# Linguistic Approaches to Examining Archaic Sound Forms



## LilianaB

I have been just wondering how experts know what the archaic form of certain sounds was 2000 years ago, for example. Is it based mostly on written records or something else. Thank you.


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## ahvalj

LilianaB said:


> I have been just wondering how experts know what the archaic form of certain sounds was 2000 years ago, for example. Is it based mostly on written records or something else. Thank you.


Examples, please.


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## LilianaB

How do researchers know that certain sounds were,  let's say closer to -o 2000 years ago and then they became closer to -a. This is just an example. Is such research based solely on written evidence. What if written records do not exist from such remote times, which will be true in many cases. What do they take as samples to examine?


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## Hulalessar

I have often wondered the same. How, for example, can we know that Hittite had labiovelar plosives and laryngeal fricatives?


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## ahvalj

Well, a comprehensive explication would require too much writing. I suggest you to check a couple of manuals on the comparative linguistics, there you'll find the details. The method works very well on modern languages, e. g. comparing words from the modern Romance dialects we can come to forms pretty similar to the documented Latin ones, the same for the Slavic, Germanic, and a lot of other language groups. Then, we can compare these reconstructed forms for every group to deduce the habit of the words in their common ancestor. This science exists for about 200 years, and so far it worked pretty well — I don't know any attempts to reinvent the wheel in this area.

Now about a/o. There are many groups of the IE languages that have a distinction between short "a" and "o", with words with "a" of one language corresponding to "a" in the other, and the same with "o". E. g., Greek axōn vs. Latin axis; Latin rota, Old Irish roth. On the other hand, many languages have "a" in place of both these sounds, e. g. Lithuanian ašis, ratas. When these latter languages have "o", it is always of another origin, not corresponding to "o" in Greek/Latin/Celtic etc. Since there is no reason to believe that some old sound splitted into "a" and "o" in these dialects (unlike in Germanic, where the old "u" splitted into "u" and "o" depending on the following sounds), we come to a conclusion that both short "a" and "o" were present in the common ancestor of all these languages. This is further confirmed by alternations (there is a very widespread alternation "e/o", but "a" doesn't participate in it, except for a few words) and by other indirect evidence. 

Back to my example you are mentioning. So, we have the IE reconstructed root k'lew- "to be known, to listen", and the reconstructed word "k'lowos" (actually, "k'lewos", but this is another story). In modern Slavic it gives "slovo" and probably (directly or indirectly) the name "slověne". On the other hand, all the neighbors of Slavs that had the distinction between short "a" and "o" and borrowed words from the Slavic dialects between the 5th and 8th centuries (Greeks, Romanians, and Finns) heard "a" in this and other Slavic words that in the 9th century have "o". This means that the Slavic sound was more open then, and it was either "å" or even a plain "a". Further details see in my previous comment.


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## LilianaB

Thank you, Ahvjl. How do we even know that there was a common language? Couldn't it have all been a coincidence? I only recently found out that wolves are not genetically related to dogs but developed separately, regardless of the fact that they look similar. A little bit OT, but just to demonstrate my point.


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## ahvalj

LilianaB said:


> Thank you, Ahvjl. How do we even know that there was a common language? Couldn't it have all been a coincidence? I only recently found out that wolves are not genetically related to dogs but developed separately, regardless of the fact that they look similar. A little bit OT, but just to demonstrate my point.


First of all, they do not just look similar, they had a common ancestor not more than a few tens of thousands years ago. Dogs are the result of hybridization between wolves and related species.

As to the languages, partly it depends on what do we call a common language: a strict dialect or a group of related dialects. In history there are examples of both. E. g., all the Romance languages originate from a single dialect spoken in the (originally) town of Rome and surrounding villages. The Germanic and Slavic languages in their early forms consist of very similar dialects, so that there is no evidence for a broad and diverse dialect continuum that gave rise to each group, everything was pretty compact. On the other hand, East Baltic and West Baltic (Prussian) show some very ancient differences, so that we should move the time they had split to a rather early date. The same for the Iranian languages. But if you want to say that English, Lithuanian and Russian are descendants of dialects that were separate since the Neanderthal times, then I am afraid you are alone.


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## ahvalj

LilianaB, since you can read Russian, here are two best books I know on the topic. Hope, you are familiar with the torrents. The copyright to both books is long expired, so don't worry:
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3244614
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1560424


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## ahvalj

LilianaB said:


> I only recently found out that wolves are not genetically related to dogs but developed separately, regardless of the fact that they look similar.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog


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## origumi

You can take the thread below as a good example: how "ns" was pronounced in Classic Latin.
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2296044


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## ahvalj

LilianaB said:


> Thank you, Ahvjl. How do we even know that there was a common language? Couldn't it have all been a coincidence? I only recently found out that wolves are not genetically related to dogs but developed separately, regardless of the fact that they look similar. A little bit OT, but just to demonstrate my point.


