Proto-Indo-European accent
Encyclopedia
Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual system of Proto-Indo-European language
.
to have a pitch accent
system that is usually described as a free tonal accent. This means that at most one syllable in a word was distinguished by height (rather than prominence), and that the place of accent (tone) was not predictable by phonological rules
.
PIE accent could be mobile, which means that it could change place throughout the inflectional paradigm. That state of affairs can be seen in Vedic and Ancient Greek, e.g. in the declension of athematic
nouns; compare:
—or in the conjugation of athematic verbs (compare Sanskrit root present first-person sg. émi, first-person plural imás). Otherwise, the accent was placed at the same syllable throughout the inflection, and according to that placement nouns are divided into barytones accented on the first syllable, and oxytones accented on the last syllable. Compare:
PIE accent was also free which means that it could stand on any syllable in a word, which is faithfully reflected in Vedic Sanskrit accent
(later Classical Sanskrit has predictable accent). Compare:
As one can see, the placement of reconstructed PIE accent is reflected in Vedic Sanskrit
basically intact. According to the reflex of PIE accent, Indo-European languages are divided into those with free accent preserved (either directly or indirectly), and those with fixed (or bound) accent. Free accent is preserved in Vedic Sanskrit (of modern Indo-Iranian languages, according to some, in Pashto), Ancient Greek, Balto-Slavic and Anatolian. In Proto-Germanic
, free accent was retained long enough for Verner's Law
to be dependent on it, but later stress was shifted to the first syllable of the word.
is generally considered the most archaic, reflecting fairly faithfully the position of the original PIE accent. Avestan
manuscripts do not have written accent, but we know indirectly that in some period free PIE accent was preserved in (e.g. Avestan *r is devoiced yielding -hr- before voiceless stops and after the accent—if the accent was not on the preceding syllable, *r is not devoiced).
Ancient Greek also preserves free PIE accent in its nouns (see Ancient Greek accent
), but with limitations that prevent the accent from being positioned farther than the third syllable from the end (next from the end if the last syllable was long). Verbal accent in Greek is almost completely worthless for reconstructing PIE accent, because (other than in a few cases) it is consistently positioned as far to the left as the rules allow.
Proto-Germanic
initially preserved PIE free accent, with some innovations. In the last stage of Proto-Germanic, the accent was changed into a stress accent and fixed on the first syllable of the word, but prior to that it left its traces in the operation of Verner's law
.
Anatolian languages
show traces of old PIE accent in the lengthening of the old accented syllable. Compare:
Balto-Slavic
also retains free PIE accent. For the reconstruction of Proto-Balto-Slavic accent, the most important is the evidence of Lithuanian
, Latvian
(traditionally Lithuianian is thought as more relevant, but that role is being increasingly taken over by Latvian), and some Slavic languages, especially West South Slavic languages and their archaic dialects. Accent alternations in inflectional paradigms (both verbal and nominal) are also retained in Balto-Slavic. Generally it was held that Balto-Slavic has innovative accentual system, but nowadays, according to some researchers, Balto-Slavic takes a pivotal role in the reconstruction of PIE accent (see below).
Indirect traces of the PIE accent are said to be reflected in the development of certain sounds in various branches. For the most part, however, these are of limited, if any, utility in reconstructing the PIE accent.
Vedic Sanskrit evidence also indicates that in some positions Proto-Indo-European verb
could be unaccented in some syntactical conditions, such as in finite position in the main clause (but not sentence-initially, where verbs would bear whatever accent they would have borne in subordinate clauses). Same is valid for vocatives, which would be deaccented unless they appeared sentence-initially.
nominals
and thematic verbal stems all had fixed accent (i.e. on the same syllable throughout the paradigm), which was inherited in all attested daughter languages. Although, there exist some uncertainties regarding the simple thematic present. Some athematic nominals and verb stems also exhibited fixed accent (chiefly on the root), but most had alternating, mobile accent, exhibiting several characteristical patterns; in all of them the surface accent was to the left in one group of inflected forms (nominoaccusative of nominals, active singular of verbs), and to the right in the rest. It can be said that in PIE endings and stems could all be underlyingly accented or not, and that the leftmost underlying accent surfaced, and that the words with no underlying accent were accented by default on the leftmost syllable, but no phonological rules for determining the position of PIE accent have been ascertained for now.
