is there, like, a 'Crawford School' somewhere in the mountains of Colorado or Wyoming where we can come be monks or something.. work on the ranch.. learn linguistics.. etc?

This was splendid! An introduction to historical linguistics was, a very long time ago, part of what I studied at university. And this video covers stuff I never grasped back then. Accomplishing this in bare 20 minutes is quite impressive!

Great topic! Always love Indo-European subjects

Very helpful. The stegosaurus and the toga was GREAT.

I grew up with my mother's copy of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which had a big appendix containing all PIE roots then known. It was a big onfluence on my interest in the subject. That and Lockwood's "Panorama of the Indo-European Languages", which was also my mum's.

I'm used to the numbered laryngeals by now, but I do think PIE words would look a lot less intimidating if we replaced *h₁ *h₂ *h₃ with *hₑ *hₐ *hₒ.

@arta.xshaca

5 ай бұрын

More like [h], [χ], [ʁʷ] (or a glottal stop for the first one and the velar fricatives for the last two), along with a short schwa sound where necessary. It is likely that those three sounds were the actual pronunciations.

@mccookies3664

5 ай бұрын

if you write the letters as superscripts, then it also lines up with the aspiration and labialization diacritics, which is nice.

@vinnybaggins

5 ай бұрын

It's the revenge of math. The alphabet has invaded math in the past, now it's the time for math to invade the alphabet 😂

@shmoobalizer

3 ай бұрын

@@arta.xshacaiirc there's a law in proto germanic that implies h3 was voiceless. not sure

@Cebulanka

7 күн бұрын

*hₐ is actually used, sometimes

I'm just one subscriber but I really like the 'side quests'. It's cool when you branch out into the broader Germanic, and indeed Indo-European worlds.

Proto-Indo-European is a great window into the linguistic roots of all people who speak or study any current Indo-European language.

this is THE VIDEO i've been looking for

18:14 Speaking of your books, you should pitch a parallel text edition to the publisher - for all of us who enjoy learning by reading the source texts - with an audio edition read by you in both languages. Twice the sales from the same work you already did (other than the audio version).😊👍🏻

@QuasarKaraoke

5 ай бұрын

His Poetic Edda and Saga of the Volsungs are available on Audible, if you didn't know!

@martinnyberg71

5 ай бұрын

@@QuasarKaraoke Aren’t all of them? Havamal at least I’ve heard samples of. But my suggestion was to also record the Old Norse text in the reconstructed pronunciation and sell a bilingual edition.😊

Thanks for decoding and demystifying

This was extremely enlightening and useful!

It was lovely to come home from work, make myself a cup of tea, and relax with this video. Interesting content as always with beautiful scenery.

Interesting. I'll have to check out that book.

Great video as always :) I left a comment on Simon's latest video but you two got me really into linguistics and after a few years of working full time after high school, I've decided to take the leap back into schooling this fall and am planning on studying historical linguistics. I appreciate your work and how digestible and understandable you make the material seem, even to someone who's worked more with his hands than his head the last few years. Keep up the great work!

This was great. I found and subscribed to your channel because of an IE video. Only then did you drag me into all topics Norse. :)

This video goes very well with Simon Roper's video on Laryngeals. Thank you sir

That was wonderful, I knew some things but learned a lot more. :)

Great topic, thanks!

Thanks for this. For the record, I hereby give you my permission to film future snowbound videos from the warm cabin of your truck.

Very helpful - illuminated a number of points I only half followed from books and there were sone great throwaway comments (stegosaurus, toga, thatch)

Scarfs are a thing. Thanks for the info very helpful!! Have a lovely weekend!!

I love the fact that in the thumbnails of the videos you can clearly see his evolution in style.

This was a helpful video. I grew up reading the Ind-European root appendix in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English language. I also looked at Pokorny's Indogermanisches Lexikon. What I saw there was very different than other sources. I asked myself if I were just that ignorant, a quadratus of sorts. And now this video explains the differences and clears up a lot for me. Thank you!

