[tied] Re: PIE voiceless aspirates

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

>
> First, let me say that I have great respect for Lehmann and Piotr.
> I am not in a position to make a personal judgment on Burrow.
>
> I think I should have been more explicit with the point I was
> trying to make.
>
> If <prthus> really represents something like /pRt-xus/ then <th>
> does not represent an aspirated voiceless stop. Why would Old
> Indian have used one letter to represent what, to their ears,
> would have had to have been a sequence of two sounds /t/ + /x/,
> in this case, in two different syllables?

The change of *t + *h2 to *th is at least as old, I assume,
as Proto-Indo-Aryan, and maybe even as old as Proto-Indo-
Iranian, and so came centuries before the analysis of Vedic
and Sanskrit by the ancient Indian grammarians. The actual
writing of those languages, of course, came even later still.

> And, if /x/ were still present in that position, why do we see no
> sign to represent /xV/ in other positions?

Well we do see see metrical evidence of a laryngeal, or at
least of some sort of reflex of a laryngeal manifesting as
an exception to normal quantification, in the Vedas. However,
as I say, the change predates Sanskrit and Vedic as we know
them.

> If Old Indian <th> represented an earlier affricate /ts/, would the
> syllable division not have been /pRt-sus/?

No, if it were truly an affricate, then it could be divided
in no other way besides [pR.tsus], as the very definition of
an affricate is 'a sequence of stop plus homorganic fricative
between which no syllable boundary may occur'.

"Tree chopper", [trIj.tša.p&r] contains an affricate, while
"treat shopper", [trIjt.ša.p&r] does not.

David