[SPAM] [tied] Re: Order of Some Indo-Iranian Sound Changes

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2009-02-21 06:04, david_russell_watson wrote:
>
> > "... A similar rule operates in Pawnee,
> > a Caddoan language spoken on the other side of the world,
> > though the details are different; see Douglas R. Parks,
> > A grammar of Pawnee (New York 1976: Garland), pp. 14, 42-3)."
>
> See a detailed description of this rule in Wichita (related to
> Pawnee):
>
> https://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp/pdfs/01-deguchi02.pdf
>
> I would interpret the affrication of dental stops in *TT (as well
> as *TK) clusters as phonetic reinforcement, preventing their
> realisation as unreleased stops and so increasing their
> contrastivity ([CORONAL] being the least salient place of
> articulation in terms of auditory cues such as vowel-consonant
> transitions). Note t > ts in the High German Shift and the
> affricated allophone of /t/ (in "strong" positions) in many accents
> of English.

The rule I imagine is this:
PIE stops had spirantized allophones before other stops (or consonants
in general?), thus
*-pT- > *-fT-,
*-tT- > *-þT-
*-kT- > *-xt-
etc

which were kept by some languages (Iranian, Sabellic),
expanded at the expanse of the other allophones by some (Germanic) and
generalized away by the rest.

Before that happened, some languages simplified *-þT- > *-sT-.

That should do the trick.


Torsten