Re: On the ordering of some PIE rules

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2007-01-28 11:26, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > Yes. It means I'm making the clain 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? 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?

According to the standard theory, in stop + t, the stop was unvoiced
already in PIE. From eg p + t we get Germanic f + t by Grimm. But for
some reason the second stop doesn't follow Grimm. There would be
nothing phonetically unacceptable in it, if it had done it. If the
first stop had been spirantized instead in PIE and Grimm (ie.
spirantization) had spread from there, the second stop was so to speak
'protected' from those who wanted to show loyalty by spirantizing,
since the cluster was already half spirantized.


Torsten