--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> 22-01-04 00:40, elmeras2000 wrote:
>
> >> The Satem shift [produced] a new system:
> >>
> >> *k' *k *kW
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Now, what about the "distributional evidence" here? Wouldn't
that be
> > the same as with the PIE system? And if that evidence is any
good
> > should it not be taken seriously here as well showing us that
the
> > palatals were not palatal? It seems to me you have just refuted
> > reality.
>
> Well, no. The system above was short-lived. Even Albanian has
merged *k
> with *kW everywhere except before front vowels, and all the other
Satem
> languages have a wholesale merger between the two. That
immediately
> increases the incidence of *k and makes it more frequent than *k',
as
> expected.
>
> This kind of reasoning based on distributional evidence is nothing
new.
> It has been used before to claim that the mediae (with their
labial gap)
> must have had a "marked" manner of articulation once upon a time.
Even
> those who don't accept the glottalic hypothesis for PIE are often
> willing to accept it for some remoter stage of pre-PIE.
Sure the reasoning is not new, but is it valid? How can you know
that the stop system of the common prestage of the Satem languages
was short-lived? And if you can, what does that precisely mean? Can
you know that the time span between PIE and Proto-Satem, which you
are in essence introducing, was longer than the period of stability
of the Satem stop system?
Even more important: Can you know that the putative prestage of
equlibrium from which Proto-Satem is moving away, was present in
PIE? How can you know that Proto-Satem and PIE were not identical? I
can derive all the stop systems of the IE languages from your Proto-
Satem if I want to. How can we know that is not correct?
With the glottalics you apparently accept that the beautiful
prestage can be a prestage of the protolanguage. What happened to
that option in the case of the velars?
Your scenario that PIE did not have palatals may have something
attractive about it as you relate the story. Yet, if the three kinds
of velars came about by transfer of features from a once
differentiated vocalism which were later neutralized, then the
palatals must be older than the protolanguage. And in that case I
cannot see what is gained by wiping them out of PIE.
Jens