From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 45036
Date: 2006-06-21
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:
Piotr:
> > *kWou- and *gWou- point to different homelands? Just how do they
do so?
> Well, Verner's Law was later needed to account for exceptions to the
> Grimm's Law.
So what?
> <http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=584056>
That summary switches abruptly from Verner's law to homelands. I see
no connection between the two topics.
> "This (Verner's Law) discovery gave a depth of history to
> Proto-Germanic."
> Not sure what is meant by "This (Verner's Law) discovery gave a depth
> of history to Proto-Germanic." Does it mean it makes the Germanic
> family look older than it is?
I think it means no more than that an ancient feature now alien to
Germanic has left its traces. The alien feature is mobile stress.
> "In Proto-Indo-European, as also in early Greek and
> Sanskrit, and still in a few modern languages like Latvian and
> Slovenian, accent was a variable pitch that could be on any syllable."
That confuses two features - (a) two contrasting type of accent and
(b) mobile accent, i.e. the position of the acent changing as a word
is inflected.
> It was clear that this was true of early Proto-Germanic, and allowed
> Verner's Law to apply."
The 'this' is the mobile accent - Verner's law is not evidence of an
inherited contrast in accent types. The evidence that PIE contrasted
two types of accent is pretty thin.
> "The place of Germanic in the IE family seems a little bit insecure."
Wonderfully ambiguous! There's no doubt about its membership, but
what it is most clearly related to is far from clear. However, I
think that is probably true of modern Romance dialects, and I would be
startled if it were not true of some Indic languages.
> "Germanic ia also instrumental in ruining Warnov-Ringe's (CPHL project)
> perfect tree models."
> Perhaps the Grimm-Verner proposals allow proto Germanic to split off
> very early from the mother river and thus affecting the time line and
> homeland equations.
I cannot see any relevance. Grimm's law is usually dated to about
2000 years ago.
Richard.
Richard.