Sex, Greek, and Rix’s Law

A recent comment by David Marjanović made me reflect on a Sanskrit word, yábhati ‘have sexual intercourse’ (as the Monnier-Williams dictionary tactfully puts it). The verb is of special interest to speakers of Slavic languages, because its exact cognate – Proto-Slavic *jebe/o- (with a host of Slavic derivatives) – remains one of the most favourite obscenities in all the languages belonging to that branch of Indo-European. Interestingly, the verb is only very sparsely attested in Iranian and seems to be completely absent from Baltic. In Modern Indo-Aryan its reflexes are quite numerous, though hard to recognise after more than two millennia of sound change, sometimes combined with euphemistic deformation.

By comparing Indo-Iranian and Slavic cognates, we arrive at the stem *jébʰ-e/o- (3sg. *jébʰeti, 3pl. *jébʰonti) as the most parsimonious reconstruction of their ancestral form. It’s a so-called “simple thematic present” – an imperfective stem built to the root *jébʰ-, with the vowel *e in the root and the “buffer vowel” *-e/o- added before personal endings. If the verb has a deeper origin in Indo-European, its oldest form must have been different. Simple thematic presents occur in large numbers in most of the branches of the family; for example, they accout for much of the third conjugation in Latin. However, they are absent from the most outlying lineage of Indo-European (the Anatolian languages), and their low number in Tocharian, the next group that split off before the divergence of the modern branches, shows that they evolved gradually in post-Proto-Indo-European times. Further speculation about the origin of *jébʰ-e/o- via internal reconstruction is difficult because simple thematics have more than one historical sources.

I hope it is not all Greek to you.
[Source: Wikipedia]

When we run out of exact cognates, we can focus on next best thing – plausibly related words with a different morphological structure. Everybody agrees that Ancient Greek oípʰō (with the same meaning) must be a relative of yábhati. Pre-Greek *jébʰ-e/o-, however, would have produced Gk. ˣzepʰō (here, ˣ, not to be confused with the asterisk, marks an unattested, incorrectly predicted form), so the origin of oípʰō must be different. Since the Greek reflex of the root morpheme (oípʰ-) contains an unexpected o, it is justifiable to suspect that one of the Proto-Indo-European “laryngeal” consonants, the one conventionally written *h₃ (probably a voiced pharyngeal fricative [ʕ], if you prefer phonetic symbols) is lurking about. This consonant was vocalised in Greek as o in some positions; it could also (already in PIE) change an adjacent *e into *o. This is why the root we are discussing is often reconstructed as *h₃jébʰ- to accommodate the o-colouring fricative. Unfortunately, most sources just put the laryngeal there and don’t attempt to explain the Greek form in detail.

The trouble is that oípʰō can’t be derived from *h₃jébʰ-e/o- either. According to recent work on PIE syllable structure (Byrd 2015; see also here), the sequence *h₃j- was simplified to *j- in word-initial positions very early in the history of Indo-European, so in this case too we should expect Gk. ˣzepʰō, just as if the *h₃ weren’t there. Some authors propose that *h₃jébʰ-e/o- had a metathetic byform *h₃óibʰ-e/o-, in which *j and *e had swapped places, which caused the latter to get coloured to *o by the preceding *h₃. Such a solution, however, is desperately ad hoc. There is no morphological or phonological motivation for the metathesis, and the wish to see the desired output is not enough.

Another ad hoc solution is adopted in the Lexicon der indogermanischen Verben (Lexicon of Indo-European Verbs, LIV), where the root is listed as *jebʰ-, and its Greek reflex is reconstructed as a present stem with the zero grade of the root and the prefix *o-, that is, *o-ibʰ-e/o-. The problem is that such an alleged verb prefix is vanishingly rare in Greek (so rare that its very reality is questionable), and its function (if any) is unspecified. Solving one mystery by creating another is not sound etymological practice.

A more ingenious suggestion was made by Johnny Cheung in his Etymological Dictionary of the Iranian Verb (2007). Cheung proposes that the Greek present was reduplicated. Grammatical reduplication in PIE involves copying the initial consonant, extending it with the vowel *e or *i, and pasting it back onto the root as a prefix. There are several classes of Indo-European verb stems formed in this way. Following Cheung’s suggestion, we should reconstruct *h₃e-h₃ibʰ-e/o-, which after the laryngeal colouring of the first *e yields *h₃oh₃ibʰ-e/o- and – hey presto – Gk. oípʰō.

