--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> 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.
But the Old English situation is symmetrical, so no shibboleths
arose. This is reminiscent of the mixed language that is used between
Danes and Swedes if they are trying to communicate with good will.
ie. without power play.
>
> Nobody in his or her right mind would suggest "Germanic
desatemisation" for its own sake. >
> Piotr
Alas, I'm out of my mind.
Consider the present situation. Everybody knows that the centum
languages haven't de-satemised. In the hypothetical situation that
they had, we would have found alternating -k-/-s- roots in the centum
languages. But since everyone knows they haven't, if a linguist finds
an alternating -k-/-s- they are assigned to different roots. Which
means that if I find roots differing by -k-/-s- in the etymological
dictionaries I get suspicious.
So how about
*k-l- "go, impel" / *s-(l/r)- "go, impel" (and *kW-l- ?)
*k-l- "whole, sound" / *s-l- "whole, sound"
?
Torsten