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43-417: Jasanoff is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: Jay Jasanoff (born 1942), American linguist Maya Jasanoff (born 1974), American historian Sheila Jasanoff (born 1944), Indian-born American social scientist [REDACTED] Surname list This page lists people with the surname Jasanoff . If an internal link intending to refer to

86-402: A n , ph o tograph / ph o tography ). Confusingly, in some contexts, the terms 'ablaut', 'vowel gradation', 'apophony' and 'vowel alternation' are used synonymously, especially in synchronic comparisons, but historical linguists prefer to keep 'ablaut' for the specific Indo-European phenomenon, which is the meaning intended by the linguists who first coined the word. In Proto-Indo-European,

129-548: A single vowel in the parent language. In particular, the zero grade was often subject to modification from changes in the pronunciation of syllabic sonorants. For example, in Germanic, syllabic sonorants acquired an epenthetic -u- , thus converting the original zero grade to a new "u-grade" in many words. Thus, while ablaut survives in some form in all Indo-European languages, it became progressively less systematic over time. Ablaut explains vowel differences between related words of

172-603: A specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name (s) to the link. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jasanoff&oldid=1016831267 " Categories : Surnames Ashkenazi surnames Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata All set index articles Jay Jasanoff Jasanoff received both his bachelor's degree (in 1963) and his Ph.D. (in 1968) from Harvard. After working for one year as an assistant professor at

215-457: A verb is *bʰeydʰ- "to wait" (cf. "bide"). In the daughter languages, these came to be important markers of grammatical distinctions. The vowel change in the Germanic strong verb, for example, is the direct descendant of that seen in the Indo-European verb paradigm. Examples in modern English are the following: It was in this context of Germanic verbs that ablaut was first described, and this

258-612: A younger sister, Joan Reyna. His wife, Sheila Jasanoff , is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School . His son, Alan Jasanoff , is a neuroscientist at MIT , and his daughter, Maya Jasanoff , is a professor in the Department of History at Harvard. Indo-European ablaut In linguistics , the Indo-European ablaut ( / ˈ æ b l aʊ t / AB -lowt , from German Ablaut pronounced [ˈaplaʊt] )

301-513: Is "sound reduction". It was coined in this sense in 1819 by the German linguist Jacob Grimm in his Deutsche Grammatik , though the word had been used before him. In particular, the 17th-century grammarian Schottelius had used the word negatively to suggest that German verbs lacked the sophistication of the classics, but there is no hint of this disdain in Grimm or in modern scholarly usage. In English,

344-614: Is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb s i ng, s a ng, s u ng and its related noun s o ng , a paradigm inherited directly from the Proto-Indo-European stage of the language. Traces of ablaut are found in all modern Indo-European languages , though its prevalence varies greatly. The phenomenon of Indo-European ablaut

387-562: Is easily explained: the PIE root is *h 1 es- . In the singular, the stem is stressed, so it remains in the e-grade, and it takes the inflection -ti . In the plural, however, the inflection -énti was stressed, causing the stem to reduce to the zero grade: *h 1 es-énti → *h 1 s-énti . See main article: Indo-European copula . Some of the morphological functions of the various grades are as follows: e-grade: o-grade: zero-grade: lengthened grade: Many examples of lengthened-grade roots in

430-466: Is not difficult to imagine it as a contraction of an older *ph 2 terés, pronounced perhaps [pɐterés] , as this combination of consonants and vowels would be possible in English as well. In other cases, however, the absence of a vowel strikes the speaker of a modern western European language as unpronounceable. To understand, one must be aware that there were a number of sounds that were consonants in principle but could operate in ways analogous to vowels:

473-408: Is said to be from pre-Proto-Indo-European syncope in unaccented syllables, but in some cases the lack of accent does not cause zero grade: *deywó- , nominative plural *-es "god". There does not seem to be a rule governing the unaccented syllables that take zero grade and the ones that take stronger grades. It is still a matter of debate whether PIE had an original a-vowel at all. In later PIE,

