# Indo-European I, ich, je, eu, yo, ...



## basper82

The first-person personal pronoun (in the nominitive singular case), as in the English "I", for the most part can be traced and related to other languages as a result of a series of consonant shifts/drops.  Here are some examples:

g => y consonant shift - as in the Spanish "yo" = akin to the Latin/Greek "ego"

"softening", or elimination of a consonant - as in the Italian "io" from the Latin "ego", or the drop of the "-c" from ME "ic" (akin to Ger. "ich" and Dutch "ik") to produce the Modern English "I".

Even Slavic langages like Russian have "ya", which is similiar to the Nordic "jag" (and vice versa)

Latin/Greek "ego" and Icelandic "eg"; Arabic "ana" and Albanian "unë"... The list goes on.

So how does the French "je" fit into this? Is it perhaps related to the Scandinavian "jag", only now the "j" is pronounced like a "zha" instead of a "ya"?


----------



## Fred_C

Hi,
In French the consonant G is pronounced exactly like a J when it is followed by a E or an I.
If the word "JE" was spelt "GE", it would be pronounced exactly the same way, and perhaps its Latin etymology would be clearer ?

(This is just personal intuition)


----------



## Frank06

Hi,

French _je_ ultimately comes from Late Latin _eo_ (<Latin ego < PIE *eg^/eg) and corresponds to all the (nominative/subject) forms in the other Romance languages.
The Germanic form is *_ek_, while Greek and the Italic languages used the extended the form to *_ego:_.

Old French had a wide variety of forms: _eo, io, gié, jeo, jo_, ... "résultant de divers traitrement phonétiques de _eo_ selon la force d'accent était maintenue ou non", to quote Alain Rey's _Dictionnaire historique de la langue française_.
The atonic form _je_ itself is the result of a weakened _jo_.



basper82 said:


> The first-person personal pronoun (in the nominitive singular case), as in the English "I", for the most part can be traced and related to other languages as a result of a series of consonant shifts/drops.


It can be traced back to PIE, rather than to other IE languages.


> So how does the French "je" fit into this? Is it perhaps related to the Scandinavian "jag"


Maybe I misread your post, but it seems that your looking for a kind of direct line between several IE languages. It's beyond doubt that French _je_ is related to PIE *eg-, but you seem to suggest that there is some influence of the Scandinavian form on the French one. (My apologies if I did misunderstand).
So, yes, French _je_ is related to Scandinavian _jag_, they are cognates which go back to the same PIE form. The same way _je_ is related to English _I_, German _ich_ etc., because they all go back to the same PIE root.



> Arabic "ana"


I wonder why Arabic should come into play.


Groetjes,

Frank


----------



## basper82

Thanks Frank, that was exactly the answer I was looking for.

As far as the Arabic "ana", I wanted to see if someone could describe a link as it is an IE language.


----------



## berndf

basper82 said:


> As far as the Arabic "ana", I wanted to see if someone could describe a link as it is an IE language.


This surely is of Semitic origin. A cognate is Hebrew "ani", "anochi" ("ch" like in Scots "loch").

The precise development of French _je_ out of Vulgar Latin _eo_ has been discussed here.


----------



## Mariah8282

You should keep in mind the different groups:

LATIN: Italian, French, Spanish...
INDO-EUROPEAN: English, German, Scandinavian languages...
SEMITIC: Arabic, Hebrew...

Russian is a Slavic language...

It easy to understand why we have some words in Romance language since we can study Latin documets and see the transformations.

It's not the same for Indo-European languages since we don't have any written document...so we have "created" Indo-European,  imagining how it could have been the original words starting from the languages we speak today...

Hope I've been of any help...


----------



## berndf

Latin, Greek and the Slavic languages are all Indo-European. You probably meant "Germanic" and not Indo-European.

Among those you mentioned, only the Semitic languages are non-Indo-European.


----------



## Frank06

Hi,


Mariah8282 said:


> LATIN: Italian, French, Spanish...
> INDO-EUROPEAN: English, German, Scandinavian languages...
> SEMITIC: Arabic, Hebrew...


Latin belongs to the Italic branch, which is part of what's been called the Indo-European language family.
English, German and the other Germanic languages are also part of that same IE language family.
PIE and Proto-Semitic are considered to be members of a super-family, though this Nostratic theory is certainly not widely accepted.



> It's not the same for Indo-European languages since we don't have any written document...


The oldest texts written in an IE language approximately date from 1500BC (Hittite). Please note that Latin is also an IE language.



> so we have "created" Indo-European,  imagining how it could have been the original words starting from the languages we speak today...


