Re: The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 14:45:14 +0000, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:

>> Which means that there are no grounds for saying that *k "occurs
>> only in
>> loans into PIE from Old European".
>>
>
>You must have better arguments than this? I don't think there's much
>doubt that
>
>1) Old European existed.

Actually I do have some doubts. There is no doubt that additional IE
dialects existed besides the well known ones (Germanic, Celtic,
Balto-Slavic, etc.) and the less known ones (Dacian, Thracian, Phrygian,
etc.). There may have been dozens of "Old European" dialects, now lost
forever. I doubt there was a single "Old European" language.

>2) It has no direct descendants, therefore
>2a) Other IE languages took over its territory

"They have no direct descendants, therefore other IE languages took over
their territories".

>Question: If one language takes over the territory of another, is it
>likely that it takes over absolutely no loanwords from that language?
>
>Nah.
>
>And from there one might begin to speculate what such loans might
>look like etc.

The point is that *k, and *a, occur in PIE itself. The suffix *-(i)ko, for
instance, or the verb *kap- (c.q. *ghabh-) are Proto-Indo-European. These
items can hardly have been borrowed from one of PIE's own daughter
languages, no matter how undocumented it is.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...