The Reconstruction of the Vocabulary of Material Culture and the Time Depth of a Language Family (Military Terminology in the Proto-Indo-European Language and Its Subclades)

 
Код статьиS086954150016799-8-1
DOI10.31857/S086954150016799-8
Тип публикации Статья
Статус публикации Опубликовано
Авторы
Аффилиация: The Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
Адрес: Russian Federation, Moscow
Название журналаЭтнографическое обозрение
Выпуск№4
Страницы274-283
Аннотация

The article explicates some methodological principles that should be observed when working with the reconstruction of semantic tokens to the proto-linguistic level, and criticizes the insufficiently clear observance of them in the version of the Afrasian lexical reconstruction proposed in Alexander Militarev’s article on the “Lexical Reconstruction for the Reconstruction of the Prehistory: ProtoAfrasian Terms Related to Weaponry, Warfare and Other Armed Conflicts”. I offer a reconstruction of the vocabulary presumably related to war and weapons in the Proto-Indo-European language and its early subclades (a time depth of at least 3.5 thousand years from the present time), and make a quantitative assessment of the Proto-Indo-European “lexicon of war” in comparison with the supposed Proto-Afrasian one.

Ключевые словаvocabulary of material culture, semantic reconstruction, military terminology, Indo-European languages
Источник финансированияThis article is a translation of: Дыбо А.В. Реконструкция лексики материальной культуры и историческая глубина семьи языков (военная лексика в праиндоевропейском языке и дочерних группах) // Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie. 2021. No 4. P. 50–62. DOI: 10.31857/S023620070016698-4
Получено22.09.2021
Дата публикации28.09.2021
Кол-во символов27835
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1 Article by A. Yu. Militarev examines valuable etymological material, with the help of which the author tries to justify the assertion that the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic language (presumably, inhabiting Levant in the 11th – 10th millennia BC) were aware of the phenomenon of “war”. The issue of the existence of wars during primitive era, as we can see, is controversial for historical anthropology, not least due to disagreements regarding the definition of the term "war". А. Yu. Militarev intends to propose new material to solve the issue by reconstructing the zone of the Proto-Afroasiatic vocabulary related to military actions. Without doubting the value of his etymological proposals and not being an Afrasian languages expert I, as a specialist in semantic reconstruction who has engaged herself, in particular, in weapons and social vocabulary in the languages of other families (see: Dybo 2005; Dybo, Normanskaya 2014; Dybo 2011, 2015), would like to present some comments regarding the applied methodology and, accordingly, the status of the conclusions made:
2 1. As for the work with lexical semantics and its reconstruction, the author writes the following:
3 Taking into account all the actual difficulties and nuances of translation in all the languages, both extinct ancient and living, the term “war” usually differs from the terms “struggle”, “skirmish”, “robbery”, “raid” and others, present in the same semantic field. If, in a representative sample of daughter languages, related words mean precisely “war” (and it can be justified that they are all inherited from a proto-language, and not borrowed later), then it is extremely unlikely that a proto-linguistic term with a different meaning - say, “fight”, - in different daughter languages, was independently replaced by “war”, that is, so that in the proto-language the corresponding reconstructed word meant something different than “war”, with the basic set of associations that term once had among native speakers.
4 However, in general, we cannot reconstruct “the meaning of this term that was once associated with it by the proto-language speakers”. There is no abstract meaning of “war” similar for different languages (and proto-languages), just as there is no abstract meaning of the “dative case”. When we reconstruct the meaning of “dative case” for a certain proto-language morpheme, as well as when describing morphology of a certain language and stating that this or that morpheme is the dative case in its system of nominal inflection, we imply that, apparently, this morpheme was used in the proto-language (is used in this language) to denote the actant function of the addressee. At the same time, it could (can), additionally, express the function of the end point of movement, of the experienсer (the subject of perception), of the chomage agent (for example, a subject in a passive structure) - or it could not. The semantic role of addressee is the core role for the dative case. If in the recovered system of case morphemes, in addition to our “dative”, a separate morpheme exists for which we can restore the function of expressing the end point of movement, then we will ascribe to it the grammeme of allative and then decide whether or not our reconstructed dative expressed this function too. However, without reconstructing the system we cannot say anything definite about the functions set of this morpheme, state that, for instance, it combines all the listed functions on the basis that the “dative” we have highlighted in Turkish or Russian combines these functions.
5 Quite similarly, to restore meaning of a certain reconstructed lexeme, as well as to register true interpretation of the lexeme in a dictionary of the language under consideration, we need to establish both the microsystem of lexemes that includes this lexeme and which semantic characteristics work as distinctive ones in this microsystem. To do that for an ancestor language, it is necessary to define relevant microsystems and their distinctive characteristics for at least a part of compared languages (usually, in order to do it correctly, one needs to establish diagnostic contexts of usage of these words, which requires either a targeted poll [see, e.g., the works of the school of E. V. Rakhilina: Rakhilina, Kholkina 2019], or a sufficiently large corpus of texts in the language [see Dybo 2013; Kassian et al. 2010]).
6 There is another important matter. The author states in footnote 7: "In comparative-historical linguistics ... semantic comparison criteria remain 'humanitarian', often based on obviousness and common sense." However, comparative historical linguistics and historical typology of semantic changes have been developing more stringent criteria for semantic comparison (see reviews: Dybo 1996, 2011). The simplest of them is to establish availability of an example of polysemy of a lexeme in any existing language (using a formal criterion for distinguishing between polysemy and homonymy).

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