It is much easier to reverse a historical
process of language change if the language in question has a written form.
Orthography can preserve old features so that they can be recovered. Consider
the relations between rhotic and non-rhotic varieties of US English. The latter
are recessive, which means that rhoticity is being reversed. This should be
impossible, as non-rhoticity has resulted in seemingly irreversible mergers,
e.g. of <guard> and <god>, at least in some accents, or
<source> and <sauce> (as in RP). How does a speaker know when to
restore an /r/? He does if he knows how the words are spelt (though hypercorrect
forms like /gard/ for <God> are possible and indeed attested, cf. also the
frequent Canadian pronunciation of <khaki> as /karki/ -- a falsely
re-rhoticised RP form).
Given the massive influence and high
prestige of "General American" with its orthographically consistent rhoticity,
the "rhotic reversal" will probably soon be completed without leaving a
substantial number of residual or hypercorrect pronunciations. A deliberate
language policy combined with the prestige of the orthographic norm in the
educational system will be very effective if most people go to school. But in a
pre-literate (or largely illiterate) society such "reversals" are typically
messy and lead to irregular variation at best (as when speakers of late Old
English carried out a partial "dispalatalisation" of historical velars by
borrowing a large number of Old Norse words). This is why modern parallels
are not always applicable to prehistoric situations.
Nobody in his or her right mind would
suggest "Germanic desatemisation" for its own sake. But if one proposes that
Germanic and Balto-Slavic are sister groups (because of their sharing a large
number of lexical isoglosses and showing several parallel morphological
features), the phonological difficulties must be explained away in one way or
another. Baltic and Slavic are satem branches, and Germanic is a centum branch.
It is generally agreed that the satem development is an innovation and that the
centum languages are more conservative in their treatment of dorsal stops. How
can we explain this paradoxical state of affairs? One (very awkward) explanation
is that Germanic had a Satemic ancestor in common with Baltic and Slavic, but
that it underwent secondary "desatemisation" through contact with the centum
languages of western Europe. This is a _forced assumption_, not an independently
motivated hypothesis, and no plausible scenario has been offered for
it, as far as I know.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 12:03 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Satem shift
I see, but I wasn't so much interested in family trees as in
the
claim that Germanic was once satemized. I assumed that those that
claimed it also would forward arguments for their claim, and if so I
would like to know what they were. I know for a fact that Danish has
been "de-satemised" (k > c^ > k, g > dy > g; of course
historically,
it's a different process), and since this is closer in time,
it has
been documented; I thought perhaps that some of the sociological and
political changes Danish went through at the time might have
parallels
in a (hypothetical) de-satemisation of Germanic. So, once
again, does any of
the said writers offer any arguments (linguistic
ones, that is) for that
postulated de-satemisation of Germanic?
Torsten