Any explanation based on anecdotal "evidence"
rather than empirical findings is a priori suspect. The occurrence of "regional
phonologies" is a familiar but irritatingly neglected phenomenon. It deserves a
lot more attention that it's received so far, also because it is of serious
relevance to the discussion of "areal versus genetic". It would be a good idea
to compile an inventory of such areal traits and map them -- e.g. to see if they
can be aligned with anything interesting. Are they biologically based? I
dunno.
As for IE curiosities, we have for instance the
special status of /sp/, /st/ and /sk/, which tend to behave (in phonotactic
terms) like single segments. They may be root-initial and syllable-initial. In
English, for example, they can combine with liquids word-initially, forming the
only acceptable CCC onsets in the language (splash, street, scratch), /st/
occurs freely in grammatical morphemes and root-finally after long vowels
(roast, paste, feast), and in OE poetry each cluster alliterates as an
indivisible whole (streamas styredon, whereas alliterations like st... s...
or st... sp... are ruled out -- no normal clusters behave like this, e.g. t...
tr... or even s... sn... are OK). On the peripheries of Indo-Europia they show
typologically unmarked behaviour (substratal influence?), e.g. prothesis with
resyllabification (sT > esT) in western Romance (a few weeks ago I heard
English-espeaking guides in Spain refer consistently to "estone", "esquare" and
"Espain", which proves that the process remains productive AD 2000); even
Hittite seems to have developed a prothetic vowel (sT > isT). Cf. Hungarian
sT > iST (S = "sh", spelt <s>) in loanwords from IE
languages.
Though exceptional treatment of sT clusters is not
completely unknown in other families, it is nevertheless extremely rare and
therefore typologically odd, almost like the South African clicks or the
Australian lack of fricatives, or the survival of breathy stops in
India.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 5:53
AM
Subject: [tied] Re: IE &
linguistic complexity
On a related point, my lecturer in Aboriginal linguistics
at the
University of Western Australia in 1970 claimed that the loss of
frictives and sibilants from Aboriginal Languages was due to the
widespread condition of Yaws, which leads to a constant sub-auditory
hiss, making these phonemes inaudible. I tend to be suspeicious of
his explanation but would be interested in what people on this list
think. Can phonemes change for this kind of reason? Are there
any
PIE examples? (*TH, *DH for example).