Re: [tied] Re: On the ordering of some PIE rules

On 2007-01-28 18:50, tgpedersen wrote:

> 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.

Why didn't they spirantise the *d series as well? In Iranian,
spirantisation affected _all_ stops. And if they were so intent on
out-Iranianising the Iranians, why are actual Germanic loans from
Iranian, such as *paTa-, so boringly straightforward instead of ending
up as *faTa- or the like?

> 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.

Funny how you continue referring to "the shift" after allegedly having
done away with it. Well, there's no getting round the fact that Germanic
obstruents correspond regularly to extra-Germanic ones. If loans from
Celtic split into "high" and "low" variants, why don't we find a similar
stratification in the inherited vocabulary, and why did no single Latin
loan undergo Grimm's Law? The traditional explanation is clear: loans
from Celtic are on the whole older than those from Latin and _some_ of
them were borrowed before GL applied.

>> 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.

Isn't the traditional scenario more parsimonious? It makes no untestable
assumptions about PIE allophones. And I'd like to repeat my question,
slightly rephrased: does your hypothesis explain anything that the
traditional account doesn't?

Piotr