Re: Satem shift

--- In cybalist@..., tgpedersen@... wrote:

> > --- In cybalist@..., tgpedersen@... wrote:

> --- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> > What happened in Romance was not "satemisation" but someting much
> > more trivial -- palatalisation of velars before front vowels. The
> > Satemic shift does not depend on the phonetic environment (*k^ >
> > palatal even before back vowels and consonants), and so is a
> > different type of process, and Romance parallels are not very
> > enlightening.
> More trivial??
> If satemisation is palatalisation before front vowels + then
> regularisation of paradigms it would be pretty trivial too.

Nope. Mere phonetic assimilation like [ke, ki] > [c^e, c^i] is
something REALLY trivial (something like that has happened in
countless languages the wide world over). The Satem change is a more
complex and less common type of change -- a unique systemic shift, in
which several phonemes are re-encoded in trems of distinctive
features. This is not something that happens every now and then, and
should not be confused with common-or-garden positional
palatalisation.

Your "regularisation of paradigms" has nothing to do with either
change. They are phonologivcal, not morphophonological.

> But the whole raison d' for the *k-series, distinct from the *k'

and

> *kW, apart from the inconclusive Albanian evidence, was that they
> went *s in some satem-languages and *k in others? Which is exactly
> what you would expect with a sloppy pre-literate generalisation?

I don't think you understand the Satem developments. The *k series
did not change into sibilants anywhere. The reason why we reconstruct
*k as distinct from *k^ and *kW is that some instances of Satem *k
correspond to *k, not *kW, outside the Satem group. There are some
more recently discovered "triple reflexes" of the three series
in "centum" languages; perhaps the most convincing case is Latin
(Schrijver 1991, discussed here ca. 3500 messages ago).

Piotr