Re: [tied] PIE Stop System

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, etherman23 wrote:

> Lately I've been giving thought to the PIE stop system and I've found
> the proposals I've seen rather unsatisfactory. The Traditional p, b,
> bh, etc. system is the most in agreement with the comparative data,
> but it's typologically unacceptable. We could add aspirated unvoiced
> stops as Szemerenyi proposes but the evidence for these is lacking
> outside of the Indo-Aryan branch. At best there are isolated examples
> in other families.

There is ample material reflecting aspirated tenues from the whole range
of IE. The superstition that /th/ etc. is non-existent is based on nothing
but an undignified consensus to turn a blind eye on the relevant evidence.

> These stops would also be extremely rare, and
> mostly exist in onomatopeia and possible stop + laryngeal situations.
> The Glottalic theory at first makes sense but the change of p' > b,
> etc. is hard for me to swallow. Presumably there's an intermediate
> stage so we'd have p' > b' > b. Yet no IE language that I'm aware of
> preserves any trace of voiced implosives. Furthermore it's claimed
> that the Glottalic theory accounts for the lack of *b because it's
> interpretaed as p', the most marked version of p. But this is at odds
> with *b/p' having a typical distribution non-initially.

The very marked /p'/ apparently had its weak spot in word initial where it
certainly is harder to produce and perhaps even harder to recognize than
in the ongoing flow of articulation in the interior of words. Since there
is no resonance space *before* the lips, labial closure is detected
basically from the noise it produces *behind* the lips; and if a labial
stop is immediately followed by a glottal explosion produced in the same
space the labiality feature will be hard to hear except in the
modification it produces on a preceding sound; in initial position there
of course are no preceding sounds, so here the labial feature gets very
weak; that must be the reason for the rarity of labial ejectives ; the
other points of articulation as dentals and velars have some space before
their points of closure where the opening gesture can produce an audible
sound.

>
> There is another proposal that seems pretty obvious to me, yet I've
> seen no discussion of it (though I can't imagine I'm the first to see
> it). I would reinterpret the Traditional unvoiced stops as unvoiced
> aspirates, the voiced stops as unvoiced stops, and the voiced
> aspirates as plain voiced.

So, /th, t, d/ instead of /t, d, dh/, in that order? That is, Sanskrit
/t/, Greek /t/ were aspirated, and Sanskrit /dh/, Greek /th/ were
unaspirated?? Can you really mean that?

> Such a system would be typologically
> acceptable (it's found in Ancient Greek).

- but not in that order.

> The Traditional unvoiced
> stops often become either unvoiced aspirates or fricatives in
> daughter languages which makes the reinterpretation plausable. The
> Tradition voiced stops become unvoiced in Germanic and Armenian, as
> well as some minor languages. This reinterpretation then would have
> these languages as relic areas.

This is at variance with d > t in the earliest of the Iranian loanwords in
Armenian.

> Finally the Traditional voiced
> aspirates become simply voiced in most daughters, which means that in
> my reinterpretation the voiced stops remain unchanged in most
> daughter languages.
>
> This reinterpretation thus has two advantages:
> 1) It's typologically natural.
> 2) It stays fairly close to the comparative data.

The second point is very wrong: Why would your *t take on voice in
Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italo-Celtic, Albanian and Balto-Slavic? And why
would it behave as a lenis in Anatolian? And why would your *d take on
aspiration in Indo-Iranian, Greek and Italic while your *th distinctively
[!] loses its aspiration in the same languages? Why would there be vowel
lengthening in Balto-Slavic before your *t, but not before your *d and
*th? And why would Indic, Greek and Tocharian dissimilate *dVd to *tVd,
while keeping *thVth intact? And why would *tVt be banned in the root
structure?

This surely explains none of the problems raised by the actual material.

The typological defects of PIE are mended if /th/ is added, and there are
enough etymologies to demand this. The voiceless aspirates are far less
frequent than the other series, but so they are in Sanskrit, which still
must have existed in the shape we know it. The lacunae of the system can
be explained by a pre-IE sound shift from the "Glottal Theory" system to
the "Traditional", i.e. Sanskrit-type, IE system of Brugmann's Grundriss.

The traditional phonetic values must have been reached at some point
*before* the dissolution of PIE, since there was time to integrate a few
examples of initial /b-/. I suppose this also explains the modest number
of roots with other vowels than /e/.

Jens