Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "congotre o" <congotron@...> wrote:

> It was interesting to see these arguments.
> I am a novice to many of these details, but I want advice on
> something rudimentary.
> I met a guy from Kurgan, Russia where some say this whole
> language family 'originated.'

> I started trying to explain this whole idea of a common ancestral
> language, and started off with the word he used 'sto', Russian for
> 100, and I explained to a group (of math students) its roots and
> relation to 'hund' of hundred, following that centum/satem argument
> from introductions to etymology. I explained the detail, but it
> wasn't impressive, because it wasn't obvious to others that these
> relationships were not accidental. On the other hand, if you
> use common words like 'mother', some assume that similar words in
> faraway places are an accident, or a more recently globalized word.

Which is actually a pretty reasonable naive response.

> What kind of examples will bring the average person uninformed of
> p-IE ancestry to give it any attention, since common words like
> 'dog' and 'perro', as you said here, are from sidestreams?

I don't think that you can rely on a couple of words. What makes
it convincing is the regularity, and to demonstrate that you have
to line up several examples.

A possible alternative is to demonstrate the principle by looking
at regular changes within one of the IE daughter families --
Germanic, say -- where the relationships are fairly clear but by
no means trivial, and then say that it applies to the larger
family as well, though many of the regularities are harder to spot.

Brian