Re: Does anyone here know of rules/laws/standards for going from Proto-Indo-European => Latin?


<jacksonscottsly@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1144616252.508956.223380@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
first off, sorry if a) I'm misusing this, and b) this topic isn't
appropriate for this group; I've got no experience on usenet and I
couldn't find a group relating to historical linguistics.

No worries - you're in exactly the right spot, and you're using it perfectly
correctly.

Now, as briefly as possible, my question. I'm looking for some way to
explain a consonant change from Proto-Indo-European to Latin (most
likely) to make a linguistics paper that I'm writing. At this point,
it's probably a little late to include any information that I find
(which would be peripheral to the paper anyway), but I'm still really
curious.

anyway, I'm basically looking for some kind of rules or standards
(similar to "Grimm's law") to explain morphological changes from PIE to
Latin.

You mean phonological, in this case, right?

For Indo-European in general, you'll probably find that the most useful
things are Sihler's *New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin* (1995) (but
with caution - it's easy to get wrong ideas from him) and Szemerenyi's
difficult classic *Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics* (1996). The
Latin parts of Sihler will probably be the most useful things available in
English.

For Latin phonology more specifically, you'll have to turn to French or
German. Niedermann's *Précis de phonétique historique du latin* (1959) is
quite useful, and couples well with Ernout's *Morphologie historique du
latin* (1953). This pair is brilliant and thorough, if slightly outdated;
Monteil covers much the same ground in *Eléments de phonétique et de
morphologie du latin* (1986). The most up-to-date is Meiser's *Historische
Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache* (1998), but I can only speak
for it second-hand - at the time I would have needed it, my German wasn't
good enough, and so I used the French sources (mostly Niedermann and
Ernout).

Please point me in the right direction if you can. I don't
want anyone doing my homework for me, but if you want to know more
specifically what I'm looking for to get a better idea of what I mean
or if you think you have more specific/situational help, my exact
conundrum is below.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Basically, the word I'm researching is "cottage", which by most of my
sources comes from the old french "cotage" which derives from (this
seems more questionable) latin "cotagium". The American Heritage
dictionary doesn't list any further etymology, but one source I have
(Shipley's "Origin of English Words") claims that the word dates back
to the PIE root "geu". That's all well-and-good, but I can't find
anything that would lead me to posit that a "geu" would change to a
"cot" (unless I'm understanding it wrong and the "gium" is where the
root lies?). All the consonant shifts I'm familiar with apply to the
germanic, not italic, languages and I don't know what resources to
search for the answer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm pretty sure that 'cotagium' is a Mediaeval Latinisation from French
'cotage' rather than the source of the French word. Having a quick browse
through the OED, it seems that 'cotage' in French was a feudal legal term
referring to tenure of a house; it would thus have been derived from a
Germanic word, not Latin. The OED puts down 'cot' and 'cote' as cognates
that, together with a host of forms in other Germanic langauges, point to a
Proto-Germanic word *kutom, with a related o-grade form *kaut-.

Of course, this could possibly go back to an IE root *geu-, although I'm not
sure how the suffixes work.

Neeraj Mathur


.

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