--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> On 2007-01-28 11:26, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > Yes. It means I'm making the claim that those changes that Grimm's
> > law is meant to explain were already present as variations
> > (allophones) in pronunciation in PIE sounds (phonemes), and that
> > those variations were generalized in the Germanic languages and
> > the others were generalized in other IE languages, eg Sanskrit.
>
> Then why are early loans from Celtic (such as *walxa- < *wolko- and
> *ri:k- < *ri:g- ~ *re:g-) affected?
Because since soundlaws don't apply as per a fixed point in time, but
do so by a gradual process, the gradualness being a growing percentage
of the speakers applying it, there will alway be a section of the
society of that language that hasn't applied it yet, and another one
that has, as per my shibboleth theory, which you probably remember,
otherwise it's here:
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
Now it's my contention that immigrated Iranian-speakers and their
local followers in Galicia?/Przeworsk?/Thuringia? set themselves apart
from the not-yet-converted locals by the Iranian habit of spirantizing
stops before consonants and that in mutual competition and
phonological ignorance they tried to outdo each other, thereby
extending the application field of that Iranian (but ultimately
old-school PIE) rule. This first Germanic sound shift, as it turned
out to be, set them socially apart from the locals in the NWBlock area
as a mark of their superiority (as the second Germanic sound shift
still does in those parts), whereas in the former Celtic area of
Southern Germany those skalkaz they would feel superior to were those
Celts who had learned the new Lingua Franca from scratch, with minimal
influence from their too distantly related mother-tongue, so that, in
order to maintain the social distance, members of the New Order had to
perform the same trick on their own sociolect over again, which became
known later as the second Germanic or High German sound shift.
Now, to get back to your question, those Celtic loans will have
entered Germanic as low-status words at a time where both shifted and
unshifted sociolects of Proto-Germanic existed. Their high-status
equivalents, with Germanic sound shift, have survived.
> And how can your "allophone rearrangement" hypothesis be tested?
> Does it make any predictions different from the standard theory of
> GL as a Germanic sound change?
I made it with the intention of simplifying the existing set of rules
so if it does predict a different outcome, which it might, it is not
intentional. Therefore I think it should judged on the lesser
criterion of Occam instead.
Actually, I thought of using the same 'PIE allophone' approach to
explain the other great divide in IE, namely kentum/satem. I'm not
ready with the details, but here's part of it
1 PIE
k^: c^e, ko, s^t
k: ke, ko, xt
kW: ke, kWo, xWt
2
kentum-generalization
k^: ke, ko, xt
k: ke, ko, xt
kW: ke, kWo, xWt
by eliminating c^ and s^, making k^ indistinguishable from k
3 Germanic
taihun-generalization
k^: xe, xo, xt
k: xe, xo, xt
kW: xe, xWo, xWt
by the generalization known later as Grimm
4 Latin <- 2 (kentum)
k^: ke, ko, kt
k: ke, ko, kt
kW: ke, kWo, kt
by eliminating fricatives
5 B.Sl., Iranian <- PIE (1)
k^: c^e, c^o, s^t
k: ke, ko, xt
kW: ke, kWo, xWt
generalizing in paradigms with k^
(so that I won't fall into the pis^u/pis^et trap again),
spilling some into the k-row
and then
6
k^: c^e, c^o, s^t
k: ke, ko, xt
kW: ke, ko, xt
getting rid of kW's, making them coincide with k's
add further palatalization to satisfaction.
One PIE allophone variation that we have to accommodate anyway is the
unvoicing of -KT- groups which purports to explain eg Latin rect-
Iranian rast, Germanic rext-. Personally I believe that the so-called
unvoicing is due to the fact that the only PIE suffix that occurs with
great regularity is the ppp *-tó-. But we know from eg. Iranian that
the pret. suff. became unvoiced over time GAv aoGDa -> YAv aoxta, so I
suspect that the *-tó- suffix, which is BTW the thematic end-stressed
adjective (tomós) to the -t- which occurs in noun-verb composites
(sacer-do:-t-), is originally the "do" verb *dhe-/*do-, so much more
so that now both Ossetic and Germanic testify to their being
identical (preterite/ppp styem being identical). Which means I think
the PIE stop cluster unvoicing went like *-g-d- -> *-Gd- -> *-xt- ->
(for some) -k-t-. Otherwise, how to explain Skt. bud-dha? (attempt:
*bhudh-dó -> *bhuz-dhó -> (no unvoicing) -> buddhá-). *-tó-
assimilating regressively and Bartholomae assimilating progressively
is a strange mix, therefore I prefer a more 'submissive' role for the
so-called *-tó suffix and consistent progressive assimilation (wrt
voicing and aspiration) in stop clusters.
Torsten