From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 27765
Date: 2003-11-28
>On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:There were no pre-existing adjectival suffixes -u and -ro. I put that in
>
>> > I do not think there are 10 %
>> >relic forms, on the contrary I estimate there are some 10 % *innovative*
>> >forms with the "wrong" suffix, i.e. with *-ro- combined with a sonant
>> >nucleus, or *-u- after a vowel (vocoid) nucleus.
>>
>> That would be even more remarkable.
>
>In what way? There used to be zero percent overlap, then it grew, and by
>the split-up of PIE it seems to have been something in the order of 10 %.
>
>>
>> Maybe what I mean will become clearer if I use a purely phonetic example
>> instead of a morphophonetic.
>>
>> Suppose we have a proto-language with the phoneme /k/. The theory is
>> that
>> a soundlaw applies, turning /k/ into /c^/ under certain conditions (say,
>> before front vowels). It's supposed that there was no phoneme /c^/ to
>> begin with, so it's a split, no merger involved.
>>
>> Now what we actually find is one language, say Tofarian, which has /k/
>> everywhere. Another language, Lifuanian, has /c^/ everywhere. The other
>> daughter languages show the distribution /c^/ before front vowel, /k/
>> before back, with perhaps some 10% exceptions.
>>
>> How believable is the theory?
>
>Do you seriously mean this? There is no denying that in PIE /u/ and /ro/
>are *not* in complementary distribution, but they appear to be nearly so
>when forming adjectives, so I try to explain how that can be. In this
>theory it is *not* presupposed that there were no other segments /u/ and
>/ro/ in the language,