The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 12:12:11 +0000, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> wrote:
>
> >On the question of palatal vs palatalised (now I can't find the
> >thread) I think palatalised must mean something that can be de-
> >palatalised (unlike palatal), it must have a rubber band attached;
> >which is: participation in a paradigm in which that sound (velar)
> >alternates between palatalised and non-palatal,
>
> Not necessarily. And certainly not in the case of PIE *k and *k^,

which do

> not alternate significantly.

You misunderstand me. I am suggesting that so-called palatal PIE *k^
once alternated between (eg.) /k/ and /k'/ (or /c^/) in the
appropiate contexts, from which state of affairs it was
regularised/generalised to either a non-alternating /k/ (in the
centum languages) or a non-alternating /k'/ (in the satem languages,
from which it developed > /c^/ > /s^/ etc), and that so-called plain
PIE *k occurs only in loans into PIE from Old European which is a
para-/pre-IE language in central Europe.

>
> It's simply a question of articulation. For a palatal stop, the

closure is

> made at the hard palate by the front of the tongue. For a

palatalized

> stop, the closure is made at the appropriate labial, coronal or

radical

> locus, but simultaneously the front of the tongue is raised towards

the

> hard palate (as in producing the vowel /i/). For coronal and

radical

> (velar/uvular) stops, this does affect the place of articulation

somewhat

> (/t'/ is usually more back than /t/, /k'/ is more front than /k/),

but the

> gesture is quite distinct from that of a palatal stop.
>

You're talking Slavic languages here, in which palatalisation
is 'system-wide', so to speak, which means that you have to be able
to distinguish eg /c^/ from /c^'/. That's not necessary eg in
Swedish, or Old English. We're using different terminology, is all.

Torsten