Reviewed by Joseph F. Eska, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
This volume contains eighteen papers presented at a symposium conducted under the auspices of the Sixteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics held at the University of Copenhagen in August 2003. As with many published conference proceedings, the papers are highly variable in quality, but one stands out in particular.
The most successful instances of internal reconstruction are often characterized by the fact that they provide unexpected explanations outside of their primary purpose or reconstruct forms that turn out to be attested. Such is the case with Jay H. Jasanoff’s article, ‘*-bhi, *-bhis, *-ōis: Following the trail of the PIE instrumental plural’ (137–50). He demonstrates that the earliest reconstructible forms in *-bʱi were adverbs, e.g. *h2n̩t-bʱi ‘sidewise’ (from*h2(e)nt- ‘front, side’), which were later specialized as prepositions, e.g. Gk. amphí, Old High German umbi ‘around’.
*-bʱi was then remade as an instrumental plural case form, e.g. ‘arrow-wise’ → ‘with arrows’. The dative-ablative plural *-bʱios (>*-bʱos outside of Indo-Iranian) was then created by the affixation of *-os, attested in Hittite as the dative-locative plural –aš. By analogy, the instrumental plural *-bʱis was created by the addition of *-is, which can be inferred to have been the original instrumental plural desinence in the pronominal inflection on the basis of the reconstructed demonstrative instrumental plural *tṓis < the plural stem *tói- + *-is. (*-ṓis was subsequently extended to o-stem nouns.)
Jasanoff then infers that *toi– was originally a collective stem that thus would have been inflected in the singular (e.g. dative *toi-ei, genitive *toi-s). As these forms cannot be reconstructed on the basis of the attested Indo-European languages, this suggests that they were pluralized within PIE to yield a genitive plural *toi-s-ohxom (Vedic téṣām), which explains the intrusive -s-. A second unexpected result is that previously unexplained Anatolian neuter nominative-accusative plural pronominal forms in -e continue the plural stem in *-oi by regular sound change from a period prior to its replacement by *-eh2, which served to disambiguate them from the masculine forms.
There are four other notable papers. Moss Pike, ‘The Indo-European long vowel preterite: New Latin evidence’ (205–12), stresses the importance of manuscript evidence in demonstrating the existence of a long vowel preterite clēpit ‘3s stole’, which may have a near analogue in Tocharian, beside the sigmatic clepsit. Irene Balles, ‘The Old Indic cvi construction, the Caland system, and the PIE adjective’ (1–16), and Sabine Häusler, ‘Genitive and adjective—primary parts of the proto-Indo-European language-system?’ (73–84), offer evidence that adjectives were a very young lexical category in PIE.
Finally, Roland Pooth, ‘Proto-Indo-European ablaut and root inflection: An internal reconstruction and inner-PIE morphological analysis’ (229–54), provocatively suggests that ablaut in proto-Indo-European was not conditioned phonologically, as conventionally assumed, but morphologically, as conventionally reconstructed for proto-Semitic, which has been presumed to have roots and templates, e.g. Arabic ktb ‘write’ and uC1C2uC3 (imperative), respectively. Gonzalo Rubio (2005), however, argues that proto-Semitic in fact had stems and words and was substantially different fromPIE.
Reference
Rubio, Gonzalo. 2005. ‘Chasing the Semitic root: The skeleton in the closet’. Aula orientalis 30. 45–63.