Re: Odp: Cowboys on Horseback (Germanic)

----- Original Message -----

From: Alexander Stolbov

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 1999 12:41 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: Cowboys on Horseback (Germanic)

 

Now I see that I was wrong when comparing Germanic *h (*x) to Iranian *h (*x), sorry.

Still some doubts remain. It is not easy for me to give up thinking about Germanic and Balto-Slavic as close relatives (neither linguistic morphological nor archeological evidences allow this).

You wrote on Nov 6 :

 

<<The change *s > *x > *h (in Greek and Iranian, but also e.g. in Brythonic Celtic) is again a rather common process.>>

 

If so, could the following process take place (theoretically and practically)?

 

                    PIE             GBS            Germanic

 

               *k            *s            *x (*h)

               *g            *z            *k

               *gh          *zh          *g

 

(GBS = Germano-Balto-Slavic)

This won't work: first, because the inherited *s and *z (i.e., the PIE voiced allophone of *s) are continued without any changes in Germanic (e.g. *suHnus gives English son, not hun); secondly, because most sound changes are asymmetrical, i.e. do not normally operate in the reverse; this is particularly true of velar palatalisations. The change of a palatalised velar stop into a fricative or affricate is commonplace (cf. Russian ruka : ruchka; iskat' : ishchu, etc.; similar things have happened independently in many Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Aryan and other languages), but the change of a fricative into k would be extremely unusual. -- Piotr

However, the obliteration can occur parallel, convergently (like *s > *h in Greek and Iranian). We can demonstrate it. The transition from Mycenian *kw to Classical Greek *p happend independently of the delabialisation in Aryan and in Balto-Slavic.

This argument works (and completely destroys all my logic constructions) only if it's proved that *kw > *k happened before the partition of Aryan and Balto-Slavic. Do such proofs exist?

 

Absolute proofs can rarely be offered in historical linguistics, but your scenario requires a lot of zigzagging between kentum and satem types just in order to justify the classification of Germanic together with Balto-Slavic. This looks like desperate wiggling out of trouble. And what's happened to the RUKI rule in Germanic? (I think the likelihood of its independent operation in Aryan and Balto Slavic is very low, so Germanic ought to have participated in that innovation.) Besides, I've never seen a real satem language with labiovelars preserved. Albanian was once believed to be a counterexample, but the Albanian evidence has now been found unconvincing.

 

Piotr