From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 176
Date: 1999-11-04
----- Original Message -----From: Marc VerhaegenSent: Thursday, November 04, 1999 9:11 PMSubject: [cybalist] Re: Ruki RuleThanks a lot, Piotr. Is it so exceptionel? not present in other IE languages? perhaps a consequence of specific ways of pronunciation perhaps partly inherited from PIE? has it something to do with the satem/centum distinction? (sorry if this question sounds silly - I don't know anything on Slavic or Indo-Iranian or...)MarcI mean that the Ruki Rule is not trivial in the sense that e.g. the palatalisation of velars before front vowels is. The latter change took place in Proto-Aryan and in Proto-Slavic, but also parallelly (at different times) in the individual Romance languages (except Sardinian), in Old English, and in innumerable entirely unrelated languages worldwide. Ruki is unique to Aryan, Baltic and Slavic -- languages which may be susupected of being closely related on other grounds as well. The environment of Ruki is something like a fingerprint -- very specific and NOT VERY NATURAL (the sounds that condition is do not seem to be definable as a simple natural class). There is no trace of the rule even in the other satem languages (Armenian or Albanian), not to mention the rest of IE -- in other words, there is no ground for claiming that it was a pronunciation inherited from PIE. This is the kind of evidence that is really valuable in determining family-internal relationships.Piotr