@spuntotheratboy

4 ай бұрын

I too grew up with the AHD ID appendix 😀

great vid

I agree with the idea that PIE should refer to the post-Anatolian split language, because PIE was conceptualized and theorized before the discoveries of Hittite and Tocharian. Thus the older ancestor language should be called Indo-Hittite, that way when David Reich and his friends write articles about how actually PIE was spoken 10,000 years ago, we can just tell them they are talking about pre-proto-Indo-Hittite and nobody cares about that lol

do you think you could do a video on Frithiof's Saga? I recently read the Ferdinand Schmidt version and I found it very enjoyable. There isnt as much coverage of it as other sagas on youtube. Its version of the death of Buldr is one of my favorites and its writing style and its narrative of longing and penance really held me.

Thanks for posting this, a very good introduction to quite a complex topic! I just wanted to let you know that the link that you put in the description to Hávamál from the publisher's page appears to be broken

Awesome! I'm teaching a little group the roots of Faroese, and this improved my grasp of Indo-European a lot and I could recognise a lot of Faroese descendents. What I often miss from what I've tried to read about IE is how the strong verbs were. I've heard some Faroese linguist fondly describe the strong Faroese verbs as ancient, but I haven't come across the material of their IE conjugation readily available or explained. Or rather the connection from an IE past tense to a Faroese past tense for example.

@tfan2222

5 ай бұрын

Maybe the mean “ancient” in the sense it’s close to Old Norse?

@tjstarr2960

5 ай бұрын

They might mean that strong verbs themselves are a very ancient conjugation of verbs in the language, which is true of all Indo European languages. This was the original way of conjugating verbs, before the "weak verbs" developed in the Germanic branch with the suffix that became English -ed as in "walk/walked". Strong verbs work by changing the root vowel, which is called "Ablaut", and we can see it in English verbs like "Sing-sang-sung". It could also work by lengthening the vowel sound or shortening/deleting it, but I don't have a good example of that in English. If you study Latin/Greek/Sanskrit or other ancient Indo-European languages, you can see all these Indo-European languages have similar vowel changes between the past/present forms of a verb, just to give one example. In Latin and Greek, I know you have to memorize both the present and past tense of every verb, because the vowel changes between the different forms of the verb are unpredictable, for example, the past tense of the verb "Cado" meaning "I fall" is "Cecidi". In that sense, it is almost like every verb is a Germanic "strong verb", just that after the strong verb, it is also followed by a past tense set of endings in Latin/Greek. By the way, when I say "vowel changes", it is a bit misleading. Most Indo-European roots could appear in multiple forms. For example, we get the Latin root "dent-" as in "dentist", but the Greek root "dont-" as in "orthodontics", and these are called the "E and O grades" of the root, which are thought to generally be front/back vowels. There was also usually a "Zero Grade" of the root where the vowel was deleted completely, and lengthened grade, which is just the long vowel version of the root E or O vowel.

Very nice video. I always just stick to the IPA most of the time when i see Proto-Indo-European words cause the writing looks so odd and i never understood it

From what I know the none-anatolian reflexes of the laryngeals differ from one another so they must have been lost after they split. Germanic may even have consonantal velar reflexes in very rare cases in words like quick, or in Proto-Germanic *kwikwaz from *gʷih₃wós which also have us Latin vivus.

A short but great video, but too short, too short.

Two questions pop up in my mind whenever I read about PIE. 1. i and u can be seen as syllabic realisations of glides y and w, the same way resonants, sonorants and laryngeals can also be syllabic. The only vowels being e and o, however there is no existing language with a two-vowel inventory with backness distinction but no openness distinction. And 2. is it possible for two full grade roots have a common zero-grade version, e.g., CReC and CeRC > CRC?

One thing concerning the “S Mobile”: it didn’t “disappear” in other languages, but it evolved separately in later PIE dialect because of the several case ending with “s” that merged with the following proto word stem. Proto-Italic (Latin) is said to have branched out first after Tocharian, so your examples for Snail and Snow don’t have a “S-“ in Latin but they have it in Slavic and Germanic. Another good example is “S-Hort” in English that goes “Kurtus” in Latin.

@marjae2767

5 ай бұрын

So it's analogous to the derivation of English an + adder from a + naddere.

@jonstfrancis

5 ай бұрын

I've found this the most confusing when studying PIE roots. This makes sense.

@jonstfrancis

5 ай бұрын

@@marjae2767 or more like newt from an ewte?