It was shown, however, by Vladislav Illich-Svitych
in 1963 that the Balto-Slavic accent does not match with that presupposed PIE accent reconstructed on the basis of Vedic and Ancient Greek—the Greek-Vedic barytones correspond to Balto-Slavic fixed paradigms, and Greek-Vedic oxytones correspond to Balto-Slavic mobile paradigms. Moreover, in about a quarter of all cognate Vedic and Ancient Greek etymons accents do not match at all; e.g.
Recently Russian linguists Vladimir Dybo
and Sergej Nikolayev have been reconstructing PIE accentual system as a system of two tones: + and − (probably high and low tone). Proto-Indo-European would not thus have, as is usually reconstructed, a system of free accent more or less preserved in Vedic, but instead every morpheme would be inherently high or low (i.e. dominant or recessive, as it cannot be known for sure how those features were phonetically actually manifested), and the position of accent would be later in various daughter languages determined in various ways (depending on the combinations of (+) and (−) morphemes), whereas Vedic would certainly not be the most archaic language. Many correspondences among IE languages, as well as certain phenomena in individual daughters dependent on PIE tones, should corroborate this interpretation.
Dybo lists several shortcomings of the traditional approach to the reconstruction of PIE accent. Amongst others, wrong belief in the direct connection between PIE accent and ablaut
which in fact does not actually explain the position of PIE accent at all. Usually, however, it is thought that zero-grade should be unaccented, but that is provably not valid for PIE (e.g. 'wolf', 'seven' etc.) according to the traditional reconstruction. Furthermore, Dybo claims that there is none whatsoever phonological, semantic or morphological reason for the classification of certain word to a certain accentual type, i.e. the traditional model cannot explain why Vedic 'wolf' is barytone and Vedic devás 'deity' is oxytone. According to Dybo, such discrepancies can only be explained by presupposing lexical tone in PIE.
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
.
Description
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is reconstructedLinguistic reconstruction
Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of the unattested ancestor of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction. Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language...
to have a pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
system that is usually described as a free tonal accent. This means that at most one syllable in a word was distinguished by height (rather than prominence), and that the place of accent (tone) was not predictable by phonological rules
Proto-Indo-European phonology
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European language has been reconstructed by linguists, based on the similarities and differences among current and extinct Indo-European languages...
.
PIE accent could be mobile, which means that it could change place throughout the inflectional paradigm. That state of affairs can be seen in Vedic and Ancient Greek, e.g. in the declension of athematic
Athematic
In the Indo-European languages, thematic stems are stems ending in a theme vowel, a vowel sound that is always present between the stem of the word and the attached ending...
nouns; compare:
- PIE 'foot, step' Nom.Nominative caseThe nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
sg.Grammatical numberIn linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
> Sanskrit , Ancient Greek - PIE Gen.Genitive caseIn grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
sg. *pedés > Sanskrit padás, Ancient Greek - PIE Acc.Accusative caseThe accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
sg. } > Sanskrit , Ancient Greek
—or in the conjugation of athematic verbs (compare Sanskrit root present first-person sg. émi, first-person plural imás). Otherwise, the accent was placed at the same syllable throughout the inflection, and according to that placement nouns are divided into barytones accented on the first syllable, and oxytones accented on the last syllable. Compare:
- PIE barytone 'wolf' > Sanskrit Nom. sg. vṛ́kas, Gen. sg. vṛ́kasya, Nom. pl. vṛ́kās
- PIE oxytone *suHnús 'son' > Sanskrit Nom. sg. sūnús, Gen. sg. sūnós, Nom. pl. sūnávas
PIE accent was also free which means that it could stand on any syllable in a word, which is faithfully reflected in Vedic Sanskrit accent
Vedic accent
The tone accent of Vedic Sanskrit, or Vedic accent for brevity, is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta "raised" , anudātta "not raised" and svarita "sounded" .-The accents:Udātta marks the place of the inherited PIE accent...
(later Classical Sanskrit has predictable accent). Compare:
- PIE 'carried' > Vedic bháramāṇas
- PIE 'holds' > Vedic dhāráyati
- PIE 'worships' > Vedic namasyáti
- PIE 'red' > Vedic rudhirás
As one can see, the placement of reconstructed PIE accent is reflected in Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit is an old Indo-Aryan language. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian. It is closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved Iranian language...
basically intact. According to the reflex of PIE accent, Indo-European languages are divided into those with free accent preserved (either directly or indirectly), and those with fixed (or bound) accent. Free accent is preserved in Vedic Sanskrit (of modern Indo-Iranian languages, according to some, in Pashto), Ancient Greek, Balto-Slavic and Anatolian. In Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic language
Proto-Germanic , or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Germanic languages, such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish.The Proto-Germanic language is...
