Thomas Smitherman

Place: HF 216

        Time: Friday November 6., 14.15-16.00

Title: The Case for Prehistoric Language Contact Between Kartvelian and Indo-European

There are a number of striking formal and typological similarities between the Kartvelian languages (located in and around the present-day Republic of Georgia) and the older Indo-European languages. This paper makes the case that the most likely explanation of these phenomena are the existence of long-term, prehistoric contact between the Early Kartvelians and either the Proto-Indo-Europeans or an early branch thereof.

Strong correspondences in ablaut types (Gamqrelidze & Machavariani 1962) and syllable structure (Gamqrelidze & Ivanov 1983) between reconstructed PIE and Proto-Kartvelian are well-documented, as are a number of accepted "Indo-Europeanisms" in the reconstructed Kartvelian lexicon (Klimov 1994). We shall examine more instances of likely lexical borrowing into Kartvelian from an early stage of Indo-European (Smitherman 2009) before shifting focus to the development of the verbal systems and argument marking in the two families. Both the IE and Kartvelian verbal systems display an evolution from a more diathetically centred split in conjugations to one more aspectually centred (Smitherman 2006).

Given the similarities in the development of the verb, ablaut, syllable structure, and apparent lexical borrowings, the most likely explanation is an ancient period of long-term language contact. Concluding arguments shall show why alternative explanations (a common genetic inheritance, coincidence, and language universals) are improbable explanations.

References:

• Gamqrelidze, Tamazi & Ivanov, V.V. 1983. Indoevropeisky jazyk i indoevropeitsy. Tbilisi State University.
• Gamqrelidze, Tamazi & Machavariani, Gizhi. 1962. Sonant'ta da sist'ema da ablaut'i kartveur enebshi. Tbilisi: Mecniereba.
• Klimov, G.A. 1994. Drevneishie indoevropeizmy kartvel'skikh jazykov. Moscow: Nauka.
• Smitherman, Thomas. 2006. Razvitie kategorii aspekta i diatezy v indoevropeiskikh i kartvel'skikh jazykakh. Master's Thesis, Moscow State University.
• Smitherman, Thomas. 2009. On Ancient Kartvelian-Indo-European Lexical Contacts and Their Consequences for Proto-Indo-European. Submitted to the Proceedings of the Conference on Indo-European Phonology, April 2009, University of Copenhagen.