> Further, on a Nostratic point of view, the lack of palatals is
> unproblematical
> but rather opens the doors for better correlations with language
groups
> like Uralic or Tyrrhenian.
>
I have a rather small brain which has room only for the simplest
theories (which won't take up so much space on my harddisk).
Therefore I designed one. It goes like this.
The were two stop series in PIE, plain (*k etc) and uvular (*q etc),
later palatal (*k^ etc) and labiovelar (*kW etc). So, where do the
plain stops (*k etc) come from? Well, a long time ago, when this list
discussed it, the thing that kept Piotr from accepting only two stop
series was that the reconstructed (*k) appeared always(?) before /a/
in Latin. Now suppose we accept Kuhn's claim that all occurrences
of /a/ date to a certain period in pre-PIE; before that period the
PIE vowel system was *i, ablaut vowel *a/*& (or *a/*ä), *u; after
that it was *i, ablaut vowel *e/*o, *u and *a (which all occurred in
loans, either from a pre-PIE stage dialect that PIE conquered in
central Europe (that of the Old European river names), or from
outside Europe (overseas?)), and further that the old plain *k had
been palatalised by then (spreading from occurrences of it before
*ä), the we'd have a system that behaved as if it had the three stop
series of 'classical' PIE. Now bring out your cruise missiles.
Torsten