History and Sound Laws

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/11/99 4:58:02 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:

<<If a prehistoric sound change has
somehow admitted an exception, we'd often be able to tell (e.g. if the
first consonant of the PIE word for 'father' had somehow escaped Grimm's
Law, then the Old English texts would spell it 'paedar', not 'faedar').>>

But it's the other way around.  Grimm's Law was derived from evidence like
"faedar'.   Please recognize that "the law" proves nothing more than that the
pattern exists and has predictive value.  It wasn't handed down on some
tablet somewhere.

More importantly Grimm's Law IS an exception.  The basis of all phonetic
continuity is that it DOESN'T change randomly or unpredictively.  The basic
formula therefore is p > p, not p > f.  Grimm's Law is only derivable because
in the rest of IE we see directly (not reconstructed) p > p.  If Germanic and
Grimm's Law never existed, you would have still have continuity and a strong
reason to infer common ancestry in the rest of IE.

<<But the problem is, the loan words are often our main evidence that
languages were in contact in prehistory.  This is true of the loan words
from Italo-Celtic into Pre-Proto-Germanic, for example; it's those loan
words which are our evidence that these groups were in contact.>>

You should have seen how I was mauled on this list when I suggested
Greek/Euskara contact.  The fact is that we have very good reason to
conjecture strong contacts between southern and northern Europe.  And that
evidence is archaeological.

If you had an example of a true clash between proximate material remains and
linguistic evidence - e.g., like Germanic/Polynesian in 700 BCE - I don't
know what would happen.  Obviously, the linguistic evidence would have to be
powerful and DATABLE - which brings back the dating of material remains.
(You certainly couldn't just find the usual "common ON phonemes" in Algonquin
you see on the web.)  I don't know how Tocharian went, but I think there you
had some actual preliminary historical evidence in Asian records that would
justify looking.

<<For example, we can tell that 'skirt' was borrowed from Old Norse into Old
English and not the other way around, because Old English would have
changed it to 'shirt' (and it did in fact do so, with the ON cognate
'skirt' being borrowed later to give rise to a doublet).>>

I don't have my stuff with me, but if this is prehistorical, how do you get
the chronology.  You understand that by saying <<because Old English would
have
changed it to 'shirt'>> and then saying it actually happened later, you are
demonstrating the real question.  Yes, English did change it to 'shirt'.  So
how do you do the chronology - that the full doublet came later - if you have
no documentation?  How could the sound laws make 'skirt' necessary, if they
also produced 'shirt?'   If you have historic evidence for this, than this is
not we are talking about.  As far as the direction of the loan, if
prehistoric, how do you know it ( and all similiar changes) went ON>OE?  My
bet is you have to make a historical assumption.

Regards,
Steve Long