Centum-Satem isogloss - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The centum-satem division is an isogloss

Isogloss

An isogloss—also called a heterogloss —is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature...

of the Indo-European language family

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

, related to the different evolution of the three dorsal consonant

Dorsal consonant

Dorsal consonants are articulated with the mid body of the tongue . They contrast with coronal consonants articulated with the flexible front of the tongue, and radical consonants articulated with the root of the tongue.-Function:...

rows of the mainstream reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European:

},	},	}	(labiovelars)
},	},	}	("plain velars")
},	},	}	("palatovelars")

The terms Centum Group and Satem Group come from the words for the number "one hundred" in a traditional representative language of each group: Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

centum and Avestan

Avestan language

Avestan is an East Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name...

satəm. The initial consonant in these two examples comes from the Indo-European "palatovelar" consonant, }, which became in the first case a simple velar, and in the second a sibilant.

The terms "palatovelar" and "plain velar" are in quotes because they are traditional terms but do not reflect current thinking, which holds that the "palatovelars" were actually plain velars, e.g. [k], while the "plain velars" were pronounced farther back in the mouth, perhaps as uvular consonant

Uvular consonant

Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and...

s (e.g. [q]).

The satem languages (which have the sibilant where the centum equivalents have the velar) include Indo-Iranian

Indo-Iranian languages

The Indo-Iranian language group constitutes the easternmost extant branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It consists of three language groups: the Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Nuristani...

, Armenian

Armenian language

The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...

, Baltic

Baltic languages

The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe...

, Slavic

Slavic languages

The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...

, Albanian

Albanian language

Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...

, and perhaps also a number of barely documented extinct languages, such as Thracian

Thracian language

The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times in Southeastern Europe by the Thracians, the northern neighbors of the Ancient Greeks. The Thracian language exhibits satemization: it either belonged to the Satem group of Indo-European languages or it was strongly...

-Dacian

Dacian language

The extinct Dacian language may have developed from proto-Indo-European in the Carpathian region around 2,500 BC and probably died out by AD 600. In the 1st century AD, it was the predominant language of the ancient regions of Dacia and Moesia and, possibly, of some surrounding regions.It belonged...

. This group changed PIE palatovelars into sibilants, retaining PIE

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

plain velars and merging PIE labiovelars into them to form an expanded velar group. It is sometimes suggested that the plain velars and the labiovelars were not merged in Proto-Albanian, but this is not a mainstream viewpoint. Balto-Slavic is largely satem but evidences centum development in some words, suggesting that "Satemization" was incomplete or operated according to different principles than in the other Satem languages.

The centum group includes all remaining dialects, i.e. Italic

Italic languages

The Italic subfamily is a member of the Indo-European language family. It includes the Romance languages derived from Latin , and a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, and Latin.In the past various definitions of "Italic" have prevailed...

, Celtic

Celtic languages

The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...

, Germanic

Germanic languages

The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

, Hellenic

Hellenic languages

Hellenic, as a technical term in historical linguistics, is the branch of the Indo-European language family that includes Greek . According to most traditional classifications, Hellenic contains only Greek as a single language alone in its branch, and is as such co-extensive with "Greek"...

, Tocharian

Tocharian languages

Tocharian or Tokharian is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. The name is taken from the people known to the Greeks as the Tocharians . These are sometimes identified with the Yuezhi and the Kushans. The term Tokharistan usually refers to 1st millennium Bactria, which the...

, Anatolian

Anatolian languages

The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...

and possibly a number of lesser-known extinct groups (such as Ancient Macedonian

Ancient Macedonian language

Ancient Macedonian was the language of the ancient Macedonians. It was spoken in the kingdom of Macedon during the 1st millennium BCE and it belongs to the Indo-European group of languages...

and Venetic

Venetic language

Venetic is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in ancient times in the North East of Italy and part of modern Slovenia, between the Po River delta and the southern fringe of the Alps....

). This group merged PIE palatovelars and plain velars, yielding plain velars (but see below about Anatolian).

The satem languages share some innovations in common (particularly, the ruki sound law

Ruki sound law

Ruki refers to a sound change in Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian, wherein an original phoneme changed into after the consonants , , and the semi-vowels , , or:...

), while the centum languages have no common innovations, and in fact include the two groups that split off the earliest, i.e. Anatolian and Tocharian. Furthermore, the satem languages occur in a contiguous region approximately in the middle of the PIE area, while the centum languages occur in a discontiguous area partly surrounding the Satem languages. This strongly suggests that "satemization" was a single areal sound change, which occurred less completely in Balto-Slavic (at the edge of the area) than elsewhere, while "centumization" was actually a set of unrelated changes occurring independently in multiple language groups. This is easy to understand given the current conception of the PIE values of the three dorsal series, where Centumization involves nothing more than the elimination of the velar-uvular distinction, which is typologically fairly rare and in any case carried very little functional load in PIE. Satemization, however, was a more substantial change, involving the fronting of PIE velars and the unrounding of PIE labiovelars.

In addition, recent evidence from Luwian

Luwian language

Luwian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Luwian is closely related to Hittite, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria...

indicates that all three series were maintained separately in Proto-Anatolian

Proto-Anatolian language

Proto-Anatolian is the proto-language from which Anatolian languages emerged. As with all other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Anatolian languages as well as other Indo-European...

, and the Centumization observed in Hittite

Hittite language

Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...

only occurred after the breakup of Common Anatolian.

Tocharian is an additional puzzle in that it largely reflects a situation where all three PIE dorsal series as well as all voicing/aspiration distinctions (originally constituting nine separate consonants) have merged into a single phoneme /k/. This has led some writers to suggest that Tocharian does not fit the Centum-Satem model. However, some PIE labiovelars are in fact represented by a labiovelar-like element or by
a non-original sequence /ku/. Along with other evidence, this suggests that labiovelars
were distinct in Proto-Tocharian and only later merged with
velars (as happened independently in Old Irish and to some extent in some other
languages), making Tocharian a clearly Centum language.

The isogloss only applies to the parent language with the full inventory of dorsals. Later sound changes within a specific branch of Indo-European that are analogous to one of the centum or satem changes, such as the palatalization of Latin

Latin

k to s in some Romance languages

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

or the merger of * with *k in the Goidelic languages

Goidelic languages

The Goidelic languages or Gaelic languages are one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages, the other consisting of the Brythonic languages. Goidelic languages historically formed a dialect continuum stretching from the south of Ireland through the Isle of Man to the north of Scotland...

, are excluded.

Schleicher's single guttural row

August Schleicher

August Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...

, an early Indo-Europeanist, in Part I, "Phonology", of his major work, the 1871 "Compendium of Comparative Grammar of the Indogermanic Language", published a table of original momentane Laute, or "stops", that has only a single velar row, }, }, }, under the name of Gutturalen. He does identify four palatals (}, }, }, }) but hypothesizes that they came from the gutturals along with the nasal ń and the spirant ç.

Brugmann's labialized and unlabialized language groups

Karl Brugmann

Karl Brugmann was a German linguist. He is a towering figure in Indo-European linguistics.-Biography:He was educated at Halle and Leipzig. He was instructor in the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Leipzig, and in 1872-77 was assistant at the Russian Institute of Classical Philology at the latter place...

in his 1886 equivalent work, "Outline of Comparative Grammar of the Indogermanic Language," promotes the palatals to the original language, recognizing two rows of Explosivae, or "stops", the palatal (}, }, }, }) and the velar each of which was simplified to three articulations even in the same work. In that same work Brugmann notices among die velaren Verschlusslaute, "the velar stops", a major contrast between reflexes of the same words in different daughter language

Daughter language

In historical linguistics, a daughter language is a language descended from another language through a process of genetic descent.-Examples:*English is a daughter language of Proto-Germanic, which is a daughter language of Proto-Indo-European....

s: in some the velar is marked with a u-Sprache, "u-articulation," which he terms a Labialisierung, "labialization," in accordance with the prevailing theory that the labiovelars were velars labialized by combination with a u at some later time and not among the original consonants. He divides languages therefore into die Sprachgruppe mit Labialisierung and die Sprachgruppe ohne Labialisierung, "the language group with (or without) labialization," which are perforce identical to the Centum and Satem groups. He opines that

"For words and groups of words, which do not appear in any language with labialized velar-sound [the "pure velars"], it must for the present be left undecided whether they ever had the u-afterclap."

The doubt introduced in this passage suggests he already suspected the "afterclap" u was not that but was part of an original sound.

Von Bradke's centum and satem groups

In 1890 Peter von Bradke published "Concerning Method and Conclusions of Aryan (Indogermanic) Studies" in which he saw the same division (Trennung) as did Brugmann but he defined it in a different way. He said that the original Aryans knew two kinds of gutturaler Laute, or "guttural sounds," the gutturale oder velare, und die palatale Reihe, "guttural or velar and palatal rows," each of which were aspirated and unaspirated. The velars were to be viewed as gutturals in an engerer Sinn, "narrow sense." They were a reiner K-Laut, "pure K-sound." Palatals were häufig mit nachfolgender Labialisierung, "frequently with subsequent Labialization." This latter distinction led him to divide the palatale Reihe into a Gruppe als Spirant and a reiner K-Laut, typified by the words satem and centum respectively. Later in the book he speaks of an original centum-Gruppe from which on the north of the Black and Caspian Seas the satem-Stämmen dissimilated among the Nomadenvölker, or Steppenvölker, located there by further palatalization of the palatal gutturals.

Brugmann's identification of labialized and centum

By the 1897 edition of Grundriss, Brugmann (and Delbrück) had adopted Von Bradke's view. He says

"Die Palatallante der idg. Urzeit ... erscheinen in Griech, Ital., Kelt., Germ. in der Regel als K-Laute, dagegen im Ar., Arm., Alb., Balt-Slav., denen sich Phrygisch und Thrakisch ... meistens als Zischlaute."

The Proto-Indo-European palatals appear in Greek, Italic, Celtic and Germanic as a rule as K-sounds, as opposed to in Aryan, Armenian, Albanian, Balto-Slavic, Phrygian and Thracian for the most part sibilants.

Concerning the labialized velars Brugmann had changed his mind, and there was no more mention of labialized and non-labialized language groups. The labio-velars now appeared under that name as one row of the 5-row Verschlusslaute (Explosivae) containing die labialen V., die dentalen V., die palatalen V., die reinvelaren V. and die labiovelaren V. It was Brugmann who pointed out that labiovelars had merged into the velars in the Satem Group, accounting for the coincidence of the discarded non-labialized group with the Satem Group.

Alternative views

The presence of three dorsal rows in the proto-language is one hypothesis of many. In another hypothesis by Antoine Meillet

Antoine Meillet

Paul Jules Antoine Meillet was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. Meillet began his studies at the Sorbonne, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the Année Sociologique. In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the...

the original rows were the labiovelars and palatovelars, with the pure velars being allophone

Allophone

In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

s of the palatovelars in some cases, such as depalatalization before a resonant. Other possibilities are borrowing between early daughter languages during the process of Satemization, or perhaps the concept of original velars is an artifact based on just plain false etymologies in modern times. Oswald Szemerényi

Oswald Szemerényi

Oswald John Louis Szemerényi was a Hungarian Indo-Europeanist with strong interests in comparative linguistics in general....

proposed that the "preconsonantal palatals probably owe their origin, at least in part, to a lost palatal vowel;" that is, a velar was palatalized by a following vowel subsequently lost. The palatal row therefore post-dated the original velar and labiovelar but Szemerényi does not give times. He includes the palatals in a table of five rows stops "shortly before the break-up" with a question mark after them. Other scholars who assume two dorsal rows in PIE include Kuryłowicz (1935), Meillet

Antoine Meillet

(1937), Lehmann

Winfred P. Lehmann

Winfred P. Lehmann was an American linguist noted for his work in historical linguistics, particularly Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic, as well as for pioneering work in machine translation.-Biography:After receiving B.A. in Humanities at the Northwestern College in Watertown in 1936, he...

(1952), and Woodhouse (1998).

The Satem concept

The Satem languages show characteristic affricate and fricative consonants articulated in the front of the mouth in inherited Indo-European lexical items in which in other languages termed the Centum Languages pure velars and labiovelars, sounds articulated at the back of the mouth, are found. The Satem shift is conveniently illustrated with the word for '100', Proto-Indo-European , which became Avestan satəm (hence the name of the group), Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

sad, Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

śatam, Latvian

Latvian language

Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...

simts, Lithuanian

Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...

šimtas, Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek...

sъto. Another example is the Slavic prefix sъ(n)- ("with"), which appears in Latin, a centum language, as co(n)-; conjoin is cognate with Russian soyuz("union").

