Northwest IE attributes

Stefan Georg georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl
Thu Jan 27 08:27:45 UTC 2000


>Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

>>Not *so* unlikely, after all. Palatalizations are, so to speak, the
>>garden-variety of sound-changes.

>-- yes, but the same one in two adjacent groups for different reasons?  This
>violates explicatory parsimony.

Only with less-than-natural sound changes. This one is quite natural.

>And as you point out, this particular change is _not_ common in the IE
>languages.  Only Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic show it with any degree of
>consistency (Armenian possibly too).

Albanian, Romance, Modern Cretan, Swedish aso.

But, then, I'm not arguing against an areal explanation of some phenomena
(among them palatalization and assibilation of palatal stops) in Baltic,
Slavic and Indo-Iranian. Only against viewing satemisation as  a shared
innovation of a "satem" node in IE.

St.G.

Dr. Stefan Georg
home:
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+49-228-691332+
Georg at home.ivm.de

work:
http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html



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