Re: [tied] Re: Germanic Scythians?

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 19978
Date: 2003-03-17

----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2003 4:13 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Germanic Scythians?


> T: And if we assume that the input was *p, *s, *t, *k, *kW, we get an accentually conditioned rule of fricative and occlusive voicing.

... which affects non-glottalised occlusives only, though, according to your schema, the glottalised ones are voiceless as well. The reformulation is disjunctive (VL no longer applies to a natural class of consonants) and therefore inferior to the traditional version.

> T: Simplicity comes at a price.

There is no such price attached to the traditional formulation of VL. It's satisfactory as it is.

> P: You apparently would like to do so in order to leave an escape gate for your "Tungri = Thuringi" idea, but that's a poor justification from anyone else's point of view.

> T: Please excuse my anti-social rule; but it works.

_You_ claim it works, meaning, I suppose, that the result has been forced to fit your "Tungrian" proposal (a circular feat, because that was the _only_ purpose of the whole exercise). But it's unsatisfactory on linguistic grounds. Apart from problems already mentioned, it critically depends on the acceptance of a glottalic model of pre-Germanic, which is untenable.

Piotr