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In his early years, C. C. Uhlenbeck was particularly interested in the problem of the Indo-European homeland (1895, 1897). He rejected Herman Hirt’s theory (1892) that the words for ‘birch’, ‘willow’, ‘spruce’, ‘oak’, ‘beech’ and ‘eel’ point to Lithuania and its immediate surroundings and returned to Otto Schrader’s view (1883, 1890) that the original homeland must rather be sought in southern Russia and may have included some of the later Germanic and Iranian territories. It is clear that the Mediterranean region and the area around the North Sea can safely be excluded because the arrival of the Indo-Europeans was comparatively recent here, as it was in Iran and the Indian subcontinent. It is difficult to be more specific within the limits of central and eastern Europe and central Asia. Uhlenbeck was impressed by the lexical correspondences between Indo-European and Semitic which had been adduced in favor of an eastern homeland but pointed out that borrowings from Semitic may have reached the Indo-Europeans through an intermediary. He agrees that the Indo-European words for trees and animals point to a moderate climate but questions the possibility of a more specific localization as well as the concept of homeland itself.
Winter's law again
(2007)
Since I discussed the scholarly literature on Winter’s law twenty years ago (1988), several important articles on the subject have appeared (Young 1990, Campanile 1994, Matasovic 1995, Derksen 2002, Dybo 2002, Patri 2005, Derksen 2007). As the law evidently continues to be controversial, it is important to look into the nature of the evidence and counter-evidence which is adduced. It appears that doubts about Winter’s law are largely the result of four types of misunderstanding.
In an earlier study (1983) I argued that unlike aorists and athematic presents, Indo-European perfects and thematic presents originally had a dative subject, as in German mir träumt ‘me dreams’ for ich träume ‘I dream’, e.g. Greek oida ‘I know’ < ‘it is known to me’, édomai ‘I will eat’ < ‘it is eatable to me’. On the basis of Oettinger’s epoch-making book (1979), I proposed that the Hittite hi-flexion originated from a merger of the perfect, where *-i was added to 3rd sg. *-e in order to supply a new present, with the thematic flexion of causatives and iteratives, where the final *-e of 3rd sg. *-eie was dropped before the loss of intervocalic *-i- (1983: 315).
Gothic gen.pl. -e
(2007)
Like its predecessor in Zagreb, the conference on Balto-Slavic accentology in Copenhagen was a great success. The enthusiasm of the organizers Adam Hyllested and Thomas Olander proved highly effective in stimulating discussion among the participants. While in Zagreb most papers dealt with Slavic data, in Copenhagen the emphasis was on Balto-Slavic problems.
Last year Georg Holzer proposed a relative chronology of accentual developments in Slavic (2005). Here I shall compare his chronology with the one I put forward earlier (1975, 1989a, 2003) and discuss the differences. For the sake of convenience, I first reproduce the relevant parts of my chronology, omitting asterisks before pre-historic Slavic forms. 1. Proto-Indo-European. 2. Dialectal Indo-European. 3. Early Balto-Slavic. During this period the characteristic lateral mobility of Balto-Slavic accent patterns came into existence. 4. Late Balto-Slavic. During this period the Balto-Slavic accent patterns obtained their final shape.
Erdvilas Jakulis’ thorough, detailed and comprehensive study (2004) is an important contribution to our reconstruction of the Balto-Slavic verbal system. The following remarks are intended to complement his findings from a Slavic perspective. Jakulis demonstrates that the type of Lith. tekèti, teka ‘flow’ is largely of East Baltic provenance. He finds it difficult to identify the same type in Old Prussian.
It is gratifying to see that Jay Jasanoff has now (2004) adopted my theory that "the Balto-Slavic acute was a kind of stød or broken tone" (p. 172), which I have been advocating since 1973. Unfortunately, his acceptance of my view is not based on an evaluation of the comparative evidence (for which see Kortlandt 1985a) but on his desire to derive Balto-Slavic “acute” and "circumflex" syllables from the "bimoric" and "trimoric" long vowels which he assumes for Proto-Germanic as the reflexes of the Indo-European "acute" and "circumflex" tones of the neogrammarians. Since the original "circumflex" was limited to Indo-European VHV-sequences, Jasanoff proposes a whole series of additional lengthenings yielding "hyperlong" vowels in Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, which still do not suffice to eliminate the counter-evidence (cf. Kortlandt 2004b: 14). The reason for this failure is his unwillingness to recognize that lengthened grade vowels are circumflex in Balto-Slavic (cf. Kortlandt 1997a).
The highly successful conference on Balto-Slavic accentology organized by Mate Kapovic and Ranko Matasovic has given much food for thought. It has clarified the extent of fundamental disagreements as well as established areas of common interest where the evidence seems to be ambiguous. In the following I shall comment upon some of the papers presented at the conference which are directly relevant to my own research.