Re: Questions about Japanese historical phonology.

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 13:58:08 +0100, Joe <joe@...> wrote:

> John Cowan wrote:
>> Take a look at Ringe and Warnow's stuff, which was briefly discussed
>> on the list in May 2003:  http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/ et seqq.
>> A particularly interesting result, which certainly no one expected,
>> is that Germanic probably started out as a satem language that was
>> mugged by centum speakers later on, due to a migration into centum
>> territory.
>
> Either that, or the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages satemised
> independantly.  I can't see how a satem>centum change could really take
> place.
Is it not possible that the situation with Germanic could have been that
Gmc (as well as early BS and IIr) retained a phoneme somewhere between /k/
and /s/ -- which is what k^ notates in PIE anyway -- and that substrate
influence dragged the sound toward /k/ from there, rather than all the way
 from /s/? That, working from first principles (rather than an exhaustive
knowledge of the evidence), would seem an eminently logical conclusion.
Maybe Gmc had /c/ in opposition to /k/, rather than /s/ in opposition to
/k/?

I don't see the path /c/ -> /k/, under the pressure of a speaker
population that lacked native /c/, as being particularly problematic.
Likewise, the progression from /c/ -> /s]/ in a population that lacked the
former and had the latter doesn't strike me as entirely odd.





Paul