Bartholomae's law
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Bartholomae's law (named after the German Indo-Europeanist
Christian Bartholomae Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a Monotheism, monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ (title), Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive ...
) is an early
Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch ...
(PIE)
sound law A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
affecting the Indo-Iranian family. It states that in a
cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study t ...
of two or more obstruents (
stops Stop may refer to: Places *Stop, Kentucky, an unincorporated community in the United States * Stop (Rogatica), a village in Rogatica, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina Facilities * Bus stop * Truck stop, a type of rest stop for truck dri ...
or the
sibilant Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...
), any one of which is a voiced aspirated stop anywhere in the sequence, the whole cluster becomes voiced and aspirated. Thus to the PIE root "learn, become aware of" the participle "enlightened" loses the aspiration of the first stop ( Grassmann's law) and with the application of Bartholomae's law and regular vowel changes gives
Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
'' buddha'' "enlightened".


Further developments

In both the
Indic Indic may refer to: * Indic languages (disambiguation) * Various scripts: ** Brahmic scripts, a family of scripts used to write Indian and other Asian languages ** Kharosthi (extinct) * Indian numerals * Indian religions, also known as the Dharm ...
and the
Iranian Iranian may refer to: * Iran, a sovereign state * Iranian peoples, the speakers of the Iranian languages. The term Iranic peoples is also used for this term to distinguish the pan ethnic term from Iranian, used for the people of Iran * Iranian lan ...
subgroups, further developments partially obscured the operation of the law: Thanks to the falling together of plain voiced and voiced aspirated stops in Iranian, Bartholomae's law appears synchronically as progressive voicing assimilation after roots that originally ended in voiced aspirates, for example
Old Avestan Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scrip ...
''aogda'' "he said" from PIE . This is not true for roots with plain voiced stops, for example Old Avestan ''yuxta'' "yoked" from , where Bartholomae's law does not apply. In Indic, voiced ''*z'' as resulting from Bartholomae's law was devoiced to ''s'', although there is some evidence from the
Rigvedic The ''Rigveda'' or ''Rig Veda'' ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (''sūktas''). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts (''śruti'') known as the Vedas. Only one S ...
language that a voiced aspirate ''*z'' once existed in Indic as well: This is shown by forms like ''gdha'' "he swallowed" and ''dudukṣa-'' "want to give milk" (see below).


Interpretation

A written form such as ''-ddh-'' (a literal rendition of the
devanāgarī Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the a ...
representation) presents problems of interpretation. The choice is between a long voiced stop with a specific release feature, aspiration, symbolized in transliteration by -''h''-, or else a long stop (or stop cluster) with a different
phonation The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defini ...
al state, " murmur", whereby the breathy release is an artifact of the phonational state. The latter interpretation is rather favored by such phenomena as the
Rigvedic The ''Rigveda'' or ''Rig Veda'' ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (''sūktas''). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts (''śruti'') known as the Vedas. Only one S ...
form ''gdha'' "he swallowed," which is morphologically a middle
aorist Aorist (; abbreviated ) verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo-European languages and languages influenced by the I ...
(more exactly " injunctive") to the root ''ghas''- "swallow", as follows: ''ghs-t-a'' > *''gzdha'', whence ''gdha'' by the regular loss of a sibilant between stops in Indic. While the idea of voicing affecting the whole cluster with the release feature conventionally called aspiration penetrating all the way to the end of the sequence is not entirely unthinkable, the alternative – the spread of a phonational state (but murmur rather than voice) through the whole sequence – involves one less step and therefore via
Occam's razor Occam's razor, Ockham's razor, or Ocham's razor ( la, novacula Occami), also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony ( la, lex parsimoniae), is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied beyond neces ...
counts as the better interpretation. Bartholomae's law intersects with another Indic development, namely what looks like the deaspiration of aspirated stops in clusters with ''s'': descriptively, Proto-Indo-European "you lick" becomes *''leyksi'', whence Sanskrit ''lekṣi''. However, Grassmann's law, whereby an aspirated stop becomes non-aspirated before another aspirated stop (as in the example of ''buddha'', above), suggests something else. In late
Vedic upright=1.2, The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism. Above: A page from the '' Atharvaveda''. The Vedas (, , ) are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the ...
and later forms of Sanskrit, all forms behave as though aspiration was simply lost in clusters with ''s'', so such forms to the root ''dugh-'' "give milk" (etymologically *-) show the expected devoicing and deaspiration in, say, the
desiderative In linguistics, a desiderative (abbreviated or ) form is one that has the meaning of "wanting to X". Desiderative forms are often verbs, derived from a more basic verb through a process of morphological derivation. Desiderative mood is a kind of ...
formation ''du-dhukṣ-ati'' (with the root-initial ''dh''- intact, that is, undissimilated). But the earliest passages of the Rigveda show something different: desiderative ''dudukṣati'', aorist ''dukṣata'' (for later ''dhukṣata'') and so on. Thus it is apparent that what went into Grassmann's law were forms like ''*dhugzhata, dhudhugzha''- and so on, with aspiration in the sibilant clusters intact. The deaspiration and devoicing of the sibilant clusters were later and entirely separate phenomena (and connected with yet another suite of specifically Indic sound laws, namely a "rule conspiracy" to eliminate all voiced – and murmured – sibilants). Indeed, even the example "swallowed" given above contradicts the usual interpretation of devoicing and deaspiration: by such a sequence, *''ghs-to'' gave, first, *''ksto'' (if the process was already Indo-European) or *''ksta'' (if Indo-Iranian in date), whence Sanskrit *''kta'', not ''gdha''.


Relative chronology

There is no evidence that Bartholomae's law predated Indo-Iranian, that is, that it was a feature of Proto-Indo-European. The
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
form ''lectus'' "couch" and
Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
''léktron'' "bed" are differently formed but both continue the root "lie" (the English word being from the same root). But because the Latin would otherwise have resulted in a forbidden cluster (**''gt''), it may well just be a case of voicing assimilation. In similar combinations arising within Greek, the pattern is for the whole cluster to become aspirated, thus **''lékhthron''. It obviously does not in this formation, which for other reasons as well is likely to be very old. This may be because the consonant cluster is more complex. In the case of Latin ''lectus'', it is significant that the root does not otherwise survive in Latin at all, so that there can be no history of analogical remodeling or other disturbances. It is not completely clear what the result of a sequence would have been in Latin, but other evidence suggests lengthening of the vowel plus simplification, so **''lēgus'' (cf. ''co-āgulum'' "rennet" < , ''tēgula'' "roofing tile" < ).


See also

*
Sandhi Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...


External links

* William H. Bennet
The Germanic Evidence for Bartholomae's Law
''Language'', Vol. 42, No. 4 (Dec., 1966), pp. 733–737 {{Proto-Indo-European language Indo-European linguistics Sound laws Indo-Iranian languages