Re: Introducing myself to the list

On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:

> dirk elzinga wrote:
> > However,  applying this typologically sound
> > principle leads to the conclusion that Gosiute has preserved an
> > original [tT] while all other dialects of Shoshoni have
> > innovated a [ts] from that. This is not only demonstrably
> > wrong (the shift has happened within the past 100 years based on
> > documentary evidence), but flies in the face of common sense in
> > linguistic reconstruction.
>
> Not necessarily, almost all descendants of Latin have changed /k/ to
> something like /s/ or /tS/ when palatized, the only exception I know of
> is Sardinian (I think, one of the langs in Italy, at any rate).  There's
> no reason why the more conservative pattern can't be in the minority.
> Granted, that's not the case in Shoshoni (as can be shown from
> documentary evidence), but from what I understood, going by what's in
> the majority of languages is usually considered to be a secondary
> consideration, after things like likelihood of change.
Hmmm. I had forgotten about Sardinian. But that is a rare
situation; we have lots of documentary evidence for the the
pronuniciation of Latin and it's daughters, so we know a bit
more about that situation than we do about PIE. Maybe this makes
the same point; we can use our principles of reconstruction, but
all bets are off when we get good documentary evidence. Then
it's just a matter of looking rather than guessing.

> > Now, granted we don't have anything like that clear of a
> > situation in PIE, typological generalizations should still be
> > approached with caution in reconstruction; there might be
> > Gosiute-like pitfalls lurking. In the absence of any kind of
> > evidence, speculation based on typological tendencies may carry
> > a bit more weight than "untethered" speculation, but it remains
> > speculation nonetheless.
>
> True.  The only thing we can be reasonably sure of is that there were
> three sets of stops.  There are several theories which equally well
> explain the facts, none of them can be disproven from documentary
> evidence, so the most probable (both in diachronic and synchronic terms)
> would be the best theory.  It may be wrong, but any of the theories may
> be wrong.  The comparative method isn't an exact science.
Personally, I favor the glottalic theory, for precisely the
reasons mentioned by others, even though I didn't use it when
constructing Shemspreg. I originally intended Shemspreg to be a
tongue-in-cheek IAL, so relative ease of pronunciation was a
concern. So the erstwhile voiced aspirates became fricatives
whose voicing was contextually determined. Had I to do it over
again (no, I'm not planning on it anytime soon!), I would
probably keep the glottalized stops and laryngeals (which also
went by the wayside).

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu