Was PIE SOV?

Danny L. Bate has a new article declaring that "PIE was not SOV" (2/20/25), in which he attempts to demonstrate under three objections why "SOV" is not a useful term for describing and summarizing the word order of Proto-Indo-European clauses:  1. "clausal bias", 2. "changing the subject", 3. "discourse dominates".

 

Before we delve into the details of Bate's anti-SOV argument, let's look at the dimensions of what PIE became before its daughters spread to the New World and elsewhere across the globe:

It does not bother me that there are three conspicuous blanks in the Eurasian IE palette:  Finland, Hungary, Turkey.  The majority languages of the first two together constitute Finno-Ugric, which are European latecomers — Hungarian entered the Carpathian Basin at the tail end of the 9th century and Finnish and its congeners arrived in the Baltic region around the same time, ultimately both from the southern Urals (hence Uralic) and Turkey, formerly populated by speakers of numerous Anatolian (ergo, IE) languages, including Lydian, Carian, and Hittite, the first IE tongue, which were overlaid by Turkic speakers from the distant east beginning in the 11th century.  For me, the most glaring absence is Tocharian, which was historically located in the Tarim Basin — linguistically datable by manuscripts to the 5th-8th, but other types of evidence (cultural, archeological, anthropological, etc.) locate them in Eastern Central Asia as early as the 1st and 2nd millennia BC, having impinged from the northwest.

In attempting to understand such grossen Fragen as the typology of PIE, determining the nature and spatiotemporal dispersal of its constituent descendants is vital, i.e., how and when the IE languages got where they are (that includes, of course, what other languages they came in contact with during their peregrinations.  For that reason, I invested a lot of effort in conceiving and creating what I call the “Die Sprachamöbe".  See Victor H. Mair, “Die Sprachamöbe: An archeolinguistic parable" in The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: The Institute for the Study of Man; Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), pp. 835-855.

Here are key passages from Bate's article:

1. The first objection is more of an appeal for clarification and specification. The view that early Indo-European languages, and therefore their common ancestor, ‘were SOV’ works better for some types of clause than others. The label of SOV seems to be rooted in what we call declarative main clauses – combinations of verbs, nouns and other words that together express simple statements of fact, like the sky is blue or cats are great. If we first specify that this is the type of clause that we have in mind, then yes, SOV does appear to be the norm.

2. The second objection stems from my squeamishness over the very terms subject and object, and an undefined sense of uncertainty over their relevance for Proto-Indo-European. The subject of a sentence is one of those linguistic terms (along with word) that elude easy definition when you try to pin them down. This is not to say that subject is a useless grammatical label, but rather that it may mask a variety of phenomena, and vary in usefulness across different languages.

3. The final objection, which I consider the most serious, is a matter of context and conversational flow. It is generally agreed that individual early Indo-European languages like Latin and Ancient Greek adapted the word order of their sentences according to the larger conversation to which a given sentence belongs. This is usually referred to in the literature as discourse information.

Conclusions: 

In producing the documented word order of Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and the rest, it was the Topic-Focus-Verb system that had the final say, or at least considerable power. It is the output of this system that we have to use to get back to the word order of Proto-Indo-European, and the prescence of this schema across its elder daughters indicates that the proto-language operated through it too.

Perhaps then it would be fruitful to retire the label of ‘SOV’ for Proto-Indo-European, or pause the hunt for its basic arrangement of those clausal components. Considering it to have been principally TFV, instead of SOV, could put the whole endeavour of tracking the developmental paths of Indo-European syntax on firmer foundations. From this departure point, I feel we can better understand the interesting and distinctive changes that the ancestral syntax would then undergo across the expanding family of languages, such as in its later Celtic, Germanic and Romance branches.

Although Hittite, the PIE ursprache, so to speak (!), massively uses topicalization and focus and other means to tie discourse together, its fundamental word order is verb-final.

Bate's bold thesis is certain to meet with opposition.  One thing his critics are likely to tell him is that he needs to balance off variation against syntax.

Perhaps some such judicious assessment as this by Hiroshi Kumamoto will help the author refine his thesis and make it more acceptable:

The author seems to be trying to address the question that was plentifully discussed half a century ago. It's not a bad thing as long as he's based on the actual language data, albeit limited. But perhaps he might find a look at the researches in linguistic typology beneficial. When in the 70's some non-IE languages with exotic structures became known and fully described, such as the ergative construction and the focus system of the Philippine languages, and the traditional concepts of the "subject" and "object" became shaken, scholars / researchers gathered in a conference and produced the volume entitled Subject and Topic. A New Typology of Language, edited by Charles N. Li (the co-author with Sandra Thompson of Mandarin Chinese), 1976, Academic Press, which became the de-facto standard for this kind of discussion. This trend continues to Aikhenvald, Dixon & Onishi eds., Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects, John Benjamins 2001. Here's the advertisement for the book:

In some languages every subject is marked in the same way, and also every object. But there are languages in which a small set of verbs mark their subjects or their objects in an unusual way. For example, most verbs may mark their subject with nominative case, but one small set of verbs may have dative subjects, and another small set may have locative subjects. Verbs with noncanonically marked subjects and objects typically refer to physiological states or events, inner feelings, perception and cognition. The Introduction sets out the theoretical parameters and defines the properties in terms of which subjects and objects can be analysed. Following chapters discuss Icelandic, Bengali, Quechua, Finnish, Japanese, Amele (a Papuan language), and Tariana (an Amazonian language); there is also a general discussion of European languages. This is a pioneering study providing new and fascinating data, and dealing with a topic of prime theoretical importance to linguists of many persuasions.

And another quarter century has seen more along similar lines of studies, too many to be listed here.

As Asko Parpola put it to me:  I think its title is overshooting, "PIE was basically a SOV language” is good enough.

Despite all objections that may be raised, I should note that I enjoyed reading Bate's essay beause it is full of good humor, such as this caption for an intriguing illustration of a body of deliberating Roman politicians:  "Catiline (ca. 108-62 BC) waits patiently for Cicero (106 BC-43 BC) to reach the main verb".

Let the debate begin!

Selected readings

• "SOV emerges in the Negev" (2/3/05)
• "Word-order 'universals' are lineage-specific?" (4/15/11)
• "Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic" (4/23/24)

[h.t. Pamela Kyle Crossley; thanks to Donald Ringe and Craig Melchert]