Miguel:
>There's a difference between "how rare is this" and "there can't be
>any *pw sound.
You are correct. Apologies. I should say, "It is very, very rare and
horribly and terribly unlikely what it is that you are carrying on about"
and not "Completely impossible". Afterall, God maaay exist... I've never
heard him speak to me or anything but I'm sure it's not totally impossible
per se that he hides underneath coffee tables... :P
Miguel:
>On the other hand, if we once had *pw, which turned *kw elsewhere
>(given the markedness of *pw, a natural thing to occur), but was
>retained as *p in Germanic, that would make a good explanation. In
>some cases, this can be made plausible by related forms which also
>show *p in other IE lgs. (e.g. Lat. lupus "wolf" ~ vulpes "fox" for
>*wlpw-), in other cases the only evidence I have at the moment are
>comparisons with extra-IE forms, such as *pwetwor- ~ PAA *p.wat.-
>"four" or *l^a:pwnt- "liver" ~ Uralic *lapde- "spleen".
Hello? (Miguel starts floating into the sky...) Miguel... Miguel...
MIGUEL!!! Get out of those clouds, Miguel! Come back down to earth with the
rest of us. Using extra-IE evidence as the core of your evidence is foolish.
What is the evidence _within_ IE?
>When I first started thinking about the possibility that, besides *k,
>*k^, *kw (etc.) [and possibly *x^, *x, *xw], the other pPIE >consonants may
>also have had palatalized and labialized variants,
Stop Miguel. You are under an assumption. Who says there was even a
three-way contrast between palatalized, plain and labial in IE? I only know
of *k versus *kW, or *k^~*s^ versus *k in any given language. Do you have
strong evidence of a three way contrast [*k^/*k/*kW] in ProtoIE (without
resorting to extra-IE correspondances)?
I am only in very partial agreement with you, Miguel, that *t and *s are
connected, although my thoughts are that Steppe *-T (any dental stop) was
simply softened to IE *s. There is also a connection between *-r and *-n
(heteroclitic declension, for example), again caused by a sound change of
*-n > *-r. There is no palatalisation or labialisation to be seen in these
changes.
Miguel:
>But there are more phenomena that suddenly begin to look >understandable if
>we assume palatalized and labialized variants of >the consonants: the *n/*i
>stems like *poti-/*potn- (< *potn^-), or >the verb *nem- ~ *yem-, some
>*l/*i alternations such as in the >"liver" word (< *l^a:pwnt-), and maybe
>even the Caland system (*n -> >-r ~ -n-; *nw > -u ~ -m-; *n^ > -i ~ -n-).
You've accused me of "assumptions" and yet here you are saying "...if we
assume...". Your theory makes nothing understandable. Please. We don't need
to assume anything. You present no direct evidence of palatalisation and/or
labialisation of these phonemes, nor is it necessary for the reconstruction
of pre-IE. You could connect any phoneme with another by convenience in this
deranged, ruleless theory. If you felt the "need" too, you might say *mw >
*r... or *ky > *gh, etc. Eeny, meeny, mynie, moe. Let's throw linguistics
out the window then and join the Miguel cult of preIE.
- gLeN
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