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516-400: Is said to be in the "zero grade". Syllables with long vowels are said to be in "lengthened grade". (When the e -grade or the o -grade is referred to, the short vowel forms are meant.) A classic example of the five grades of ablaut in a single root is provided by the different case forms of two closely related Greek words. In the following table, an acute accent (´) marks the syllable carrying

559-467: Is still what most people primarily associate with the phenomenon. A fuller description of ablaut operating in English, German and Dutch verbs and of the historical factors governing these can be found at the article Germanic strong verb . The same phenomenon is displayed in the verb tables of Latin , Ancient Greek and Sanskrit . Examples of ablaut as a grammatical marker in Latin are the vowel changes in

602-407: Is the Indo-European ablaut, remnants of which can be seen in the English verbs r i de , r o de , r i dden , or fl y , fl ew , fl ow n . For simply learning English grammar, it is enough to note that these verbs are irregular , but understanding why they have unusual forms that seem irregular (and indeed why they are actually perfectly regular within their own terms) requires an understanding of

645-585: The University of California, Berkeley , he returned to Harvard to teach as an assistant professor and, later, associate professor from 1970 to 1978. He then moved to Ithaca, New York , to teach at Cornell University , where he was promoted to full professor in linguistics. He taught at Cornell for twenty years, including a number of years as the department chair. Since 1998 he has been the Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology at Harvard, and

688-496: The Indo-European verb and subsequent articles has been adopted by several textbooks and has been generally well-received. Jasanoff has argued that certain ablaut properties and inflectional endings found in the Hittite and Tocharian verbal systems require the revision of the traditionally reconstructed middle endings and their relationship with the endings of the PIE perfect and the thematic conjugation. Specifically, he proposes that

731-626: The Indo-European verb, he has treated such issues as the origin of the Balto-Slavic pitch accent, Germanic and Celtic nominal morphology, and the internal reconstruction of the earliest stages of the Proto-Indo-European language. He has emphasized the importance of the Hittite and Tocharian evidence for Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, as these languages were not available to 19th century Indo-Europeanist reconstruction. His research has contributed to integrating Hittite and Tocharian verbal morphology into

774-509: The PIE inflectional endings for the primary (nonpast) active and middle should be reconstructed as follows: While the reconstruction of the active endings continues the “Brugmannian” model, the middle endings differ from older reconstructions in 1) the reconstruction of the primary middle hic-et-nunc marker as *- r (rather than *- i ), 2) the reconstruction of originally “dentalless” third singular and plural forms *- o(-r) and *- ro(r) , which were remodeled as *- to(r) and *- nto(r) already at

817-475: The PIE stage in analogy with the third person active forms, but were preserved as designated passive or “stative” endings in Indo-Iranian (Ved. 3sg. "stative" - e < *- o-i ), Anatolian (Hitt. 3sg. - a(ri) < *- o(ri) ) and Old Irish (3sg. pass. - ar < *- or ), among others. Concerning ablaut , Hittite and the Indo-European verb proposes a novel type of present with o/e -ablaut (later o/ø -ablaut of

860-432: The article apophony . Some involve a variation in vowel length (quantitative gradation: ph o tograph / ph o tography shows reduction of the first vowel to a schwa ), others in vowel coloring (qualitative gradation: m a n / m e n ) and others the complete disappearance of a vowel (reduction to zero: could n o t → couldn't ). For the study of European languages, one of the most important instances of vowel gradation

903-404: The basic, inherent vowel of most syllables was a short e . Ablaut is the name of the process whereby this short e changed, becoming short o , long ē , long ō or sometimes disappearing entirely to leave no vowel at all. Thus, ablaut results in the alternation of the following sounds: If a syllable had a short e , it is said to be in the "e-grade" or "full grade". When it had no vowel, it

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946-406: The development in the daughter languages is frequently far more complicated, and few reflect the original system as neatly as Greek. Various factors, such as vowel harmony , assimilation with nasals, or the effect of the presence of laryngeals in the Indo-European (IE) roots as well as their subsequent loss in most daughter languages, mean that a language may have several different vowels representing

