Re: Introducing myself to the list

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.

> 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.

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