Notice that no single satem language
has labiovelars, whereas they all preserve *k^w _and_ *kw (*kw and *qw?)
clusters. This looks like a shared innovation rather than strange coincidence,
and suggests a very early loss of labialisation as a feature of dorsal stop
phonemes, most likely contemporal with the satem shift proper. With *k^/*kW/*k
redefined as *k/*kW/*q we get this:
PIE *k > Satem *k^
PIE *kW > Satem *k
PIE *q > Satem k
-- with the fronting of the whole
*k/*q subsystem, but not of *kW, which becomes delabialised and merges with
reflexes of old uvular *q. The merger is irreversible, as speakers have no means
of knowing which *k comes from older *kW. Albanian may be an exception (it's
imaginable that in Albanian *q wasn't fronted until rather late and thus
escaped the palatalisations that affected *k < *kW), but even in Albanian
there is no trace of retained labialisation. At best we'd have a three-way
system like *k^/*k/*q, and it's hard to imagine how it could have "devolved"
back into anything centum-like.
The satem group is very sharply defined
(there are no satem developments outside it), which suggests a late
fast-spreading innovation rather than a dialectal feature in PIE times. In
the latter case we would expect a "grey zone" between satem and centum areas,
with fractures partly obliterating the [+/- satem] boundary. The facts that
Tocharian and Greek were unaffected (despite the numerous affinities between
Greek and Indo-Iranian and Armenian), and that there is a slight
south-to-north cline with regard to the thoroughness of the
change _within_ the Satemic group, suggest that satemisation was
initiated somewhere in the southern part of the Pontic area and diffused
northwards at a time when Proto-Tocharian and Proto-Hellenic occupied
sufficiently peripheral locations east and west of the core area. The optimal
timing, in my opinion, would be after 3000 BC but well before 2000
BC.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 8:26 PM
Subject: [tied] Satem shift
Piotr:
>[...] there is no indication of a temporal gap
between those >processes,
>which means that at a certain point the
whole system of >phonological
>contrasts was redefined.
But is
it not possible that the satem shift happened well
*before* 4000 BCE? I now
think of IE as a puddle of ever-converging
and diverging dialects. The
"split" is, of course, nothing more
than the state of a part of this
dialectal muddle as it stood
approximately 4000 BCE (that is, ignoring the
possibility for
surrounding dialect spin-offs from Middle IE, Old IE or
other
earlier stages of IE, in order to prevent our brains from
exploding).
Piotr spoke earlier of uvularisation and a reinterpretation
of
*k^/*k/*kW as *k/*q/*kW to resolve typological problems in IE. If
so,
the satem dialect area would have simply "fronted" *k/*q,
forming *k^/*k. A
one-step process rather than a messy, two-step
palatalisation +
delabialisation event.
Plus, I can't see why this process must
necessarily occur *after* the
final fracturing of IE since we all should know
by now that IE was
never "unified" as it is traditionally stated. IE would
have always
been an area of dialects, no matter how far back in time we
go.
Thoughts?