989-410: The disappearance of the laryngeal h 2 could leave an a-colouring and this may explain all occurrences of a in later PIE. However, some argue controversially that the e-grade could sometimes be replaced by an a-grade without the influence of a laryngeal, which might help to explain the vowels in class 6 Germanic verbs , for example. Although PIE had only this one, basically regular, ablaut sequence,

1032-511: The early 18th century by the Dutch linguist Lambert ten Kate , in his book Gemeenschap tussen de Gottische spraeke en de Nederduytsche ("Common aspects of the Gothic and Dutch languages", 1710). The term ablaut is borrowed from German, and derives from the noun Laut "sound", and the prefix ab- , which indicates movement downwards or away, or deviation from a norm; thus the literal meaning

1075-483: The examples above, Szemerényi's law affected the older sequences *ph 2 -tér-s and *n̥-péh 2 -tor-s, changing them to *ph 2 -tḗr and *n̥-péh 2 -tōr. Thus, these forms were originally in the regular, unlengthened e-grade and o-grade. Such lengthened vowels were, however, later grammaticalised and spread to other words in which the change did not occur. Nevertheless, there are examples of true lengthened grades, in which short e alternates with long ē . Examples are

1118-405: The four syllabic sonorants, the three laryngeals and the two semi-vowels: When u and i came in postvocalic positions, the result was a diphthong. Ablaut is nevertheless regular and looks like this: Thus, any of these could replace the ablaut vowel when it was reduced to the zero-grade: the pattern CVrC (for example, *bʰergʰ- ) could become CrC ( *bʰr̥gʰ- ). However, not every PIE syllable

1161-406: The grammar of the reconstructed proto-language . Ablaut is the oldest and most extensive single source of vowel gradation in the Indo-European languages and must be distinguished clearly from other forms of gradation, which developed later, such as Germanic umlaut ( m a n / m e n , g oo se / g ee se , l o ng / l e ngth ) or the results of modern English word-stress patterns ( m a n / wom

1204-402: The language started to develop a more complex vowel system. Thus, it has often been speculated that an original e-grade underwent two changes in some phonetic environments: under certain circumstances, it changed to o (the o-grade) and in others, it disappeared entirely (the zero-grade). However, that is not certain: the phonetic conditions that controlled ablaut have never been determined, and

1247-403: The paradigms of verbs and nouns. These were not the main markers of grammatical form, since the inflection system served this purpose, but they must have been significant secondary markers. An example of ablaut in the paradigm of the noun in PIE can be found in *pértus , from which the English words ford and (via Latin) port are derived (both via the zero-grade stem *pr̥t- ). An example in

1290-479: The perfect stem of verbs. Ablaut can often explain apparently random irregularities. For example, the verb "to be" in Latin has the forms est (he is) and sunt (they are). The equivalent forms in German are very similar: ist and sind . The same forms were present in Proto-Slavic : *estь and *sǫtь , and developed into e.g. Polish jest and są . The difference between singular and plural in these languages

1333-533: The position of the word stress may not have been a key factor at all. There are many counterexamples to the proposed rules: *deywós and its nominative plural *deywóes show pretonic and posttonic e-grade, respectively, and *wĺ̥kʷos has an accented zero grade. Many examples of lengthened grades, including those listed above, are not directly conditioned by ablaut. Instead, they are a result of sound changes like Szemerényi's law and Stang's law , which caused compensatory lengthening of originally short vowels. In

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1376-400: The reconstruction of the Indo-European verbal system, though he emphasizes that “the post- h 2 e -conjugation model of the PIE verb is (…) in many respects extremely conservative” and “The novelty of the ‘new’ system is entirely at the formal level.”   His novel reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European middle in the context of the * h 2 e -conjugation theory as proposed in Hittite and

1419-534: The root, the so-called “ mólh 2 -e -type” (* melh 2 ‘to grind’), named after the * h 2 e -conjugation 3sg. present * mólh 2 -e reflected in the Hittite 3sg. present malli ‘grinds’, Lith. malù 'grind' and Gothic malan ‘to grind’ according to Jasanoff. This type has been added to the Addenda of the LIV . Jasanoff has also argued for proto-middle * h 2 e -conjugation aorists with o/e -ablaut (later o/ø -ablaut) of