Alas, the formation of reduplicated presents is something we understand rather well – well enough to see a couple of problems with this reconstruction. First, although *e may appear as reduplication vowel in IE present stems, it does so only in so-called “athematic” ones (without the *-e/o- suffix). In thematic presents, i-reduplication occurs instead, as in *si-sd-e/o- ‘sit’ > *sizde/o- > Gk. hízō. Secondly, even in athematics, *e seems to have alternated with *i. The details of the alternation are still debated, but one thing is sure: Greek generalised i-reduplication thoroughly in this class, so that we find it in Ancient Greek present stems (thematic and athematic alike) to the complete exclusion of e-reduplication. Therefore, *h₃e-h₃ibʰ-e/o- just won’t float – not in Greek waters.

There remains another possibility, also considered by Cheung but qualified as less likely than the reduplicated root: a zero-grade thematic present, *h₃ibʰ-é/ó-. Such a stem structure is also well-known; one typical example is *gʷr̥h₃-é/ó- ‘devour, swallow’ (Sanskrit giráti, Slavic *žьreti). Both *h₃ibʰ-é/ó- and *(h₃)jébʰ-e/o- (with an early loss of *h₃) could be independently derived from a still older common prototype, most probably a root verb without any suffixes. Why, then, should *h₃e-h₃ibʰ-e/o- be “more likely” than *h₃ibʰ-é/ó- as the source of oípʰō?

The problem here is that we aren’t really sure what happened to initial *h₃i- in the transition from PIE to Ancient Greek. There was a pre-Greek sound change, known as Rix’s Law, which changed any initial *HR̥- into Greek VR-. In these formulae, R stands for any liquid or nasal (l, r, m, n), R̥ is its syllabic variant, H is any of the three PIE laryngeals, and V is a vowel whose quality matches the phonetic “colour” of the laryngeal (e, a, o for, respectively, *h₁, *h₂, *h₃). To what extent the sequences *Hi- and *Hu- were also affected by Rix’s Law has been a matter of some dispute. PIE *i, *u can be regarded as syllabic variants of the corresponding glides *j and*w; therefore, it is at least thinkable that Rix’s Law could apply to them as well.

As for the sequence *Hi-, however, it can be demonstrated with good examples that no initial vowel developed if the laryngeal was *h₁. It has furthermore been suggested that the outcome could be Gk. hi- (with an initial aspirate) rather than simply *i- (Bozzone 2013). For *h₂ and *h₃ the evidence is inconclusive (no unambiguous examples). But there is no clear counterevidence either to rule out *h₂i- > Gk. ai- or *h₃i- > Gk. oi- (pace Peters 1980¹, who argues for *Hi- > Gk. *i- across the board). As for *Hu-, we have several convincing cases showing that *h₂u- > Gk. au-, one or two possible cases of *h₃u- > Gk. ou-, but no examples at all of *h₁u- > Gk. ˣeu-. This may mean that the Greek reflexes of *h₁u- are indistinguishable from *u- since both merged as Gk. hu-, while the other two laryngeals followed the pattern of Rix’s Law. It is therefore possible that *Hi- and *Hu- developed in parallel, and that the expected outcome of *h₃i- is Gk. oi-.

This insight has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the various combinations of *i/*j and *u/*w with the laryngeals in the prehistory of Greek, but I can only skim the surface of the topic in a blog post. It’s getting too long anyway, so it’s time for the moral. The hero of this little essay is a swear-word so obscene that some old ladies in my country might faint if they saw it printed in a newspaper. On the other hand, you can hear it all the time in the street, adorned with modifying prefixes, converted into derived nouns, adjectives and adverbs, and spawning lots of specialised meanings. It has functioned like that literally for millennia – taboo or no taboo. Living the merry life of an outlaw, it has become a respectable archaism, almost a living fossil, with an impeccable pedigree and aristocratic Vedic connections. Together with its equally naughty Ancient Greek cousin, it may provide a precious piece of crucial evidence needed to solve a vexing problem in Greek historical phonology. Not bad for a dirty little word.

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¹ Martin Peters. 1980. Untersuchungen zur Vertretung der indogermanischen Laryngale im Griechischen. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

[See also: REDUPLICATION]