Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1)

22-01-04 18:09, elmeras2000 wrote:

> I think this causes problems for the Centum languages. I do not much
> like the uvular value you are led to ascribe to the "plain velars".
> It is a phonetic value we never find in the daughter languages,
> posited *against* their unanímous testimony. Can we really just
> assume that the "velars" were uvulars that changed into velars
> everywhere? It seems to be against the way we usually work. Still, I
> cannot disprove it.

What suggests to me they may have been uvulars is the high frequency of
*a next to the *k-series dorsals, noted already by Meillet and found by
Schrijver in the Latin material. Uvulars are essentially [a]-coloured
dorsals -- they often cause the lowering of nearby vowels. Velar stops
have no such effect.

> I won't hurt your national pride, but I am a native speaker of a
> language that turned around and depalatalized kj and gj.

Oh, we haven't changed them to [c^] yet. But see what happened in
earlier Slavic or independently in almost all Romance languages, or in
Old English, or in Indo-Iranian, or... Dispalatalisation is possible,
but the coronalisation of palatal stops is one of the most common
phonetic changes on this planet.

> In the end, the issue is a small one; we agree there were three
> series, and probably also that Albanian may be distinguishing them
> under favourable conditions.

Yes, of course, it's just a minor issue. One can simply ignore my
speculation about PIE phonetics and start with the pre-Albanian triad
*k', *k and *kW.

Piort