Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:

> You're asking a very interesting set of questions.
> I suppose you'll get the official dogma from somebody else.
>
> As I have already pointed at on cybalist,
> the supposed distinction in PIE between :
> kW
> k + w
> k + u
> k^w
> makes very little sense from a pure phonological point of view.
> I guess there exists no real language with labio-velars and plain

velars,

> where the mono-phonemic kW should be different from the bi-phonemic k+w.
>
> The graphic invention of k^w distinct from kW is a way of "saving" a

couple

> of words that are very dubious in the first place.
> As I mentioned quite a lot of times,
> dog k^won is bad, it should be kuH2on as confirmed by all the rest

of the

> world but the indo-europeanist dogma won't move an inch, I suppose.
> horse ek^wos is worse, as this is not even a PIE-stage word and

internal

> correspondances within IE data are horrendous.

I knew that all this has been extensively discussed on Cybalist but I
was hoping that it might be at least somewhat new on pieml, and
therefore would spare me the labour of having to search the archives.
I remember what you and others have said about *k^won and maybe
*ek^wos, and maybe you're right -- can it ever be solidly proven once
and for all?

>
> I think the opposition of k^ and k does not exist
> but the opposition between g and g^ and gh and g^h exists.
>

Why? Or please direct me to the posting where you explain why you
think so.

> Doesn't this mean there must have been original
> palatals beside completely separate original velars, as well as
> labiovelars?
> ===========
> I believe the answer is yes.
> Arnaud
> =======
>
> Or are original velars palatalized across the
> intervening *w (perhaps a labiopalatal *w, like French <u> in
> <huit>?)?
> =======
> This would require that PIE should _first_ have vowel ü
> something that looks highly unlikely (not to say impossible)
>
> But Attic treatment of labio-velars suggests it had ü as a glide.
> It has been discussed on cybalist too.

But ü was a post-PIE phoneme peculiar to Attic in this case, was it not?

>
>
> To me the only evident explanation is that there must have
> been original palatals beside original velars, the two of which
> however merged in Greek and Latin (and Celtic and Germanic). But the
> fact that both are represented by velars (or their later developments)
> across such a wide area over several language families, instead of by
> e.g. palato-alveolars or simple alveolars, which might be more
> expectable, would then be very hard to explain, and would suggest that
> indeed there were only velars and labiovelars, no palatals.
> ========
> No,
> some languages have three series and you can't merge them into only two.
> I mean Yeniseian for example.

So no descendants of Yeniseian or Proto-Yeniseian merge the three into
two? This doesn't necessarily imply that PIE indeed had all three series.

>
> the name "palatal" and "velar" may be misleading :
> the opposition between g^ and g can be voiced velar g and

glottalized k?.

> all are originally velar.
> The change of place of articulation may be a secondary development of
> eastern dialects.
>

Please direct me to the posting where you discuss this idea, or else
please explain this to me.

> I really want to know this and therefore also the question of the
> legitimacy of "palatals" for the sake of establishing the plausibility
> and credibility of the IE-derived conlangs that I am inventing and
> have invented.
> Andrew
> =========
> What is this ?
> Arnaud
> ======

Oh, it's this tedious, time-consuming obsession that I developed about
16 years ago which grew out of my childhood fascination with the
history of English (and the resulting interest in Indo-European) and
Esperanto, the former of which began around age 7 or 8 and the latter
of which began around age 11 or 12. What I do is I "invent"
hypothetical languages that _could_ have evolved from
(Proto-)Indo-European, according to sound-change laws (and grammatical
evolutions) that I set down and which are based mostly on precedented
sound changes. My objective is to produce a) a language that is
beautiful both in form and in plausibility, or b) a language that,
without borrowing, has phonemes appropriate to modern evolved
languages such as English and French, but which (hypothetically)
developed them regularly from PIE through believable processes and
which has them in a full distribution. The result is a language that
I wish existed today. Yes, it's weird, yes, it's pointless, yes, it's
useless, but I find the products beautiful in and of themselves, and
the hobby/habit/obsession is the main reason why I have become at all
knowledgeable about PIE and the Indo-European languages of history as
well as the present.

If you ever want to see one, I'll upload it to the files section, if
it is permitted -- the rules of Cybalist actually forbid this sort of
thing. I'll have to ask before I can do any such thing.

Andrew