Re: PIE voiced aspirates (?)

--- etherman23 <etherman23@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> >
> > On 2008-05-28 03:58, etherman23 wrote:
> >
> > > What's the objection to reinterpreting voiced
> aspirates as voiceless
> > > aspirates? It would be typologically natural. It
> fits with Greek,
> > > which preserves many phonological features of
> PIE. I-Ir simply added
> > > the feature of voicing. The Proto-Italic changes
> make more sense
> > > starting from voiceless aspirates. In Tocharian
> and Proto-Anatolian
> > > the feature of aspiration was simply lost. In
> Germanic and Armenian
> > > they became voiced, perhaps setting of a chain
> shift (Grimm's Law). In
> > > the other languages they simply merged with the
> existing voiced stops.
> >
> > Aye, there's the rub. How do voiceless aspirates
> "simply merge" with
> > voiced stops?
>
> The change of voiceless stop to voiced stop is
> pretty common. So I
> assume that you accept that this change is possible.
> I also assume
> that there no objection to the possibility of loss
> of aspiration,
> since that would have to be common in the
> traditional reconstruction.
> And of course phonological mergers happen quite
> frequently (and indeed
> would have been common in the traditional
> reconstruction). So what's
> the rub in three common changes actually happening?
>

. . .
Although Etruscan had no voiced stops, or at least its
alphabet did not, there are Latin words with voiced
stops that purportedly came from Etruscan. Off the top
of my head, I can think of balteus, the source of
English belt. Would these words have been more likely
to have originally been aspirated or non-aspirated
stops in Etruscan or would it have been impossible to tell?