Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 19: Introduction to the PIE Initial Stop Consonants (1)
We have seen in Blog posts 12-17 that the PIE sonorants have proved in most cases rather stable sounds, just as was the case when we compared English and German. The stop consonants provide a more complex picture, and the Germanic language group is marked out from many other groups by the extent of evolution of these sounds over the centuries. Every initial stop consonant in PIE has evolved into a different sound in Proto Germanic. The same is true of English, since, as we saw earlier, English maintains the Proto Germanic initial sounds, except where Proto Germanic k and g were fronted to ch and y.
For the PIE voiced and unvoiced stops, many Indo-European languages, including Greek and Latin, have largely conserved what we believe to have to have been the sound in PIE. (In many cases this is true also for the descendants of Latin such as French, except where gutturals have been fronted.)
For the voiced aspirates, however, it is only the Indic languages, such as Sanskrit, that have conserved the sound. In Latin, they have become either the fricative ‘f’ or the aspirate ‘h’, while in Greek they first became voiceless aspirates (as shown by the typical spelling ‘ph’, ‘th’ and ‘ch’) and then later fricatives, as we pronounce ‘ph’ and ‘th’ (though we pronounce ‘ch’ in words borrowed from Greek as a hard ‘k’-sound, as we saw in ‘cholera’ from a root *ghel- in blog post 2). In many other languages, they have lost their aspiration.
Now here is your test for this week: how can the evolution of PIE initial stop consonants in Proto Germanic be most simply spelled out?
Below, in alphabetical order of the initial consonants in English, is a list of the relationships between initial consonants in PIE and Proto Germanic. In each case, I show just one set of words to illustrate this, but in almost every case the matching sound can be shown in many other words: you will see examples in later posts that discuss each of the PIE sounds involved.
I am excluding the labio-velars at this stage as these more complex sounds show some very different outcomes in various languages. I have also excluded examples of fronting in English, as it the un-fronted English initial consonants that best reflect the situation in Proto Germanic.
Assumed PIE Sound
bh
–
–
g
dh
–
p
–
gh
k
–
b
–
–
d
t
Proto Germanic/English Sound
b
–
–
hard-c or k
d
–
f
–
g
h
–
p
–
–
t
th
Example
Bharat (the Sanskrit term for India),from a legendary monarch,with an original sense of bearing or maintaining/Christo-pher (‘Christ-bearer’) from Greek)/fer-tile (from Latin) = English to bear
Grain (from French) = English corn
Thyr-oid (Greek: Greek medical writers considered the thyroid to be shaped like a door or a shield) = English door
Tri-pod (from Greek)/ped-al (from Latin) = English foot
Chol-era (from Greek) = English gall
Cardiac (from Greek)/cordial (from Latin) = English heart
Very few examples: possibly bacillus (Latin)/bacteria (Greek), both named from ‘stick-like’ shape = peg (borrowed from Dutch so also consistent with PGmc initial ‘p’)
duo-poly (Greek) = English two
tri-ple (from Latin) = English three-fold
Now, look at the nine assumed PIE sounds:
- For each of the three groups of labial, dental and guttural initial consonants, you can see one voiceless, one voiced and one voiced aspirate initial sound.
- For PGmc, the same three groups – labial, dental and guttural – are present, and for each there is one voiceless, one voiced and one fricative initial sound (taking ‘h’ as a fricative along with ‘f’ and ‘th’).
Q: Can you deduce a simple rule that derives the Proto Germanic voiceless, voiced and fricative initial consonants from the relevant PIE sound across these three groups?
Answer in next email to subscribers.