Re: [tied] Veneti

----- Original Message -----
From: "P&G" <petegray@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: Re:Re: [tied] Veneti


> The existence of a Satem group based on a common innovation in its members would indeed be as you say, Piotr, but that is not quite what we have for PIE. There is a Centum innovation as well - the collapsing together of palatal k' and plain k.

That is a bit tricky. First of all, since because of its distribution *k^ seems to be the unmarked dorsal, it's doubtful if it was originally palatal. More likely, in my opinion, it was _the_ plain velar in PIE, i.e. [k], phonetically. As *k is relatively rare in roots and tends to colour an adjacent *e to *a, I take it to have been a uvular or pharyngeal sound, [q]. Now the falling together of sounds such as [k] and [q] is something much more trivial than the complex shift [k] > [c], [q] > [k] and [kW] > [k] in the Satem languages. Like the lenition and loss of the laryngeals (which, as I suppose everyone agrees, took place parallelly but independently in several IE groups), it's a likely "homoplasy", i.e. an innovation arising independently in different lineages. This is made more likely by the fact that a-colouring induced by *k is not equally frequent in all branches, which suggests that the merger of *k and *q was not yet complete when, e.g., Italic splitt off from its closest relatives.

Piotr