Re: [tied] *kW- "?"

> Me to Peter:
>> Peter, you just can't get around markedness.
>> The frequency of instances of what you purport to
>> be "palatal *k^" is far too numerous in the
>> commonmost morphemes of IE to be credible.
>
> Mate:
>> Not really. It can easily be explained by some
>> process in pre-PIE [...]
>
> STOP! Whoa, there! Do you understand why that
> statement is irrational? It's because, in order to
> repair what you can obviously see is a flaw in the
> IE theory, you are now going to *add* another
> tentative theory (namely, of pre-IE!!) to account for
> it!
>
> !!!! Multiplication of hypotheses! Very bad! Ugh :)

Nope, no multiplication here. I'm just saying that languages *do* pass
unstable phases in which funny things like [k'] being more frequent than
[k] occur. That's possible for IE as well. I don't really care (for this
purpose here) what's the cause of this feature of IE, I'm just saying that
it's hardly impossible as you claim.

> Mate, we both see that markedness issues make the
> IE theory unstable.

Nope, it makes IE unstable which clearly *was* the case.

>Let's not add theories to plug
> up the hole. Let's rework the IE theory in such a
> way that it doesn't have markedness issues.

Gladly, but I think that empiric data are far more important than theories.

>That's
> what the theory of uvularity does. We simply shift
> all instances of *k^ to *k and all instances of *k
> to *q. There's nothing lost by this replacement in
> regards to the traditional theory of IE. We're
> simply using different symbols. That's it.
>
> Don't be frightened.

If there was no Luwian, I would be glad to accept it. But Luwian *does*
exist, sorry...

>> So? What's the point here? Nobody is claiming that
>> palatovelars are ancient in IE.
>
> What I'm saying is that they don't exist in IE
> because of markedness issues, and loanwords that
> evidently must have occured in *pre-IE* also testify
> against palatalized velars in those stages. Ergo, the
> whole traditional view has no basis in _any_ stage of
> IE or pre-IE.

I also don't think that palatalized velars are very ancient but I do think
we need to reconstruct them for the last stage of IE.

>> Or not. I still don't get how do you explain Luwian
>> with your theory?
>
> In the same way as anything else. All we are doing is
> changing the "symbol": *k^=>*k, *k=>*q. That's it.
> All the previous explanations for Luwian or any
> language you can think of in IE linguistics are
> still in effect. It's just that we derive the attested
> results from a plain *k (instead of palatal *k^) or a
> uvular *q (instead of plain *k) instead.

Wait a minute. You *are* aware that Luwian shows different outcomes for
*k, *k' and *kW consistently (k, z and kw)? You just *cannot* explain
beginning with just *k and *q. And Hittite, its sister-language is a
typical centum language which shows us that the traditional theory is
indeed the correct one.

Mate