Re: The full list of kentum words in Slavic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> Torsten and anyone else who wishes to jump in:
>
> You've answered some of my question. I'm aware of the palatal vs.
> velar dichotomy in IE. 

Okay, but as I tried to explain, the way I think it came about fdiffers from the mainstream, since I think the kentum/satem thing was already present as allophones *within the paragdigm* of words in PIE, and 'satemization', but also 'kentumization', came about by paradigm regularization which later spread also to those words which were uninflected and therefore not part of a paradigm.

> BUT The break must have happened either during or after Germanic and
> Greek broke off, right?

The pre-stage of PIE would have had no Satemization, like the mainstream reconstructs PIE today. Satemization would have started in the central dialects as palatalization in traditionally palatalizing contexts, e.g. before front vowels, and proceeded from there. A prestage of the Slavic second palatalization, which unlike satemization is context-dependent, would also have been in place then in the central dialects. Palatalization spread outward from the center so there was always dialect difference. The break came when the peripheral dialects (creoles?) decided to generalize paradigms from non-palatalized forms. That event could be defined as the one that made Germanic and Greek break off from the rest.

 

> c. 2000 BCE? 

I have no idea. I would have to show an archaeological trace backwards to PIE for each involved culture, and I can't do that.

> And it likely spread from Indo-Iranian into neighboring
> Balto-Slavic, right?
> Or am I too simplistic regarding this? 

Or vice versa; I don't know.

> After all, we do have palatalized vs. velarized /k/ in US English:
> NY <coffee> /kwaafiy/ vs. Southern California <California>
> /kyael@...@/

> It is interesting the play between historic splits vs. Sprachbund in
> Scandinavian languages and in Ibero-Romance, how deep the splits
> really are but get papered over by proximity. 

Actually the similarity extends to politics, since in both places there was once a union in place designed to level out the differences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalmar_union
cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia
which stayed within Spain

> If I were to speak Portuguese with João, I'm sure he'd understand
> everything I say but wonder what hillbilly taught me Portuguese. I
> imagine I'd say the same thing about his Spanish. 

I imagine João heard Spanish before. That's the problem with that type of question, it's difficult to find a native speaker of one of the languages living in the required naive ignorance of the other language.

> Do "hillbillisms" work like that in Scandinavian languages, where a
> "good" Danish word is a "hillbilly" Swedish word, etc.?

http://www.dansk-og-svensk.dk/wordpress/archives/374
Danish nabo, Scanian nabbo, Swedish granne "neighbor"
Danish fløde, Scanian fleude, Swedish grädde "cream"
Danish nem, Scanian nimm, Sweish lätt "easy"

Now this means that to a Stockholmer Danish sounds like the hillbilly dialect of Scana, which on top of that is conquered territory. Imagine that your Civil War after
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea
had ended with the Confederated States living on as a rump state west of Georgia, changing the spelling of its language to match the pronounciation. Now imagine conversations between people of the United States and people the Confederated States trying to get a converstaion going. Oh, and on top of that imagine that Mexico and South America were strongly industrialized and the United States needed to go through the less industrialized Confederated States to get to these great markets. That should about cover it.

Now since dialects are dying out, neither side can use that as a resources, especially after immigration has created new tension between town and country and dialect prestige is even less than it was (Malmöitisk, the dialect of the Malmö working class back when it was an industrial city, is no more). More likely one can use one's knowledge of antiquated words, eg. 'kvæld' "evening" in Danish is poetic, 'kväll' in Swedish is the standard word, the opposite is the case with Danish 'aften' "evening", Swedish 'afton' (but there is an 'Aftonposten' newspaper).

In an incident some years back the leader of an anti-immigration party quoted 'frø af ugræs er føget over hegnet...' "seeds of weed have blown across the fence"; the Swedish press hit the ceiling. The problem is that Swedish 'ogräs' is the standard word for weed, whereas it is only poetic in Danish (the standard word being 'ukrudt' <- Low German 'unkrut'), and the line is a quote from
http://www.ugle.dk/det_haver_saa_nyligen_regnet_2.html
which was written while Germany was trying to Germanify Danish-majority Northern Scleswig, which it had conquered in 1864.


Torsten