--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Andrew Jarrette" <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson" <liberty@>
> wrote:
> >
> > see "The problem of the IE palatals, velars, and labio-velars" at
> > http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/piep13.html#txu-oclc-
> > 3953445.xml-div-d0e19016 .
>
> Just wanted to point out that Lehmann says two things that appear
> to be wrong. 1. He claims that there is no evidence for PIE
> *k^a-. What about Latin <cadere> "to fall" compared with Skt
> <çad-> "to fall off"?
That's a good point.
> 2. He claims that in Gmc PIE *kW lost its labial element before
> PIE *o. What about Gmc *hwat "what", from PIE *kWod?
Well I don't know anything about Germanic, I fear, so
I can't know what to make of this one. It does look
like an important, and surprising, defect in Lehmann's
understanding of things, if it can't be explained.
Is Lehmann the only one to claim this loss before *o.
Is there any pattern at all of loss of labialization
before *o which Lehmann might have overgeneralized?
Is it possible - sorry if this question is a stupid
one - that /a/ and /o/ were switched in the footnote?
Does it make any more sense to say that labialization
was lost before *a?
Here's a quote of the footnote in case anybody else
wants to try to make sense of it, from
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/piep13.html :
"It seems at first glance as though the Gmc. development
of the vowels is like that of Ind.-Ir., Baltic, and Slavic,
to which I attribute the phonemicization of the palatal
allophones. The threefold timbre pattern seems to have been
lost too in the Gmc. dialects; for when our Gmc. materials
were written down PIE /o/ and /a/, /o·/ and /a·/ had become
single phonemes. The Gmc. development, however, may be
dated after the operation of Grimm's Law, that is, after
the PIE velar system had been rearranged. We have various
kinds of evidence that the PIE vowel timbre distinction
was preserved relatively late into Gmc.: the labio-velars
lost their labial element before PIE /o/, maintained it
before PIE /a/; the earliest Gmc. names given by Gk. and
Lat. writers distinguish between /o/ and /a/ in unaccented
syllables, cf. Streitberg, UG 45-7. The conditions to which
I attribute the phonemicization of the palatals were not
present in Gmc."
- end quote -
David