Talk:Proto-Indo-European nominals

Comments
Can anyone give a quick summary of what these terms mean? acro-dynamic, protero-dynamic, hystero-dynamic and holo-dynamic.


 * this isn't covered yet, on Wikipedia, you'll need to turn to actual books. Briefly, it concerns the position of a word's accent, and hence ablaut grade, within the inflectional paradigm (different stresses in different grammatical cases). dab (𒁳) 11:48, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

accent classes

 * proterodynamic = "moving accent, towards the front" = accent varies between root and suffix
 * hysterodynamic = "moving accent, towards the back" = accent varies between suffix and ending
 * holodynamic = "moving accent, across the whole word" = accent varies between root and ending
 * acrostatic = "stationary accent, on the root"

when the accent varies, the strong cases (nom and voc, plus acc sing/dual) have the further-front variant and the weak cases have the further-back variant.

Beekes seems to believe that holodynamic words had accents in three places: HEUS-oos (nom), hus-OS-m (acc), hus-s-OS (gen) "dawn". Fortson gives these as HEUS-oos, HEUS-os-m, hus-s-ES. (h = h2, oo = long vowel)

Benwing 05:44, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

unclear table
Some information on why the table is missing so much forms, why there is a list of forms that are neither thematic nor athematic and why thematic feminine and a big part of neuter are not present, would make things clearer. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.190.253.146 (talk) 18:38, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Ramat's table
I'm removing Ramat's table because it is incomplete and confusing (athematic: no fem., thematic neut: only sg. etc; see the last talk secton). Will replace it with Fortson. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 19:32, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Heteroclites
It would be good to include the evidence from attested langauges for the heteroclites. In particular, I came here looking for nice evidence for it in the word for 'fire'. English 'fire' versus Gothic 'fon' is nothing like as convincing as Hittite watar, witenas (both taken from Fortson 2010: 123). Tibetologist (talk) 09:34, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the proposal was move. Cúchullain t/ c 15:11, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Proto-Indo-European nouns → Proto-Indo-European nominals – This page is about nouns, but most if not all of the content applies equally to adjectives in PIE. Adjectives have the same cases, the same morphological structure (R+S+E) and the same thematic/athematic inflection types. CodeCat (talk) 22:20, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The article now states that nominals include pronouns, and continues with information that only applies to nouns and adjectives. CodeCat, do you intend to edit this article to include/exclude pronouns? (Note: there is PIE pronouns.) Cheers --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 09:14, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Pronouns are nominals, and they have the same cases and such. But they aren't usually inflected quite the same as nouns and adjectives, and we already have a separate article to explain the inflection of pronouns at Proto-Indo-European pronouns. At the same time it seems strange to repeat the same information about cases and genders on both pages, but equally strange to have separate articles for nouns and adjectives. I'm not really sure how to handle this... CodeCat (talk) 16:18, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
 * If I got you right (and I agree), we should discuss nouns and adjectives on one page and pronouns on another. My books use the same classification, with Fortson having "Adjectives" as a subsection of "Nouns" (which isn't quite correct), and Meier-Brügger having a section "Noun and adjective" (which is a bit verbose as a title). On the other hand, Sanskrit nouns discusses adjectives as well, and so does Greek nouns (marginally). I'd say either leave the title and clarify the article scope in the lead (which I've done provisionally), or move back to PIE nouns and mention adjectives in the lead. Any thoughts? --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 17:39, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
 * From what I've read (including Fortson's book) PIE didn't really make a clear distinction between nouns and adjectives. In fact, it seems they were more similar to each other formally than either of them was to pronouns (even though in the daughter languages, especially Germanic, adjectives came to be more pronoun-like). So it makes more sense to split pronouns off into a separate article, like it is now. On the other hand, the pronoun article should probably refer back to this one for information about case, number and gender, which was (aside from the inflection, and the 'defective' personal pronouns) identical for all three. CodeCat (talk) 21:14, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Removed parts of article
Maybe to be re-included later: 1Because of the large number of laryngeal consonants in this noun class, possible "Post-PIE" (non-Anatolian) forms are shown, after the loss of laryngeals. In reality, not all daughter languages developed in the same fashion. However, all but the Anatolian languages (e.g. Hittite) eventually lost the laryngeal consonants, and the developments were fairly similar across languages; as a result, the forms given are largely accurate. The caron underneath vowels that were adjacent to laryngeals (e.g. *ō̬) is meant to indicate that in some languages (particularly the Balto-Slavic languages), these vowels maintained some property that distinguished them from non-laryngeal vowels.

There were strong pressures early on to eliminate some of the complexities of this system, especially the ablaut variations in the root. For example, the ablaut variant of  "night" is found only in Hittite; evidently, root ablaut in this word was eliminated in favor of uniform  already in the proto-language, after the separation of the Anatolian languages. In the case of "thought", no daughter languages have root ablaut in this word, but some generalized the strong variant  and some the weak variant  (cf. Gothic ana-minds "supposition" <  vs. ga-munds "remembrance" < ).

--ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 09:05, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Contradiction between the reconstruction based on Ringe and the claims about the accent/ablaut paradigms
According to the accent/ablaut table, the weak cases of proterokinetic nouns like *mén-ti-s and *dór-u should have a full e-grade in the suffix (*mn̥-téy-s, *dr-éw-s). This is true of the genitive singular in the table that is based on Ringe, but the same table shows something entirely different for the singular instrumentative (*mn̥tíh₁, *drúh₁) and almost all the plurals of weak cases (loc. *mn̥tísu, *drúsu, dat. *mn̥tímos, *drúmos, instr. *mn̥tíbʰi, *drúbʰi). Any explanation for this?--95.42.25.28 (talk) 10:18, 2 February 2021 (UTC)