Re: CHAT: "Frogman" -- an IE language!

From: "daniel andreasson" <daniel.andreasson@...>

> Danny Wier wrote:
>
> > Frogman is both a "centum" and a "satem" language, and it also has
undergone
> > a Grimm's Law-like change as Germanic and Armenian have.  So far, I
have:
>
> What's "centum" and "satem"?
In Indo-European studies, branches and individual languages are
classified as 'centum' or 'satem'.  'Centum', from the Latin for
'hundred' and pronounced 'KENT-um', preserve the velar stops (k, g, gh)
and sometimes (as in Romance and Germanic) the labiovelars (kw, gw,
gwh); the latter sometimes become labials (such as in Welsh), or in the
case of Greek, labial before back vowels, dental before front vowels,
and velar before upsilon and consonants.  But the 'satem' (Avestan for
'hundred')languages convert the palatal stops (k^, g^, g^h) into some
sort of sibilants.  For example, Sanskrit has k^ > s' (the 'sh' sound in
most modern Indic languages) and g^ > j (likewise the sound of 'jump').
Other branches, such as Iranian and Slavonic, produce c (= 'ts'), s
and/or z.  In the case of Avestan/Old Persian and modern Albanian, the
palatals become interdental fricatives (the two 'th' sounds)!

The two terms are kinda vague, and phenomena such as Grimm's Law has
affected both sides -- the centum languages of the Germanic branch, and
the satem language Armenian.  (I'll explain Grimm's Law in the future by
request.)  Also, no natlang in the IE family are both centum and satem,
and if there were five positions of stops (labial, dental, palatal,
velar, labiovelar), all reduce the list to four (but if I remember
correctly, Albanian might be both centum and satem; I need to study
further).

The centum language groups: Celtic, Italic/Latin/Romance, Germanic,
Hittite/Anatolian, Hellenic/Greek, and Tocharian.

The satem language groups: Slavonic, Illyrian/Albanian,
Thracian/Armenian, Iranian and Indo-Aryan.

But since Pokorny's landmark work on PIE, a lot has been discovered
about PIE, including a clearer picture of the h's ('laryngeals', there
are three) and at least areal features shared with other language
families, especially Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian (Georgian
et al), and maybe Dravidian, Ket-Yukaghir, Sumerian, Etruscan,
Inuit-Aleut, and even Basque.  (Those who believe in a parent language
of all or most of these families are the proponents of a VERY old
protolanguage called Nostratic -- and I myself am a believer, partly
because of my Christian, Catholic and Biblical beliefs (I'm sort of a
'Captist', a Catholic who reads the Bible, eats, and plays piano like a
Southern Baptist).  But anyway, I'm really going to have fun studying
PIE once again.  There's some neat stuff on the web, especially the work
of the young Russian genius Cyril Babaev.  (His URL is
http://members.xoom.com/babaev/index.html).

Time for a break now.  Dinner tonight is prolly gonna be a fifty-cent
can of chili beans; gawd I hate being poor...

Daniel A. Wier (call me Danny)
Lufkin, Texas USA
http://communities.msn.com/DaWier
MSN Messenger Service: dawier@hotmail.com