Research project Traveling Voices
The diachronic development of the voice system in Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic branches from a migrational perspective.
A dialogue among biologists, linguists, archaeologists, and historians over the reconstruction of the prehistoric past of Indo-European peoples has just started with the recent results in the ancient DNA and isotope analyses. This project is intended to supply more linguistic support to the restoration of the contacts and the migration routes of the Indo-European peoples, particularly of the Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic branches. Their migration process has been controversial, since the Baltic and Slavic branches share common traits with the Indo-Iranian branch (e.g., satem-assibilation of PIE palato-velars), while they share common linguistic features also with the Germanic branch (e.g., the oblique case markers with *-m- corresponding to *-bh- elsewhere). In fact, the ancient genetic analysis suggests migration routes in which the Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian branches migrated from the location of Yamnaya-culture westwards together, however, Indo-Iranian alone returned eastwards. The controversy among those languages must reflect these peculiar migration routes. I intend to investigate the prehistoric development of the voice system of these language branches, and clarify the process in light of their aforementioned migration processes. The expected results will provide not only linguistic evidence for the restoration of the migration processes of Indo-European peoples, but also with a typologically interesting case study on the voice system.
Project description
Proposal and aims
Historical linguists have proven that the languages spoken since ancient times in Eurasia, including Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, and Anatolian, are genetically affiliated with each other. Together, they are called the Indo-European language family. Naturally, their speakers are expected to have also had genetic affiliations. Historical linguists study how Indo-European languages and their speakers have spread throughout Eurasia. But it is sometimes difficult — in particular the similarities and differences among the Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic languages are difficult to interpret.
One of the prehistoric developments difficult to recover is that of the voice systems of those three branches. Proto-Indo-European is known to have had a voice called “medio-passive” (or simply “middle”), by which the agent / doer is at the same time acted upon or indirectly affected by the action. The middle inflection is well preserved in Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Tocharian, while it has gone through shifts of the voice system in the Balto-Slavic and Germanic branches.
Gothic, one of the oldest attested Germanic languages (AD 4C~), preserves the middle inflection with the passive meaning, but Slavic (AD 9C~) and Baltic (AD 14C~) do not preserve any obvious traces of the middle inflection anymore. This project will try to answer the questions as follows:
- What happened to the inherited voice system (among other things) since they branched out from Proto-Indo-European? How were their voice system restructured?
- Were the restructuring processes shared innovation or contact-induced?
- Are our hypotheses compatible with their assumed migration routes?
Recent advancements in ancient DNA analysis and isotope analysis (e.g., Haak et al. 2015; Narasimhan et al. 2019) have made it possible to evaluate our linguistics-based hypotheses from an interdisciplinary perspective. Although the DNA information does not directly indicate anything related to languages, the correlation between the geographic distribution of the ancient DNA types and the speakers of Indo-European languages can be cautiously evaluated. In response to these advancements, the RJ-funded programme LAMP Languages and Myths of Prehistory, led by Professor Jenny Larsson at Stockholm University, was organised in January 2020. Sharing with the LAMP programme the aim to comprehend the prehistoric past of the Indo-European peoples, this project approaches the voice systems of the Balto-Slavic and Germanic language families from a migrational perspective.
Project members
Project managers
Yoko Yamazaki
Researcher
