From: Glen Gordon
Message: 8200
Date: 2001-07-31
>[...] cf. also the frequent Canadian pronunciation of <khaki> asSay what now? I can assure you all that no one in Manitoba says
>/karki/ -- a falsely re-rhoticised RP form).
>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