From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 6813
Date: 2001-03-27
----- Original Message -----From: tgpedersen@...Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 12:30 PMSubject: Re: Odp: Odp: [tied] gr!> Disappearing phonation-type contrasts, hm! Varying at random, hm! Maybe I should take out some books on Hittite from the library.Do, by all means, if you have not done so yet. You will learn how the Hittites adopted a foreign writing system that didn't prove very handy when applied to an IE language, how they resolved various orthographic problems, why their spelling was messy in some respects, and in what respects it was consistent.There is nothing strange about disappearing phonation-type contrasts -- or, in plainer English, the loss of contrast between voiced and voiceless or aspirated and unaspirated consonants. *d and *dH fell together in Slavic, Baltic and Celtic, and (perhaps not completely) in Albanian, and all the three PIE rows merged in Tocharian. Hittite probably retained a lax/tense distinction (corresponding to voiced/voiceless) intervocalically but there is no evidence of it word-initially. At any rate don't take our modern transliteration of Hittite at face value: it isn't supposed to be strictly phonemic.PiotrPS You said something about a theory concerning the "heart" word and its odd behaviour in Indo-Iranian. What exactly is that theory?P.