Re: Volcae and Volsci

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <miguelc@...>
wrote:

>
> On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:57:16 -0000, "tgpedersen"
> <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> >
> >> The fact that the law (Kluge's, I mean) worked in exactly
> >> the same way in Germanic (also in pretonic position only)
> >> makes it all the more plausible that the same conditioning
> >> applied in Celtic. In fact, I find it very hard to avoid
> >> thinking that it is the _same_ law in both Germanic and
> >> Celtic.
> >
> >Hm. What does that mean? That it applied alike in two separate
> >language branches, that it applied in a common Celtic-Germanic
> >prestage (I'm not aware there is one), or that it applied in some
> >language which became substratal to both Celtic and Germanic?
>
> That it, like, say, the satem shift, applied across several
> neighbouring, but already differentiated, Indo-European
> dialects.
>

Which means you end up with the linguistic equivalent of the EPR
paradox. That's exactly why I don't like the idea of the satem shift,
but prefer to see PIE stops as phonemes with context-dependent
allophones, the palatals were *c^e/ko/xt, the labiovelars
*ke/kWo/ft(xt) and the plains *ke/ko/kt, since they occurred in
imported words. And you'd probably have to bring in extra-linguistic
factors such as the presence of a substrate anyway, to explain why
exactly those languages participated and the rest didn't.


Torsten