Peter to Jens concerning a voiced *h3:
>Oh, come, come! It may have been voiced, but there is no consensus of
>agreement as yet. We do not help our studies if we claim to "know" things
>that are not yet known, however much we want them to be true.
Oh thank god I'm not alone! :P
Even though *pi-ph3- seems to be the only remotely credible example that
might possibly show voicing of *h3, I got to thinkin' some more about how
to nail this coffin on tight.
I've already explained the fact that claiming *h3 to have been rounded
and voiced makes for a very unbalanced system of phonemes and I think we
have enough of an imbalance already without **b, thank you very much
without having to wonder why there is no rounded but _unvoiced_ phoneme
to accompany *h3.
And how can we be sure that the "voicing" really occured in IE itself
or whether the voicing happened later in an example like *pi-ph3-? For
example, let's say that I'm right for a moment. Let's say that *h3 equals
*[hW]. One then takes *pi-ph3- to have been pronounced as */piphW-/. Of
course, we see in this example that *hW wouldn't have been very audible at
all. It's just ripe for erosion. It would be very easy for different post-IE
languages to independantly turn this puppy 'round and make it *pipw-,
let's say. With assimilatory voicing of *w we obtain *pib(w)- and voila!
There you have it. No voicing of *h3 required and that explains /pibanti/
and /bibunt/ nicely.
- gLeN
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