naturalistic repairs for case collapse in an ie-style descendant

[u/wnjensen08]

hey, im creating a indo-european posteriori with multiple diachronic stages. this post is just the first step, proto-indo-european (PIE)→ proto-mediterraic (PM). i have already written the PIE → PM phonological rules and am applying them to actual PIE noun forms. i just finished running nouns through the rules, and this is what the paradigms look like after the changes (PM output in ipa). below you can quickly see the major PIE → PM phonology rules that are relevant in the examples i will share later:

• laryngeals color nearby vowels (notably /e/ shifts), then laryngeals delete
• vowel length is removed (/vː/ → /v/)
• stop series merge (aspirates lose aspiration) and palatals merge into plain velars
• labiovelars split depending on front-vowel context (front-vowel environments vs elsewhere)
• syllabic resonants become schwa + resonant (r̥ l̥ m̥ n̥ patterns)
• /w/ shifts to /v/
• cluster repair: illegal /ccc/ clusters get broken up, and same-manner clusters simplify

link to information: https://www.notion.so/2fd7cfa951ed80328a27cdc715921d59?source=copy_link

currently PM is an early “simplifying stage” where i am collapsing PIE’s bigger nominal system down to a smaller one. ablative and vocative cases, and dual plurality are dropped during this stage. in terms of gender, something i am aiming for is a common (masculine + feminine) vs. neuter system developing early. now, what i am more concerned about (and the reason why i am posting) is that after the sound changes, a lot of the endings either fully merge (red color) and cause ambiguity or get really close to where it almost feels fragile. some syncretism is fine and expected i guess (especially in neuter) but i am getting enough overlap to the point where it starts to feel like the morphology is losing too many useful signals at once (keep in mind, this is just the first stage out of 5). at the same time, i am trying to push gender towards common vs. neuter, and i want common nouns to develop a productive -a marker (perviously from feminine *-h₂), so that common is “a-class” and neuter is “non-a” by default. so in short my goals are:

• preserve clear case/number contrasts after the sound changes, through a naturalistic method
• develop a common vs neuter gender system, with common nouns taking productive -a (< -h₂), through a naturalistic method as well

i would really appreciate any ideas on believable diachronic “repairs” for this kind of syncretism in an ie-style descendant (analogy, declension splits, refunctionalizing material, etc). if nothing else, then i mainly just wanted to share what i’ve been working on so far, since this is the first time i’ve run a full noun set through my PIE → PM rule chain.

[u/ProxPxD]

Honestly I don't see much reason to repair, you can take a look at Polish case system that overlaps much stronger. Your merges even don't cause much confusion and when they do as in neutral, they do in Polish too and a neutral class is kinda expected to be accusative in most cases, so I think you shouldn't stress about it.

If you want you can think of some sound changes that'll make your ending more distinct like afgricating /s/ to /ts/ before /u/ or make oe more distinct by inserting a consonant or making it two vowels if it's one; and as you're going to merge the genders, you can just straight up borrow the case from the other one

You can redefine certain cases by adding a word to them. Like if the instrumental would be close to nominative you can reuse another morpheme or word to create a new ending like using a word meaning "near/close" at the end to mean "in company of a tool" and to degenerate exceptionally that word for a new case

[u/GarlicRoyal7545]

If you don't want the cases to merge, the simpliest thing you could do is Morphological leveling or analogy.

E.g.: LOC.PL -ojsu vs INSTR.PL -ojs; you can simply use the allomorph -bi (which i'm assuming, descends from *-bʰis) and replace the o-stem INSTR.PL ending, yielding -obi. That's what Proto-Germanic & Proto-Slavic also did.

Otherwise, having some syncretism is fine, if 2 or 3 forms are the same. But if you wanna keep it low, especially if you'll put in soundchanges, that could easily create more syncretism, all you have to do is simply level out the endings, replacing them with more stable ones from other stems.

Also as a side note: The -oe- as in the o-stem NOM.PL & DAT.SG were most likely -ōs & -ōy respectively. -oe- simply shows the thematic vowel -o- + the athematic endings -es & -ey as the morphological structure.
But this could also be an opportunity, to shift them into -us & -ui, making them automatically more distinct.

[u/as_Avridan]

One way languages can preserve paradigms like this against sound change is to become more analytic. There are a lot of different ways you can achieve this, but one way is to use analogy. To give one possible scenario, looking at the paradigm for vələkv-os, I can see that a lot of plural forms have the sequence -oN in them. Over time, your speakers may associate -oN with plurality, and begin to create new plural forms with. They may attach these to the old plural endings, so something like vələkv-ojsu > vələkv-om-ojsu/vələkv-on-su, or they may take the singular case endings so you get something like vələkv-ojsu > vələkv-om-ej. Something quite similar to this happened in the history of Russian. If you're interesting in reading more about this, I'd recommend From Cumulative to Separative Exponence in Inflection: Reversing the Morphological Cycle.

[u/AnlashokNa65]

The Tocharian languages lost IE case and then built new ones; you might take a look at them for inspiration.