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GRIMM'S LAW OF LAUTVERSCHIEBUNG ("SOUND SHIFT")
by
Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov In their reconstruction of the ancestral Indo-European language, the early linguists relied heavily on Grimm's law of Lautverschiebung (" sound shift"), which postulated that sets of consonants displace one another over time in predictable and regular fashion. The law was posed in 1822 by Jacob Grimm, who is more widely famed for the anthology of fairy tales he wrote with his brother, Wilhelm. Grimm's law explained, among other things, why in the Germanic languages certain hard consonants had persisted despite their universal tendency to yield to soft ones. The set of softer "voiced" consonants "b," "d," "g" (followed by momentary vibration of the vocal cords), posited in the protolanguage, had apparently given way to the corresponding hard set "p," "t," "k." According to Grimm's law, this had come about by "devoicing" those consonants ("p," for example, is unaccompanied by vocal vibration). Thus, the Sanskrit char is seen as an archaic form of the English "draw," which is itself more archaic than the German tragen (all of which mean "to pull").
These rules were used to reconstruct an Indo-European vocabulary that implies how its speakers lived. The words described a landscape and climate that linguists
originally placed in Europe between the Alps in the south and the
Baltic and North seas in the north [see "The Indo-European
Language," by Paul Thieme; Scientific American, October,
1958].
THE MIGRATIONS OF THE PROTO INDO-EUROPEANS FROM ARMENIA More recent evidence now places the probable origin of the Indo-European language in western Asia. Three generations of archaeologists and linguists have thus far excavated and deciphered manuscripts in close to a dozen ancient languages from sites in modern Turkey and as far east as Tocharia, in modern Turkestan. Their observations, together with new ideas in pure linguistic theory, have made it necessary to revise the canons of linguistic evolution.
ARMENIAN WARRIOR'S SIGNAL BUGLE
MADE FROM
The landscape described by the protolanguage as now resolved must lie somewhere in the crescent that curves around the southern shores of the Black Sea, south from the Balkan peninsula, east across ancient Anatolia (today the non-European territories of Turkey) and north to the Caucasus Mountains [see illustration below]. Here the agricultural revolution created the food surplus that impelled the Indo-Europeans to found villages and city-states from which, about 6,000 years ago, they began their migrations over the Eurasian continent and into history.
Some of the migrants invaded Anatolia from the East around 2000 B.C. and established the Hittite kingdom, which held all of Anatolia in its power by 1400 B.C. Its official language was among the first of the Indo-European languages to find its way into writing. Early in this century, Bedrich Hrozny, a linguist at Vienna University and later at Charles University in Prague, deciphered Hittite inscriptions (written in cuneiform, the ancient writing system based on wedge-shaped symbols) on tablets that had been found in the library of the capital at Hattusas, 200 kilometers east of modern Ankara.
The library also contained cuneiform tablets in two related languages: Luwian and Palaic. The evolution of Luwian could be traced in later hieroglyphic inscriptions made around 1200 B.C., after the fall of the Hittite Empire. To this emerging family of Anatolian languages linguists added Lydian (closer to Hittite) and Lycian (closer to Luwian), known from inscriptions dating back to late in the first millennium B.C.
The appearance of Hittite and other Anatolian languages at the turn of the third to the second millennium B.C. sets an absolute chronological limit for the breakup of the Indo-European protolanguage. Because the Anatolian protolanguage had already fissioned into daughter languages by that point, investigators estimate that it departed from the parent Indo-European no later than the fourth millennium B.C. and possibly much earlier.
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