Tag: pronunciation

The father tongue and mother tongue hypotheses in Indo-European populations

New paper (behind paywall) Reconciling the father tongue and mother tongue hypotheses in Indo-European populations, by Zhang et al. National Science Review (2018) nwy083.

Interesting excerpts:

Here, we reassessed the correlation between genetic and linguistic characteristics in 34 modern IE populations (Fig. 1a), for which all four types of datasets (lexicon, phonemes, Y-chromosomal composition, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) composition) are available. We assembled compositions of the Y-chromosomal and mtDNA haplogroups or paragroups from the corresponding IE populations, which reflect paternal and maternal lines, respectively (…)

Neighbour-Nets were constructed to delineate the differences between 34 IE population groups clustering at

… Read the rest “The father tongue and mother tongue hypotheses in Indo-European populations”

Schleicher’s Fable in Proto-Indo-European – pitch and stress accent

bell-beaker-village-nwie

Also included in our monograph North-West Indo-European (first draft) is a tentative reconstruction of Schleicher’s fable in North-West Indo-European, and just for illustration of the reconstructed sounds (including pitch and stress accent), a recording has been included.

The recording is available as audio (see above) or video (see below) with captions and multiple subtitles. The captions in North-West Indo-European show acute accents over accented vowels, while stressed syllables are underlined:

I think such a recording was necessary for comparison with the most commonly reconstructed pronunciation, as taught usually in courses. And I am not referring to those professors … Read the rest “Schleicher’s Fable in Proto-Indo-European – pitch and stress accent”