--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> So, what constraints produce these variations?
>
> Why four, five, wolf vs. why?
> and Russian chetyre vs pyat?
>
Swedes speaking English have tendency to replace English /j/ with /y/.
I think the reason is that j (d3) vs y (and c^ vs �) is a social and
geographical shibboleth in Swedish, the former being rustic (Finnish
Swedish) and declass�. Similarly English English-speakers tend to
diphthongize long vowels even when speaking foreign languages,
presumably because the low-status Scottish and Irish varieties of
English don't diphthongize long vowels. I think this is a general
priciple. Somehow you can't get your brain to accept that those
foreigners really in earnest insist on speaking like the despised
yokels of your own country so you want to help them along on their
pronounciation.
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
I imagine that in a situation in western(?) PIE where both p and kW
existed depending on dialect and sociolect there has developed a drift
to prefer one over the other (but not necessarily consistently). Note
that Latin replaces p with kW in the presense of another kW: quinque,
quercus, coquere (*penkW-, *perkW-, *pekW-), so to speak as an over-
reaction to the presence of p-varieties *penp-, *perp-, *pep-.
De-Oscanization, one might call it.
Torsten