"We" prefer to talk of "reconstructed", rather than of "created". We do not imagine, we try to reconstruct it on the basis a whole body of scientific and linguistic literature .

Groetjes,

Frank


----------



## origumi

Frank06 said:


> The oldest texts written in an IE language approximately date from 1500BC (Hittite).


The Mycenaean Linear B script, early Greek thus IE, is also dated by some scholars to 1500 BC.


----------



## dinji

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> French _je_ ultimately comes from Late Latin _eo_ (<Latin ego < PIE *eg^/eg) and corresponds to all the (nominative/subject) forms in the other Romance languages.
> The Germanic form is *_ek_, while Greek and the Italic languages used the extended the form to *_ego:_.
> 
> Old French had a wide variety of forms: _eo, io, gié, jeo, jo_, ... "résultant de divers traitrement phonétiques de _eo_ selon la force d'accent était maintenue ou non", to quote Alain Rey's _Dictionnaire historique de la langue française_.
> The atonic form _je_ itself is the result of a weakened _jo_.
> 
> 
> It can be traced back to PIE, rather than to other IE languages.
> Maybe I misread your post, but it seems that your looking for a kind of direct line between several IE languages. It's beyond doubt that French _je_ is related to PIE *eg-, but you seem to suggest that there is some influence of the Scandinavian form on the French one. (My apologies if I did misunderstand).
> So, yes, French _je_ is related to Scandinavian _jag_, they are cognates which go back to the same PIE form. The same way _je_ is related to English _I_, German _ich_ etc., because they all go back to the same PIE root.


To be clear: none of the graphems /j/ derive from the Indo-European (palato-)velar consonant. The French (and Catalan) /j/ comes from the first vowel [e-] > [i-] > [j-] and here the [j] stands for a postalveolar sibilant.

The Scandinavian [ja-] (Swedish) [je-] (Danish) (here the [j] stands for a palatal semivowel) also derives from the first vowel. The origin is a very common and productive umlaut rule "braking" the Proto-Norse vowel /e/ in a stressed syllable before a (Proto-Norse unstressed) syllable originally containing the vowel /a/. Therefore the form _jag_ presupposes a Proto-Norse form _*eka_, which is quite likely to have existed, judged by some enclitic forms _-ka_ representing the first person pronoun in attested Norse. _*eka_ is also to be expected from the Proto-Indo-European form _*ego:_

I believe the Slavonic [j-] has a similar origin, because at least Russian has a sound rule turning etymological /e/ into /ya/ subject to some conditions unknown to me.


----------



## MarcB

In the Spanish yo the y is pronounced as French j and English j by some speakers.


----------



## J.F. de TROYES

MarcB said:


> In the Spanish yo the y is pronounced as French j and English j by some speakers.


 
In what areas ? In Castilian the "y " [j] is not the same as the French "je" where "j" is pronounced [ʒ].


----------



## miguel89

In some areas in Argentina "yo" is pronounced as /ʃo/ or as /ʒo/.


----------



## JGreco

In some Spanish speaking Caribbean zones of Latin America such as Panama, Porto Rico, Cuba, The Dominican Republic, and the Coastal zones of Venezuela and Colombia the "Y" in the word "yo" is pronounced like either the "j" of Portuguese or French or the "j" of English depending on the country. I know Panama tends to lean towards the French and Portuguese pronunciation for "y" while Porto Rico seems to lean to the English pronunciation. There is a lot of variation with the pronunciation of "yo" throughout the Spanish speaking world.


----------



## 89ten

Is it certain the French je comes directly from the Latin ego? Latin lacks the semivowel j and pie form might have been jeg, not eg, since in many languages the semivowel j is present, also in French. Latin lost it, so how could it reappear in French, unless it was coincidental. The form with j could have been used in some branch of Vulgar Latin and 
  that’s how it might have made its way to French. Another idea would be that the French je was used among Celtic speakers before romance languages arrived in France


----------



## berndf

89ten said:


> Is it certain the French je comes directly from the Latin ego? Latin lacks the semivowel j and pie form might have been jeg, not eg, since in many languages the semivowel j is present, also in French. Latin lost it, so how could it reappear in French, unless it was coincidental. The form with j could have been used in some branch of Vulgar Latin and
> that’s how it might have made its way to French. Another idea would be that the French je was used among Celtic speakers before romance languages arrived in France


The etymology of _je_ seems to be quite well established. Have a look here. Latin did not lack the semi-vowel [j] it just did not distinguish it in writing from the full vowel /i/. The French letter "j" does not (and as far as I know never did) represent and a semi-vowel. Its modern pronunciation is [ʒ].


----------

