Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1)

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 12:27:14 +0000, elmeras2000 <jer@...> wrote:

>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.

Do you mean something like:

**ka -> *k
**ki -> *k^
**ku -> *kW

The problem with such a hypothesis is that then we would expect the
frequency of *k^ to be about the same as the frequency of *kW, when in fact
it's much higher. It is in fact the frequency of *k which is comparable to
that of *kW, both well below the frequency of unmarked *k^.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...