1462-455: The root, which gave rise to the Indo-Iranian passive aorist and the Tocharian subjunctive V, among others. The Proto-Indo-European sigmatic aorist is traditionally reconstructed with Narten-ablaut of the root ( ē/e ), an invariant stem-forming suffix *- s -, and the athematic secondary endings. However, the corresponding active preterit categories in Hittite and Tocharian show an *- s - only in

1505-533: The same language. For example: Ablaut also explains vowel differences between cognates in different languages. For the English-speaking non-specialist, a good reference work for quick information on IE roots, including the difference of ablaut grade behind related lexemes, is Watkins (2000). (Note that in discussions of lexis, Indo-European roots are normally cited in the e-grade, without any inflections.) In PIE, there were already ablaut differences within

1548-557: The same shape. The proposed original paradigm thus looked as follows: After Anatolian and Tocharian split off, the third singular active form became the starting point for the development of the “classical” s -aorist found in Indo-Iranian, Greek, Latin, etc. This reconstruction is elaborated and defended in Jasanoff (2019). Jasanoff was born in New York City to Milton and Edith Jasanoff, both of Eastern European Jewish descent. He has

1591-464: The term became established through the 1845 translation of Bopp's Comparative Grammar . Vowel gradation is any vowel difference between two related words (such as ph o tograph [ˈf əʊ təgrɑːf] and ph o tography [f ə ˈtɒgrəfi]) or two forms of the same word (such as m a n and m e n ). The difference does not need to be indicated in the spelling. There are many kinds of vowel gradation in English and other languages, which are discussed generally in

1634-441: The third person singular, as well as evidence of an unexpected o -grade of the root throughout the paradigm. Jasanoff argues that this situation reflects an archaism and that the classical s -aorist emerged from an older * h 2 e -conjugation aorist with o -grade of the root, whose 3sg. active form was replaced by an intrusive Narten-imperfect form to disambiguate it from the newly emerging * h 2 e -conjugation middle aorists of

1677-482: The verbs with "Narten" inflection , and nouns like *mḗh₁-n̥s "moon", genitive *méh₁-n̥s-os . Alternations of this type were rare, however, and the e ~ o ~ ∅ alternation was the most common by far. The long ō grade was rarer still and may not have actually been a part of the ablaut system at all. The zero grade of ablaut may appear difficult for speakers of English. In the case of *ph 2 trés, which may already have been pronounced something like [pɐtrés] , it

1720-458: The word stress; a macron (¯) marks long vowels and the syllable in bold is the one illustrating the different vowel gradations. In this unusually neat example, the following can be seen: As with most reconstructions, however, scholars differ about the details of this example. One way to think of this system is to suppose that Proto-Indo-European originally had only one vowel, short e , and over time, it changed according to phonetic context, so

1763-403: Was capable of forming a zero grade; some consonant structures inhibited it in particular cases, or completely. Thus, for example, although the preterite plural of a Germanic strong verb (see below) is derived from the zero grade, classes 4 and 5 have instead vowels representing the lengthened e-grade, as the stems of these verbs could not have sustained a zero grade in this position. Zero grade

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1806-401: Was first recorded by Sanskrit grammarians in the later Vedic period (roughly 8th century BCE), and was codified by Pāṇini in his Aṣṭādhyāyī (4th century BCE), where the terms guṇa and vṛddhi were used to describe the phenomena now known respectively as the full grade and lengthened grade . In the context of European languages, the phenomenon was first described in

1849-524: Was the department chair from 1999 to 2008. In his research, he has examined, in addition to the Indo-European verb, such issues as the origin of the Balto-Slavic pitch accent and the internal reconstruction of the earliest stages of the Proto-Indo-European language . Jasanoff’s research since the 1970s has focused on Indo-European verbal morphology , especially the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European middle endings (“proto-middle”). In addition to

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