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

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

> On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 14:45:14 +0000, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> wrote:
>
> >> Which means that there are no grounds for saying that *k "occurs
> >> only in
> >> loans into PIE from Old European".
> >>
> >
> >You must have better arguments than this? I don't think there's

much

> >doubt that
> >
> >1) Old European existed.
>
> Actually I do have some doubts. There is no doubt that additional

IE

> dialects existed besides the well known ones (Germanic, Celtic,
> Balto-Slavic, etc.) and the less known ones (Dacian, Thracian,

Phrygian,

> etc.). There may have been dozens of "Old European" dialects, now

lost

> forever. I doubt there was a single "Old European" language.

Krahe and Kuhn have argued that there was a relatively uniform
language spoken over lage parts of Central Europe. They call this
language "Old European". I use their term.

>
> >2) It has no direct descendants, therefore
> >2a) Other IE languages took over its territory
>
> "They have no direct descendants, therefore other IE languages took

over

> their territories".
>
> >Question: If one language takes over the territory of another, is

it

> >likely that it takes over absolutely no loanwords from that

language?

> >
> >Nah.
> >
> >And from there one might begin to speculate what such loans might
> >look like etc.
>
> The point is that *k, and *a, occur in PIE itself. The suffix *-(i)

ko, for

> instance, or the verb *kap- (c.q. *ghabh-) are Proto-Indo-

European. These

> items can hardly have been borrowed from one of PIE's own daughter
> languages, no matter how undocumented it is.
>

Not so. You conclude (with everyone else, of course), that since
reflexes in many IE languages can be reconstructed for PIE by
assuming PIE *k and PIE *a, therefore there must have been a PIE *k
and a PIE *a. I suggest instead that these roots existed (or survived
from PIE) only in the language named "Old European" by Krahe and that
the various now existing sister (or niece?) dialects borrowed it from
there. However, if the same root is found with the ablaut vowel in
some PIE language, it will be directly descended from PIE in that
language.

Torsten