--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 1:07 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Satem
>
>
> > I still think it phonetically odd that the satem languages, in
contrast to the Romance ones, palatalize also before back vowels and
even consonants. Is there an explanation for that? Is there even a
parallel in the world?
>
> There are some parallel examples, e.g. the case of Salishan in
North America: in fourteen Coast Salishan languages and two Interior
Salishan ones etymological non-labialised velars (preserved in the
rest of Interior Salishan) changed into alveopalatals in _all_
environments.
T.:
As for "the rest of Interior Salishan" languages, they could have
filled the role of the other (conservatively restoring) part of
the "shibbolethisation pair".
Interestingly, in Salishan the velar gap was _not_ filled by
labiovelars or uvulars (both available in those languages), so that
in some of the Nortwestern Coast languages plain velars occur only in
loanwords (a possible explanation in terms of systemic pressure is
maximal differentiation in a particularly rich inventory of dorsal
consonants). The case of Satem IE would have been less unusual
because the delabialisation of *kW restored the "naturalness" of the
system. Here's an interesting comment by Sarah Thomason:
>
> "... More interestingly, when people talk about unconditioned sound
changes they are referring to the end point only: there is no claim,
implicit or explicit, that the change began everywhere and proceeded
through the lexicon randomly. So, for instance, to say that most
Salishan languages (Pacific Northwest, U.S. and Canada) underwent a
change from nonlabialized velars to alveopalatals does not imply a
claim that the change happened simultaneously in all environments.
It seems most likely, in fact, that it began, like other
palatalization changes, before /i/ only, or before front vowels. (I
should have said: like most other palatalization changes; not all.)
And then it generalized until all the nonlabialized velars were swept
away, so that Flathead (e.g.) has no plain velars at all, except in
two recent loanwords ("coffee", "coat"). But since the initial
stages of this change are not documented in any way, there's no way
to test the hypothesis that the change began as a conditioned change."
>
>
http://www.umich.edu/~archive/linguistics/linguist.list/volume.2/no.60
1-650
>
>
> Piotr
Do Salishan languages have Ablaut-like processes, or do they possibly
have suffixes beginning with front and non-front vowels, which might
have set off a process of declensional regularization?
Torsten