@tjstarr2960

5 ай бұрын

It is possible that the "S Mobile" came from words endings that ended in an /s/ sound. But, we can't rule out the possibility that the /s/ sound was a meaningful prefix at one point that was optionally added to the stem, even if it was something as simple as an intensifier. It is still one of the great mysteries of Indo European languages.

@Liethen

5 ай бұрын

Also possible that sometimes there was an s- that was conflated with an -s from a preceding words case ending and got deleted using a made up pair of words for example is it bos skorto > bos korto or bos korto > bos skorto both going through a intermediate stage of slurred speech as "bosskorto"

Around the halfway point I found myself torn between wanting to hear more, and worrying about how cold you were getting! Wish I could conclude with “Button Up Your Overcoat” in PIE, but no.

@eumeeva

5 ай бұрын

It is exactly what I was thinking about!

interesting

As a Spanish speaker, the S mobile seems pretty close (if more unstable) to its lenition and or outright disappeance that happened in French and many Spanish dialects to the initial S

@AtomikNY

5 ай бұрын

I don't think those are comparable. French and those Spanish dialects underwent regular phonetic changes that predictably delete /s/ in certain environments. What we see in PIE with the S mobile are cognate words where it seems pretty random whether a word has the initial /s/ or not, unrelated to any phonetic shift in the daughter languages. My guess is there was a prefix *s- that had some kind of semantic function we haven't been able to figure out yet, because it wasn't something that drastically altered the core meaning of a word in an obvious way.

@marcasdebarun6879

5 ай бұрын

@@AtomikNY It's not a prefix, the *s- was part of the original root. What is the most commonly-accepted explanation is that the *s- was assimilated and then dropped when the root followed another word which ended in *-s. Considering there are an abundance of PIE suffixes which end in *-s (e.g. nominative singular *-os as mentioned in the video), it was something that clearly happened often enough that words would just become reanalysed without the *s-. Wikipedia gives the example *wĺ̥kʷoms spéḱyont ('they saw the wolves') -> *wĺ̥kʷoms péḱyont. Rebracketing is the name of the phenomenon, and it's happened more recently in English's history too (an ekename -> a nickname; a napron -> an apron, etc.).

@AtomikNY

5 ай бұрын

​@@marcasdebarun6879 I know that's a common explanation, but I can't think of any other examples where rebracketing occurred on that scale. And I can easily imagine some grammatical prefix or particle getting glued onto words and then leaving us scratching our heads as to what exactly the original meaning was. But I could be wrong, I'm just an amateur here (I mean, I have a linguistics degree, I just never formally studied PIE stuff).

@marcasdebarun6879

5 ай бұрын

@@AtomikNY Why does the scale matter? Though personally I wouldn't have said the scale was particularly massive, it's just that some roots sometimes arbitrarily lose the initial *s-. The eclipsis which arose in the Q-Celtic languages isn't altogether dissimilar, where a final nasal would mutate the following consonant of the next word, before eventually being assimilated, sometimes into a nasal itself. You can interpret the nasalisation property as having been rebracketed onto the beginning of the next word. That's a rather systematic example which happened throughout the entire language.

Encountering Indo-European in linguistics is like when you first encounter algebra and find out that some math has letters in it

I've read some books about proto-indoeuropean where the three dorsal theory is considered wrong and the author of the book claims that the palatal consonant set arised at a later date and spread to neighbour regions. Is the book wrong or is it still unclear whether there were palatals or not?

@_volder

5 ай бұрын

The exact pronunciations of *k, *ḱ, and *kʷ are not settled; different linguists endorse incompatible competing theories, some of which reduce them to two sets instead of three while others don't. So the notation {*k, *ḱ, kʷ} stays so people can write about them & have their readers know which speech entities the writers mean even while what they actually sounded like remains unknown & disputed.

What blows my mind as someone who studies and translates ancient Japanese works is that the Japanese word for Buddha, butsu 仏 obviously comes from the Sanskrit word, which I'm given to understand is related to the word "bud" in English. Those dang Proto-Indo-Europeans had a linguistic influence that stretched all the way to the Pacific. It's amazing.

