Ancient Indo-European

Languages between Linguistics

and Philology
Contact, Variation, and Reconstruction

Edited by

Michele Bianconi
Marta Capano
Domenica Romagno
Francesco Rovai

leiden | boston

For use by the Author only | © 2022 Michele Bianconi and Marta Capano
 Al nostro Maestro Romano Lazzeroni
(1930–2020)

For use by the Author only | © 2022 Michele Bianconi and Marta Capano
 ἡ ἀλήθεια ἐλευθερώσει ὑμᾶς
John, 8:32

For use by the Author only | © 2022 Michele Bianconi and Marta Capano
 Contents

Foreword ix
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Acknowledgements xii
List of Figures and Tables xiii
Notes on Contributors xv

Introduction 1
Michele Bianconi and Marta Capano

1 Divine Witnesses in Greece and Anatolia: Iliad 3.276–280 between

Contact, Variation, and Reconstruction 11
Michele Bianconi

2 Achaemenid Elamite and Old Persian Indefinites: A Comparative

View 48
Juan E. Briceño Villalobos

3 Phenomena of Spirantization and Language Contact in Greek Sicilian

Inscriptions. The case of τριαιντα 88
Marta Capano

4 Egyptian Greek: A Contact Variety 115

Sonja Dahlgren

5 Substrate Matters 153

Franco Fanciullo

6 Natural Language Use and Bilingual Interference: Verbal

Complementation Patterns in Post-Classical Greek 166
Victoria Fendel

7 Where Does Dionysus Ὕης Come From? 196

Laura Massetti

8 Alignment Change and Changing Alignments: Armenian Syntax and the

First ‘Death’ of Parthian 211
Robin Meyer

For use by the Author only | © 2022 Michele Bianconi and Marta Capano
 viii contents

9 Rewriting the Law: Diachronic Variation and Register in Greek and

Hittite Legal Language 234
Katharine Shields

10 Lexical Variation in Young Avestan: The Problem of the ‘Ahuric’ and

‘Daevic’ Vocabularies Revisited 254
Elizabeth Tucker

11 Greek ἄγυρις ‘Gathering’ between Dialectology and Indo-European

Reconstruction 276
Roberto Batisti

12 Here’s to a Long Life! Albanian Reflections of Proto-Indo-European

Semantics 301
Brian D. Joseph

Index 313

For use by the Author only | © 2022 Michele Bianconi and Marta Capano
 chapter 11

Greek ἄγυρις ‘gathering’ between Dialectology and

Indo-European Reconstruction

Roberto Batisti

1 Background: Cowgill’s Law and irregular o ~ u variation in Ancient

Greek*

In a number of cases, Ancient Greek shows a u vowel as a reflex of pie *o.

Most instances have been explained by Warren Cowgill (1965: 156f.) with the
sound law that now bears his name.1 In its broadest formulation (cf. Sihler
1995: 42), Cowgill’s Law states that pie *o became Gk. u between a resonant
and a labial, in either order. The exact scope of the law, however, has sub-
sequently been questioned. In an important article, Brent Vine (1999) formu-
lated a restricted version of Cowgill’s Law proper, which he subdivided into two
rules:
1) o > u / Kw_N, N_ Kw (e.g. *nokwt- > νυκτ- ‘night’, *nogwnó- > γυμνός ‘naked’2)
2) -nom- > -num- (e.g. *h3nh3-men- > *onomn̥ > ὄνυμα ‘name’)
He then added two new, separate rules describing the shift *o > u in other envir-
onments:
3) *-oli̯- > -υλλ- (e.g. *bholi̯om > φύλλον ‘leaf’: Lat. folium ‘id.’)
4) *-Tu̯ oR- > *-Tu̯ uR- (e.g. *kwetu̯ ores > Lesb. πέσσυρες ‘four’), perhaps more
generally *-Cu̯ oC- > *-Cu̯ uC- (*su̯ opnos > ὕπνος ‘sleep’)
As Vine himself (1999: 582f.) pointed out, these “analyses […] have the highly
desirable morphological consequence of eliminating altogether the problem-

* I am grateful to the audience in Oxford for their comments, and to the organizers of the Col-
loquium for making this splendid gathering of scholars possible. My thanks also go to Nicola
Serafini for sharing with me a pre-publication version of his paper on the ἀγύρται that origin-
ally sparked my interest in that word’s vocalism back in 2014. I am also indebted to Federico
Alpi for discussion of Armenian matters, and to Nicole Edmea Pollan for polishing up my
English. This paper has benefited greatly from the comments of the two anonymous referees.
It goes without saying that I alone take full responsibilities for the views presented here.
1 Less precise are approaches like that of Joseph (1979), who admits a “sporadic” change o > u “in
the context /C_C, where one of the consonants is a labial or a velar, and the other consonant
is a sonorant […] or both are labial or velar”.
2 With the additional changes *-gwn- > -μν- and *n- > *ŋ- (by assimilation?) > γ-.

© Roberto Batisti, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004508828_013

For use by the Author only | © 2022 Michele Bianconi and Marta Capano