"centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes]

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>alderson at netcom.com writes:

>Further, remember that there are other "satem" branches, such as Armenian
>and Albanian.

-- very good point.

If we take the ancestors of Armenian and the presumed Illyrian ancestor of
Albanian to be originally the northern neighbors of Greek (along with
Thracian and Phyrgian) then the relationship of Greek to Indo-Iranian is
clarified.

pre-Greek would then be the southernmost of an early dialect or
proto-language chain running south-to-north as follows:
Greek-Ilyrian/Phyrgian/Armenian/-Indo-Iranian-Balto-Slavic.

Within the original, pre-dispersal dialect cluster proto-Indo-Iranian would
be east-central, proto-Balto-Slavic central-northwestern, and proto-Greek on
the southern fringe, with the dialects ancestral to the Balkan and
Balkan-Anatolian languages

As proto-Greek moved south toward its historic range sometime in the 3rd
millenium BCE, it would lose contact sufficiently to be unaffected by
satemization, with Armenian (for example) in an intermediate position.

What a pity we don't know more about Macedonian and Epirote!  Or Illyrian and
Phyrgian, for that matter.