The claim after 5:30 that there is no reason to reconstruct laryngeals for non-Anatolian IE, is not the case. Besides the Greek prothetic vowels that have been a common example of laryngeal preservation since Beekes 1969, Kümmel has recently offered evidence that the second laryngeal was preserved in Indo-Iranian as a laryngeal sound as late as the Proto-Iranian era.

How well could we reconstruct the language that came _before_ Proto-Indo-European?

@cyganskadywizjapiechoty

5 ай бұрын

extremely badly if its not outright impossible

@willjapheth23789

5 ай бұрын

I don't think the other reconstructed proto languages are remotely similar enough.

@akl2k7

5 ай бұрын

There is internal reconstruction, but even that can only go so far. It does lead to some interesting results (agglutination, the morphosyntactic alignment being slightly different, etc.), but even that can be taken with a grain of salt.

@demoman1596sh

5 ай бұрын

In order to truly reconstruct a pre-Proto-Indo-European, we would need to identify any non-Indo-European languages that share a common ancestor with Proto-Indo-European. Unfortunately, there's quite little agreement among historical linguists as to whether there even are any modern or historical non-Indo-European languages that share a common ancestor with PIE. The Uralic languages (including Finnish, Hungarian, and many others) do seem to have intriguing similarities, but we may ultimately never be able to prove they are related to the Indo-European languages.

I’m too lazy to listen, is there a simple answer? Pls?

Very...

5:47 Wrong. Laryngeals affected the vowels and consonants. There is vowel coloring, of course. If they followed vowels, they lengthened them. If they followed consonants (stops), they made them aspirated (preserved only by Sanskrit and Greek).

Maybe find words for "snow" and "hat", but what about "cowboy"?

@oneukum

5 ай бұрын

There is the famous example used in discussing the history of Greek. You'd arrive at something like *gwoukolos meaning cowherd.

@jvanvuren5399

5 ай бұрын

gʷṓwsbʰāt

@francesconicoletti2547

5 ай бұрын

Cow sees to be gwou-. But there is nothing I can find specifically for child at all.

@oneukum

5 ай бұрын

@@francesconicoletti2547 Yes. The "kolos" part is carer. "*gwouputlos" if you absolutely insist on an absolutely literal translation.

Sne falt har.

A couple of general questions bout proto-Indo-European: Why did the speakers of proto-Indo-European develop such a complex grammatical structure? Could it be that there were efficiencies in the structure of proto-Indo-European and early variants that lead it to be adopted by other language speakers or was this simply a case of forming elites that dominated the spoken language of people?

First😅

Sanskrit is PIE ✋

@demoman1596sh

5 ай бұрын

This is a claim that is not accepted by historical linguists.

@KeinsingtonCisco

5 ай бұрын

@@demoman1596sh There are quite a few credible linguists who support the Sanskrit origin. The ones whom oppose it tend to have less credibility. ✋

@marjae2767

5 ай бұрын

Many languages switch k > s. Not as many switch s > k. Latin centum had a hard k sound, but most of its descendents have a soft s sound. Sanskrit satem *already* had a soft s sound. If we assume the common ancestor had a hard *k in that word, then Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian, both have to switch *k > *s. If that occured during the Sintashta period, that could be a shared innovation among adjacent languages, so 1 easy sound shift. If we assume the common ancestor had a soft *s in that word, then Anatolian, Tocharian, Hellenic, Italo-Celtic, and Germanic each have to switch *s > *k. In some cases, that could be a shared innovation among the western languages, but it still requires separate shifts in Anatolian and Tocharian. So at least 3 harder sound shifts. I'm not an expert, but it seems more likely that PIE had initial *ḱ in that word.

@KeinsingtonCisco

5 ай бұрын

@@marjae2767 Nope. The k sound is similar to semetic speakers like arabs who sound like they are cleaning their throat K while trying to pronounce S-H. Sanskrit is more dynamic & evolved than all the Indo-european derivatives.

@enderman_666

5 ай бұрын

@@demoman1596shit’s only ever posited by Indian nationalists

Why don’t we use kʲ, gʲ, gʲʰ for the palatal velars in PIE instead of the acute accent over the velar?

@marcasdebarun6879

5 ай бұрын

Long-established convention, really.

@arta.xshaca

5 ай бұрын

Maybe takes up too much space in paperwork