How it all began:

The _Sanscrit_ language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the _Greek_, more copious than the _Latin_, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the _Gothic_ and the _Celtic_, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the _Sanscrit_; and the old _Persian_ might be added to the same family.
​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)

The point is that the deeper we move in time, the closer the sounds, forms and vocabulary of languages within the same group or family are. Since for many languages we have attested how they split and become more diverse with time (Latin to Romance), we have all the rights to assume the same things happening in the past.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> How do researchers know that certain sounds were,  let's say closer to -o 2000 years ago and then they became closer to -a. This is just an example. Is such research based solely on written evidence. What if written records do not exist from such remote times, which will be true in many cases. What do they take as samples to examine?


Just to make sure you're asking the right question because I suspect (from earlier discussions we had) that what you're really after is something else:
Often we don't know how a phoneme was really pronounced but which phonemes ancient languages distinguished and which they do not distinguish and how speaker of these languages perceive them. Therefore we often only care what distinctions people made in writing without knowing exactly how they sounded. E.g. we know that Proto-Semitic must have distinguished three non-emphatic "s"-like sounds, s1, s2 and s3, of which we don't know how they were pronounced (the most popular theory is s1=[s], s2=[ɬ] and s3=[ts], but there is no general agreement) but we know how they developed in modern languages: Hebrew s1>/ʃ/, s2>/s/ s3>/s/; Arabic s1>/s/, s2>/ʃ/, s3>/s/. Or, to go less far back in history, we know that the /s/ in German "Gan*s*" and "gan*z*" must once have been different because one underwent intervocalic vocalization (in "die Gän*s*e" we say /z/) the other not (in "das Gan*z*e" we say /s/) but we don't know how exactly they differed.


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## LilianaB

Thank you kindly, Berndf and Ahvalj. This time I am not really after undermining the Balto-Slavic theory. I got really interested in the approaches researches take to examine sound changes in languages which did not have a written representation. It is a lot of material. I have to digest it all. Thank you.


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## perevoditel

LilianaB said:


> How do we even know that there was a common language?



We cannot be REALLY sure. If both people from Australia and Middle- and South America make ropes from plants in the same way, this method could both come from one place or develop in both in the same time. But there are some words, which sounds similar in many languages. In Polish "wola" means "will" (as noun). Verb, which came from this word - "woleć" - means "want" (like "I would rather want dog"), and it sounds similar to German "wollen", Norwegian "å ville", and has similar writing to English "will". But similarities reach much farther - Sanskrit "Veda" means "knowledge" - just like Polish "wiedza".

If you want words similar in more then 2 languages from different groups (first English, then Sanskrit and Polish):

mother - maat'r - matka (old Polish "macierz")
brother - bhrat'r - brat
two - dva - dwa

Ad. last: I know "two" sounds a bit differently from "dva"/"dwa", but I found common word in Swedish - två.

There are also similarities between Sanskrit and Latin, i.e. "apas" compared to "aqua". Probably it came to Old Brythonic as "abona", in the meantime changing meaning to "river". I guess it can be in common with Norwegian "elva" (also "river"), or "å" (theoretically meaning "small river", but I've never heard this).


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## berndf

If you have a deeper interest in reconstruction of the phonology of ancient languages I recommend reading _W. Sindey Allen: Vox Latina_. It's subject is a detailed reconstruction of the phonology of Classical Latin. Since Latin is a very well documented language there are many different cue and by reading the book you can learn how they are combined in the reconstruction effort.


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## LilianaB

Thank you.


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## Lugubert

perevoditel said:


> LilianaB said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> How do we even know that there was a common language?
> 
> 
> 
> We cannot be REALLY sure.
Click to expand...

In fact, nobody even thinks that we quote from an earlier existing language when we say that *PIE= something. Reconstructed forms are formulas that (hopefully) help us to understand how languages evolve and connect. No serious linguist would believe that stone-age people somewhere in Central Asia actually said *kmt when they meant 100.


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## ahvalj

Lugubert said:


> In fact, nobody even thinks that we quote from an earlier existing language when we say that *PIE= something. Reconstructed forms are formulas that (hopefully) help us to understand how languages evolve and connect. No serious linguist would believe that stone-age people somewhere in Central Asia actually said *kmt when they meant 100.


Actually, (1) k'mto(m), (2) not in Central Asia but in Pontic steppes, (3) many serious linguists do believe (and I have heard them counting from 1 to 10), (4) many reconstructions are quite strong — there are questions whether there were d or t‛, dh or d+something, but in principle the reconstructed forms remain unchanged for more than a century, which speaks for itself, (5) this system works OK for younger languages (oldest runic forms are just one step more derived than the reconstructed common Germanic; the same for the Vedic vs. the reconstructed common Indo-Aryan).


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