--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson"
<liberty@...> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Well, let me start with a few questions since what you are
> writing makes no sense to me.
>
> Let us say, as you do, that the change from /t-x/ to /tH/
> happened in Proto-Indo-Aryan.
Yes, before which time the antecedent of Sanskrit 'prthús' was
[prt.Xús], with 6 phonemes, but after which change it became
[pr.tHús], with 5 phonemes, and its first syllable thereafter
also light.
> The writing system came centuries later.
Yes.
> If /tH/ had been in force for centuries, then the letter for
> <th> could only have represented /tH/.
Yes.
> Written <prthus> could only have represented /pR-tHús/.
Yes.
> After the conversion, and after the invention of the letter,
> why would anyone have divided it any differently? Why would
> they even have been motivated to try to do so?
They didn't divide it differently. Forever after the change of
*t + *h2 to *tH, 'prthús' continued to be divided into syllables
as [pr.tHús].
Possibly your confusion comes from my referrence to the evidence
for laryngeals in the Vedas, but which was not meant to refer
specifically to those in positions to create aspirates. Maybe
instead the confusion came from the digression on the nature of
affricates, about which see more below.
> If there is evidence that it was divided differently, then our
> understanding of Old Indian syllabic division needs revising
> since /t-x/ could not have figured into the equation.
Well as I say, it _wasn't_ divided differently in any recorded
Indo-Aryan, and of course there's no metrical evidence that it
was divided in P.I.E. either, since of course we have no samples
of Proto-Indo-European poetry to check.
You're reversing the evidence and the conclusions, for I'm not
claiming that they were each a sequence of two phonemes on the
basis of evidence that it was possible to divide each between
syllables, but rather that it was possible to divide each between
syllables, on the basis that we have evidence that they were in
P.I.E. each a sequence of two phonemes.
For the evidence of the latter, please see my excerpts of Burrow
and Lehmann. None of my elaboration on syllable division or the
nature of affricates was intended itself to strengthen the case
against P.I.E. having a series voiceless aspirates as independent
phonemes, but only for your information.
> "Tree chopper", [trIj.tsa.p&r] contains an affricate, while
> "treat shopper", [trIjt.sa.p&r] does not.
>
> Are you really sure. German Karpfen is /karp-fN/, is it not?
> And is <pf> not an affricate?
> And where did you get the definition of 'affricate' above?
Well here is where some confusion surely came in, and on second
thought there may well be some precedent of some sort of which
I'm unaware for referring to "affricate sequences". However my
point was not really that /t/ in "treat shopper" can't be an
affricate, but that it can't be a unit phoneme, having as it does
a syllable boundary between its elements.
As far as 'Karpfen' goes, I'm not entirely sure. I read at one
point long ago that it was an affricate, and so ever after on
the rare occasions that I have spoken German have divided such
words as [kar.pfN]. If it truly is divided as [karp.fN], then
I suppose that there really must be a precedent for calling a
sequence of stop + homorganic fricative an "affricate", whether
that sequence constitutes a single phoneme or not.
> Do you think that the sequence spread over one or two words
> makes a difference?
As I say, it may well not make a difference after all in whether
we may refer to it as an affricate or not, but it does make a
difference in whether we should regard the sequence so divided
as a unit phoneme or not, and which is the point of the whole
discussion. You insist that the antecedents of the voiceless
aspirates of Indo-Aryan were in P.I.E. each a unit phoneme, while
I and most others say that they were each a sequence of phonemes,
two.
I could accept it if told that a sequence in English like the /t/
in "treat shopper" [trIjt.a.p&r] may be called an affricate, but
I would be very much surprised if told that a phoneme can be divided
between two syllables.
Is anybody willing to tell me that?
David