Re: [tied] Re: Satem shift

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 8200
Date: 2001-07-31

Piotr:
>[...] cf. also the frequent Canadian pronunciation of <khaki> as
>/karki/ -- a falsely re-rhoticised RP form).

Say what now? I can assure you all that no one in Manitoba says
/karki/ since that could only be the word "carkey" as in "Pass
the carkeys over, man. That draft totally hammered ya." Piotr
must be refering specifically to those nutty Newfoundlanders, them
there folks with their weird talk ;) We're not all Newfies, ya know!

-------------------------------------------------
gLeNny gEe
...wEbDeVEr gOne bEsErK!

home: http://glen_gordon.tripod.com
email: glengordon01@...
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>From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>
>Reply-To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
>To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
>Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Satem shift
>Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 12:51:49 +0200
>
>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 -----
>From: tgpedersen@...
>To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
>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


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