptions of the concepts that they referred to. As explained in that original document, PIE roots (each one of them with its own lexical meaning) had a CVC basic structure where each phoneme had its own general sense which, for consonants, changed to just the opposite, within the same concept, when placed at the end of the root. The concept that the word referred to was indicated by the initial consonant while the closing one determined the final meaning of the word.

For example, the PIE consonant usually represented as bh indicated “expansion, growth, external addition” as initial element while it meant “absorption, inwards addition” as final consonant. A related phoneme, p, conveyed a sense of “body, physical accumulation” at the beginning of the root which shifted to “physical lack / loss” at the end of the root. The meaning of each phoneme is shown in a simple equivalence table (the “Source Code”) in page 5 of this document.

This new document, focused only on PIE roots, explains the meaning of over 1600 of them, adding more than 300 roots to the previous list and significantly improving the equivalence table included in previous versions.

Le but de cet article est d'établir un modèle prédictible de règles pour la déclinaison athématique en PIE ; cette reconstruction va indiquer que les désinences casuelles (hors nominatif-vocatif-accusatif) sont vraisemblablement d'anciennes postpositions, que nous reconstruirons selon un modèle cohérent. Nous verrons également que le matériel de ces diverses particules est le même que celui des particules syntactiques.

In this paper, we bring together the concepts put forth in our previous papers and throw new light on how the Indo-Europeanization of the world may have happened from the conventional Central Asian homeland and explain the same using maps and diagrams. We also propose the 'Ten modes of linguistic transformations associated with Human migrations.' With this, the significance of the proposed term 'Base Indo-European' in lieu of the old term 'Proto Indo-European' will become abundantly clear to most readers. The approaches presented in this paper are somewhat superior to existing approaches, and as such are expected to replace them in the longer run. Detailed maps and notes demonstrating and explaining how linguistic transformations might have taken place in South Asia are available in this paper as understood from our previous research papers, and scholars from other parts of the world are invited to develop similar paradigms with regard to their home countries as far as the available data or evidence will allow them. This will help piece together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, and lead to a revolution of sorts in the field, leading to a ripple-effect that will strongly impact several other related fields of study as well. We also re-emphasize our epigrammatic catch-phrases 'The Globalization of Science' and 'Scientific Progress at the Speed of Light', and attempt to show how the former will inexorably lead to the latter. This is done in a respectable level of detail, as zany and theoretical concepts gain respectability only if corroborated with real-world data from across the world. The end-result will be a transformation and a revolution in human knowledge, with inevitable cascading changes in cultural and social paradigms and relationships across nationalities and cultures, and rich rewards for scholars and students of Indo-European studies across the world.

The system of verbal prefixes and their meanings in Burushaski is described and analysed. They all derive from Indo-European. The most direct correlation is between PIE s-mobile and the Burushaski prefix-s. The complex Burushaski verbal prefixes dand the Burushaski n-, nu-, nisemantically and in their grammatical function find direct and precise correspondences with very similar Indo-European developments. There are various direct and coherent developments in Burushaski from the IE distal deixis particle *-le (invocative particle, demonstrative suffix, nominal prefix, verbal transitivising prefix). A brief outline is made of the correspondences in the verbal system and in verbal suffixation. Negation in Burushaski is also of PIE origin and the Burushaski privative prefix a-/ ai-/ ayin verbs (in Hz Ng a-, oo-) is analysed and correlated. A very tentative discussion of possible relics of the IE e-augment in Burushaski is put forward. The correlation of over fifty verbs is also provided. We conclude that the Burushaski verbal prefixes, all of Indo-European origin, as well as the verbal suffixes are further evidence of the Proto-Indo-European rather than Pre-Indo-European affiliation of Burushaski.

Der Band umfasst 29 Beiträge, die dem Andenken an Prof. Heinrich
Hettrich (1947–2020) gewidmet sind. In der Zeit von 1989 bis 2014
war er Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
an der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Er hat das Forschungsspektrum der Indogermanistik entscheidend mitgeprägt und
dabei stets den engen Austausch mit Kollegen aus dem eigenen
Fach wie auch aus den Nachbarfächern gepflegt. Die in dieser Gedenkschrift versammelten Aufsätze einiger seiner ‒ oft langjährigen ‒
Weggefährten repräsentieren seine vielfältigen Forschungsinteressen,
denen er sich bis zu seinem Lebensende mit großer Energie
gewidmet hat, vor allem die Syntax (besonders im Bereich von Hypotaxe
und Kasussyntax) und die indoiranische Philologie (besonders
des Vedischen), aber auch weitere Themenbereiche wie indogermanische
Verwandtschaftsterminologie und Altertumskunde allgemein,
germanische Sprachwissenschaft (besonders die Geschichte des Deutschen), homerisches Griechisch und Sprachtypologie. Der
Erscheinungstermin der Gedenkschrift ist anlässlich von Heinrich
Hettrichs 75. Geburtstag im Oktober 2022 vorgesehen.

This paper provides an internal reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European direct/inverse system - a system that collapsed when PIE broke up and developed into a nominative-accusative language.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS VERSION IS OUTDATED. SEE THE NEW VERSION ABOVE.

The paper reviews the claims about the origin of the heteroclitic inflection of nouns in *-r/-n-,  since the decipherment of Hittite (1915). A new solution is proposed about this long standing issue, based on the reshaping of a previous inflection. .

This hymn pertains to the river crossing event of the Rigveda.

A massive and continuous flood stopped the Bharatas in their tracks. Their guide Vishwamitra then organised a sacrifice and composed this hymn to mollify the rivers' fury. Amazingly, the rivers did subside for a while, just enough for the army to cross over.

This fresh translation of Rig Veda's hymn 3.33 brings out the meaning clearly. It shows there was no real or imaginary dialogue between the sage Vishwamitra and the rivers. Rather, this was Vishwamitra's prayer to the rivers in which the Bharata army joins in at the very end.