, free accent was retained long enough for Verner's Law
Verner's law
Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...
to be dependent on it, but later stress was shifted to the first syllable of the word.
Reflexes
Vedic accentVedic accent
The tone accent of Vedic Sanskrit, or Vedic accent for brevity, is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta "raised" , anudātta "not raised" and svarita "sounded" .-The accents:Udātta marks the place of the inherited PIE accent...
is generally considered the most archaic, reflecting fairly faithfully the position of the original PIE accent. Avestan
Avestan language
Avestan is an East Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name...
manuscripts do not have written accent, but we know indirectly that in some period free PIE accent was preserved in (e.g. Avestan *r is devoiced yielding -hr- before voiceless stops and after the accent—if the accent was not on the preceding syllable, *r is not devoiced).
Ancient Greek also preserves free PIE accent in its nouns (see Ancient Greek accent
Ancient Greek accent
In Ancient Greek, accent varies from word to word, but there are rules of accent determining where it can fall and what type it can be. The rules depend on the length of the vowel in the last syllable and in the syllable being accented.-Mora:...
), but with limitations that prevent the accent from being positioned farther than the third syllable from the end (next from the end if the last syllable was long). Verbal accent in Greek is almost completely worthless for reconstructing PIE accent, because (other than in a few cases) it is consistently positioned as far to the left as the rules allow.
Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic language
Proto-Germanic , or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Germanic languages, such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish.The Proto-Germanic language is...
initially preserved PIE free accent, with some innovations. In the last stage of Proto-Germanic, the accent was changed into a stress accent and fixed on the first syllable of the word, but prior to that it left its traces in the operation of Verner's law
Verner's law
Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...
.
Anatolian languages
Anatolian languages
The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
show traces of old PIE accent in the lengthening of the old accented syllable. Compare:
- PIE *dóru 'tree; wood' > Hittite, Luwian tāru
- PIE *wódr̥- 'water' > Hittite wātar, but PIE 'waters' (collective) > Hittite widār
Balto-Slavic
Balto-Slavic languages
The Balto-Slavic language group traditionally comprises Baltic and Slavic languages, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to the period of common development...
also retains free PIE accent. For the reconstruction of Proto-Balto-Slavic accent, the most important is the evidence of Lithuanian
Lithuanian language
Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...
, Latvian
Latvian language
Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...
(traditionally Lithuianian is thought as more relevant, but that role is being increasingly taken over by Latvian), and some Slavic languages, especially West South Slavic languages and their archaic dialects. Accent alternations in inflectional paradigms (both verbal and nominal) are also retained in Balto-Slavic. Generally it was held that Balto-Slavic has innovative accentual system, but nowadays, according to some researchers, Balto-Slavic takes a pivotal role in the reconstruction of PIE accent (see below).
Indirect traces of the PIE accent are said to be reflected in the development of certain sounds in various branches. For the most part, however, these are of limited, if any, utility in reconstructing the PIE accent.
Unaccented words
Some PIE lexical categories could be unaccented (clitics). These are chiefly particles (PIE 'and' > Vedic -ca, Latin -que) and some forms of pronouns (PIE 'to me' > Vedic me).Vedic Sanskrit evidence also indicates that in some positions Proto-Indo-European verb
Proto-Indo-European verb
The verbal system of the Proto-Indo-European language was a complex system, with verbs categorized according to their aspect — stative, imperfective, or perfective. The system utilized multiple grammatical moods and voices, with verbs being conjugated according to person, number and tense...
could be unaccented in some syntactical conditions, such as in finite position in the main clause (but not sentence-initially, where verbs would bear whatever accent they would have borne in subordinate clauses). Same is valid for vocatives, which would be deaccented unless they appeared sentence-initially.
