Jens:
>Outside of the main debate: Armenian has final stress, but still
>accepts words like tasn, eLungn, ezr, astL. Surely such a language
>should not be alarming to Indo-Europeanists.
No, I don't find it alarming. I find it exceeeeeedingly unlikely.
Further it gets frustrating when I have to object to these rules,
only to have a hundred people down my throat saying that this
rule is _possible_. Well I'm not fighting against the "possibility".
I'm fighting against the _stupidity_ because this possibility is
the _least_ possible from which we can choose... so why choose it??
Miguel's version of preIE shows a strong tendency to take all the
more unlikely rules, out of novelty's sake, to reconstruct a preIE
conlang that he can appreciate. Back to reality however, *dekm would
be counted as _two_ syllables more often than one in most languages.
In fact, IE itself counts it as two, not one, and I can't imagine
a disyllabic *dekm deriving from ONE syllable given the phonetics
involved here. So I don't get where Miguel's head is at at all.
- gLeN
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