There has been some talk about repaling Grimm's law.
"The first time I (E.W. J. Barber) heard the proposal to repeal
Grimm's law-that is to say, to reevaluate the position of who changed
what, in the series of sound correspondences which are known as
Grimm's law-was in a lecture that Paul Hopper gave. And then, of
course Professors Ivanov and Gamkrelidze, almost exactly the same
time, published their hypothesis gleaned from somwehwhat different
data and ideas but coming up with much the same model. As I sat there
listening to Hopper's version of how to revise our reconstructions of
PIE consonants, the linguist in me was listening to the linguists, but
the archaeologist in me was saying, you know, if, when you have
repealed Grimm's law, you begin to think about who had to change, was
it the people who are living upon the steppe lands today, that is the
Slavs? The people just to the west of them, Germanic peoples? Now I
(Barber) can only evaluate the six branches that I can control, but
Slavic and Germanic did relatively little changing, whereas the Greeks
and the Indo-Iranians had to do a lot of changing, The old model
suggested, I think, that Sanskrit speakers were the guys who never
changed anything. That was taken as the basis, and so the Germanic
peoples must have changed and the Slavic peoples changed, and so
forth. But if you look at this other way, the people who did the most
changing were the people like the Greeks, who, from my point of view,
moved into an area where there was already a high culture. With the
Indic people it is the same thing. They moved into an area where
there was a high culture, and they went through a great deal of
changing (Barber, p. 245)."
Barber, E. W. J., "Discussion Session: Sunday Morning," in Greater
Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, Robert Drews (ed.),
Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Number 38.
My(Kelkar's) interest is in finding out how these laws bear on the IH
homeland question.
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/iedocctr/ie-ling/ie-phon-Bomhard.html
"The Neogrammarian reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European
phonological system, which was arrived at through strict adherence to
the principle that sound laws admit no exceptions, was notable for its
large inventory of stops and its extremely small inventory of
fricatives. The stop system consists of a four-way contrast of (A)
plain voiceless stops, (B) voiceless aspirated stops, (C) plain voiced
stops, (D) voiced aspirated stops. This system is extremely close to
the phonological system of Old Indic"
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/iedocctr/ie-ling/ie-phon-Bomhard.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law
Kelkar: What happens if those arrows are turned around? i.e. *f-->p,
*b-->bh etc. I think the IH homeland would move away from Germanic and
closer to non Germanic territory. Or why would Gamkrelidze and Ivanov
(who maintain an Armenian homeland) want to repeal it?
"However, contends Gamkrelidze, "recent evidence now places the
probable origin of the Indo-European language in western Asia." In
deciphering numerous texts in dozens of ancient languages from Turkey
and surrounding areas, it has become "necessary to revise the canons
of linguistic evolution." Given a profundity of linguistic evidence,
Gamkrelidze postulates that the homeland of ancient Indo-Europeans
was, in fact, the ancient Near East."
"Gamkrelidze has also called into question the paths of transformation
into the historical Indo-European languages. Grimm's assumption (known
as "the classical system") was that Germanic, Armenian, and Hittite
daughter languages underwent a systematic sound shift and Sanskrit
remained faithful to the original consonants."
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http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1674658>
Very intersting! Linguistics and politics going hand in hand.
M. Kelkar