Interpretation
According to the traditional doctrine, the following can be said of PIE accentual system: PIE thematicVowel stems
In Indo-European linguistics, a thematic stem or vowel stem is a noun or verb stem that ends in a vowel that appears in or otherwise influences the noun or verb's inflectional paradigm. The vowel is called the thematic vowel...
nominals
Nominal (linguistics)
In linguistics, a nominal is a part of speech in some languages that shares features with nouns and adjectives.- Examples :Nominals are a common feature of Indigenous Australian languages, many of which do not categorically differentiate nouns from adjectives.Some features of nominals in some...
and thematic verbal stems all had fixed accent (i.e. on the same syllable throughout the paradigm), which was inherited in all attested daughter languages. Although, there exist some uncertainties regarding the simple thematic present. Some athematic nominals and verb stems also exhibited fixed accent (chiefly on the root), but most had alternating, mobile accent, exhibiting several characteristical patterns; in all of them the surface accent was to the left in one group of inflected forms (nominoaccusative of nominals, active singular of verbs), and to the right in the rest. It can be said that in PIE endings and stems could all be underlyingly accented or not, and that the leftmost underlying accent surfaced, and that the words with no underlying accent were accented by default on the leftmost syllable, but no phonological rules for determining the position of PIE accent have been ascertained for now.
Modern theories
Traditionally the PIE accent is reconstructed straightforwardly—by the comparison of Vedic, Ancient Greek and Germanic; e.g. PIE 'father' from Sanskrit pitā́, Ancient Greek , Gothic fadar. When the position of accent would match in these languages, that would be the accent reconstructed for "PIE proper". It was taken that the Vedic is the most archaic and the evidence of Vedic would be used to resolve all the potentially problematic cases.It was shown, however, by Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych was a Russian linguist and accentologist, also a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics.Of Ukrainian descent, he was born in Kiev but later moved to work in Moscow. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally expounded by...
in 1963 that the Balto-Slavic accent does not match with that presupposed PIE accent reconstructed on the basis of Vedic and Ancient Greek—the Greek-Vedic barytones correspond to Balto-Slavic fixed paradigms, and Greek-Vedic oxytones correspond to Balto-Slavic mobile paradigms. Moreover, in about a quarter of all cognate Vedic and Ancient Greek etymons accents do not match at all; e.g.
- PIE 'field' > Ancient Greek : Vedic ájras
- PIE 'father-in-law' > Ancient Greek : Vedic śváśuras
- PIE 'which' > Ancient Greek : Vedic katarás
Recently Russian linguists Vladimir Dybo
Vladimir Dybo
Vladimir Antonovich Dybo is a Russian linguist whose areas of research include the Slavic languages, Indo-European, Nostratic, and Nilo-Saharan....
and Sergej Nikolayev have been reconstructing PIE accentual system as a system of two tones: + and − (probably high and low tone). Proto-Indo-European would not thus have, as is usually reconstructed, a system of free accent more or less preserved in Vedic, but instead every morpheme would be inherently high or low (i.e. dominant or recessive, as it cannot be known for sure how those features were phonetically actually manifested), and the position of accent would be later in various daughter languages determined in various ways (depending on the combinations of (+) and (−) morphemes), whereas Vedic would certainly not be the most archaic language. Many correspondences among IE languages, as well as certain phenomena in individual daughters dependent on PIE tones, should corroborate this interpretation.
Dybo lists several shortcomings of the traditional approach to the reconstruction of PIE accent. Amongst others, wrong belief in the direct connection between PIE accent and ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
which in fact does not actually explain the position of PIE accent at all. Usually, however, it is thought that zero-grade should be unaccented, but that is provably not valid for PIE (e.g. 'wolf', 'seven' etc.) according to the traditional reconstruction. Furthermore, Dybo claims that there is none whatsoever phonological, semantic or morphological reason for the classification of certain word to a certain accentual type, i.e. the traditional model cannot explain why Vedic 'wolf' is barytone and Vedic devás 'deity' is oxytone. According to Dybo, such discrepancies can only be explained by presupposing lexical tone in PIE.
See also
- Vedic accentVedic accentThe tone accent of Vedic Sanskrit, or Vedic accent for brevity, is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta "raised" , anudātta "not raised" and svarita "sounded" .-The accents:Udātta marks the place of the inherited PIE accent...
- Ancient Greek accentAncient Greek accentIn Ancient Greek, accent varies from word to word, but there are rules of accent determining where it can fall and what type it can be. The rules depend on the length of the vowel in the last syllable and in the syllable being accented.-Mora:...
- Proto-Indo-European nounProto-Indo-European nounThe nouns of the Proto-Indo-European language , their morphology and semantics, have been reconstructed by modern linguists based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages.-Morphology:...
(see esp. section on athematic nouns and ablaut-accentual patterns)