The sources of the satem sounds and the methods by which they became what they are have been debated heavily by Indo-European linguists for many decades. The originator of the concept, Peter von Bradke, believed in a Proto-Indo-European two-row system of four gutturals each row, the pure velar row: *k, *kʰ, *g, *gʰ, and the palatovelar row: *ḱ, *ḱʰ, *ǵ, *ǵʰ. For example, became Sanskrit

Sanskrit

ś [ɕ], Latvian

Latvian language

, Avestan, Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

and Armenian

Armenian language

s, Lithuanian

Lithuanian language

š [ʃ], and Albanian

Albanian language

th [θ] (but k before a resonant). Karl Brugmann added the labio-velar row: , with the proviso that in the Satem languages it merged into the velar row, losing their accompanying lip-rounding. This merger left the Satem group without labio-velars. Regardless of whether satem words were created from those rows with those articulations in that way, they are definable as satem words.

Satem-like features have arisen multiple times during history (e.g. French cent pron. [sã]). As a result, it is sometimes difficult to firmly establish which languages were part of the original Satem diffusion and which were affected by secondary assibilation

Assibilation

In linguistics, assibilation is the term for a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is commonly the final phase of palatalization.-Romance languages:...

in a later time period. For instance, it is known that the assibilation found in French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

and Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

were later developments as linguists have extensive documentation of Latin and Old Swedish. However, in the case of Dacian

Dacian language

and Thracian

Thracian language

, there is not enough information on the history of these languages to conclusively settle the issue of when their Satem-like features originated. Extensive lexical

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

borrowing, such as Armenian

Armenian language

from Iranian, may also add to the difficulty. The status of Armenian as a Satem language as opposed to a Centum language with secondary assibilation

Assibilation

In linguistics, assibilation is the term for a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is commonly the final phase of palatalization.-Romance languages:...

rests on the evidence of a very few words.

The Centum concept

The Centum languages show characteristic pure velars and labiovelars articulated at the back of the mouth in inherited Indo-European lexical items in which in other languages termed the Satem Languages affricate and fricative consonants articulated in the front of the mouth are found. The name Centum comes from the Latin word centum < PIE }, '100', English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

hund(red)- (with /h/ from earlier *k, see Grimm's law

Grimm's law

Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

), Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

(he)katon, Welsh

Welsh language

Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...

cant, Tocharian

Tocharian

Tocharian may refer to:* Tocharians, an ancient people who inhabited the Tarim Basin in Central Asia* Tocharian languages, two Indo-European languages spoken by those people...

B kante. Labiovelars as single phonemes (for example, /kʷ/), as opposed to biphonemes (for example, /kw/) are attested in Greek (the Linear B

Linear B

Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization...

q- series), Italic (Latin qu), Germanic (Gothic

Gothic alphabet

The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language, created in the 4th century by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible....

hwair

Hwair

Hwair is the name of , the Gothic letter expressing the or sound . Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature .-Name:...

and qairþra q) and Celtic (Ogham

Ogham

Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the Old Irish language, and occasionally the Brythonic language. Ogham is sometimes called the "Celtic Tree Alphabet", based on a High Medieval Bríatharogam tradition ascribing names of trees to the individual letters.There are roughly...

ceirt Q). In the Centum languages, the palatovelar consonants merged into the plain velars (}, }, }). The merger left the Centum Group without palatovelars.

The Centum languages preserve Proto-Indo-European labiovelars (}, }, }) or their historical reflexes as distinct from plain velars; for example, PIE

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

} : } > Latin

Latin

c /k/ : qu /kʷ/, Greek

Greek language

κ /k/ : π /p/ (or τ /t/ before front vowels), Gothic

Gothic language

Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...

/h/ : /hʷ/, etc. Remnants of labial elements from labiovelars in Balto-Slavic include Lithuanian ungurys "eel" < } ,
Lithuanian dygus "pointy" < }. Fewer examples of incomplete Satemization are also known from Indo-Iranian, such as Sanskrit

Sanskrit

guru

Guru

A guru is one who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom, and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others . Other forms of manifestation of this principle can include parents, school teachers, non-human objects and even one's own intellectual discipline, if the...

"heavy" < }, kulam "herd" < }; kuru "make" < } may be compared, but they arise only post-Rigvedic

Rigveda

The Rigveda is an ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns...

in attested texts.

