Re: [tied] *kW- "?"

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "etherman23" <etherman23@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, glen gordon <glengordon01@...>

wrote:

> > The traditional theory is INVALID by markedness, Mate,
> > because, simply, a logical theory must be _OPTIMALLY_
> > EFFICIENT. A theorist must weed out any non-
> > necessities, otherwise the theory suffers. Period.
>
> Actually it's quite easy to see why *k^ would be more common. If *e
> palatalized velars and *e is the most common vowel it's perfectly
> understandable that the velar series would violate markedness
> constraints. But then we'd expect to see some kind of regularization,
> which we do: the merger of unpalatalized velars and labiovelars.

But if *e occurs only as an allophone in the set /e/, /o/, zero, of the
phoneme *a, then 'palatalised velars' are palatalised only before the
allophone /e/. In other words, the phoneme sequence *-k^a- (which is
realised as *-ka- in proto-IE) has the allophones *-c^e-, *-ko-, *-k-
in PIE.


Torsten