--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> But if *e occurs only as an allophone in the set /e/, /o/, zero, of
> the phoneme *a, then 'palatalised velars' are palatalised only
> before the allophone /e/. In other words, the phoneme sequence
> *-k^a- (which is realised as *-ka- in proto-IE) has the allophones
> *-c^e-, *-ko-, *-k- in PIE.
That is certainly true from an articulatory point of view. Velars are
much more likely to be palatalized next to front vowels than any other
kind of vowel. It seems to me, then, that the centum-satem split did
not occur until after the separation of the qualitative Ablaut
allophones into independent phonemes. Then the IE velar series (at
least in the dialects that would later become the satem languages)
would have had palatalized allophones next to front vowels and non-
palatalized allophones otherwise.
- Rob