Historical interpretation of the sound changes

When von Bradke first published his views (1890) defining the Centum and Satem Languages, both major theories of language origination, the Tree model

Tree model

A language tree, or family tree with languages substituted for real family members, has the form of a node-link diagram of a logical tree structure. Additional linguistics terminology derives from it. Such a diagram contains branch points, or nodes, from which the daughter languages descend by...

and the Wave model

Wave model (linguistics)

In historical linguistics, the wave model or wave theory is a model of language change in which new features of a language spread from a central point in continuously weakening concentric circles, similar to the waves created when a stone is thrown into a body of water. According to the model,...

already existed. Bradke viewed his classification as "the oldest perceivable division" in Indo-European. Each of these had further "divisions;" that is, Bradke was proposing a tree division, which he elucidated as "a division between eastern and western cultural provinces (Kulturkreises)." The hypothesis came toward the end of Johannes Schmidt

Johannes Schmidt

Johannes Schmidt may refer to:*Johannes Schmidt , German*Johannes Schmidt , Danish, nicknamed Eel-Schmidt...

's career, innovator of the Wave model. He did not address it and it remained in place as the mainstream hypothesis even though cross-Kulturkreis similarities were noted. For example, referring to the "two sections", Peter Giles in 1901 noted "striking similarities" in languages across them, such as "Italic and

The proposed split was undermined by the discoveries of Hittite and Tocharian, which were Centum languages located within the hypothetical Satem range, Tocharian isolated on the Silk Route in the far east, divided from its closest cognates in Europe by thousands of miles of rugged terrain and hostile peoples. This proposed first division based on a single isogloss was further weakened by continued research into additional Indo-European isoglosses, many of which seemed of equal or greater importance in the development of daughter languages. Philip Baldi explains:

"...an early dialect split of the type indicated by the centum-satem contrast should be expected to be reflected in other high-order dialect distinctions as well, a pattern which is not evident from an analysis of shared features among eastern and western languages."

Colin Renfrew notes that the satem-centum distinction "is not in itself accorded much significance today" as it is considered "too simplistic". Tree models of the descent of PIE into the various daughter languages still exist but in the absence of historical data for the early stages of those languages the genetic models necessarily rely on comparative data; that is, the isogloss map. The Centum–Satem isogloss is just one of many that criss-cross the Indo-European landscape. Similarly the rejection of Kossinna's Law

Gustaf Kossinna

Gustaf Kossinna was a linguist and professor of German archaeology at the University of Berlin...

matching archaeological cultures to language groups in strict correspondence opened a gap between specific tree models and any archaeological support that might be found in prehistory. Archaeology is still useful, as are tree models, but only in a limited way in contexts of preponderance of evidence; that is, the existence of specific cultures in the hypothetical origin area of satemization proves nothing whatever, not even that the sound change originated there. If an origin is to be postulated for that region, however, the archaeology adds that some sort of cultural unity resulting from a common way of life prevailed there.

Application of the wave model is equally difficult. Renfrew's statement of it supposes a Satem center from which a wave of satemization spread, but "the original, earlier Centum remains untouched in the periphery." Centum may at least in many cases (but not Anatolian) have been earlier but it was not original; moreover, Centumization removed the palatovelars from the language, leaving none to satemize. It is necessary to suppose that in any given region Centumization competed with Satemization, which the mixed inventory of Balto-Slavic may support, but the Wave model in this statement of it appears equally as simplistic as the Tree model.

A compromise possibility is that PIE was neither Centum nor Satem, but satemization began in a central area and diffused outward from there. This view falls within the Wave model but begins from a different origin. Where satemization did not reach centumization took place either in different languages, or in a different lexical inventory of the same language, or not at all, allowing for the complexity of outcomes noted by the linguistic community. Winfred Lehmann

Winfred P. Lehmann

presents this view based on the work of Antoine Meillet

Antoine Meillet

. Meillet had hypothesized a two-row tectal system, labiovelars and velars, but his velars were composed of two allophonic

Allophone

In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

rows, pure velars used before back vowels and palatovelars before front. Lehmann says "Proper treatment of the subject involves consideration of the early Indo-European languages as members of a dialect continuum. In a central area, spirantization of the palatal allophones took place ...."

Schleicher's single guttural row

Brugmann's labialized and unlabialized language groups

Von Bradke's centum and satem groups

Brugmann's identification of labialized and centum

Alternative views

The Satem concept

The Centum concept

Historical interpretation of the sound changes

See also