On 2006-06-20 05:02, mkelkar2003 wrote:
> 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.
Do you mean that if the original phonological system of PIE was very
similar to that of Proto-Germanic, Germanic must be located far from the
original homeland? How on earth does the one follow from the other? In
fact, the structure of the stop system tells you nothing about the homeland.
> Or why would Gamkrelidze and Ivanov
> (who maintain an Armenian homeland) want to repeal it?
They don't, and can't, repeal Grimm's Law understood as a pattern of
correspondences between Germanic and the rest of IE. That pattern is
treated by everybody, including G&I, as an empirical FACT, and so a
linguistic GIVEN. You can repeal earlier INTERPRETATIONS of it, but if
you follow the new interpretation offered by Hopper, G&I and others, you
have to propose something like the reverse of Grimm's Law for branches
other than Germanic and Armenian. The glottalic model has its merits
(e.g. it accounts for some strange phonotactic constraints operating in
PIE), but it loses with the traditional reconstruction of the PIE stop
system in terms of overall economy. The debate isn't over yet, but
historical linguists are less enthusiastic about the glottalic theory
than they were a couple of decades ago, when at least it had the
attractive air of a fresh start. I daresay it's become a little stale by
now. It hardly helps if some of its proponents simply run in circles,
repeating themselves in article after article. Here is an extreme (but
not exceptional) example:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/2762
> "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."
The evidence for locating the IE homeland in or around the Iranian
Plateau, as proposed by G&I, is based mainly on "linguistic
palaeontology" of the most vulnerable kind. They do argue that a PIE
with ejective stops would be typologically close to the modern languages
of the Caucasus, but what if PIE had no ejectives? (And of course the
Caucasus is not the only place in the Universe where ejectives occur now
or occurred in the past).
> "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."
>
> <http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1674658>
>
> Very intersting! Linguistics and politics going hand in hand.
What's so political about it?