Re: [TIED] Itchy and Scratchy Stops

----- Original Message -----

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 11:29 PM

Subject: Re: [TIED] Itchy and Scratchy Stops

Me:

>Now this is what worries me about the theory that the labial gap in >the
>"mediae" series is a consequence of their having ejective >ancestors at a
>more remote stage. According to your chronology several >millennia elapsed
>between the ejective-to-fortis shift and your Middle >(not to mention
>Common) IE. That's surely enough time to patch any gap >for which there is
>no immediate phonetic justification. Unmotivated >empty slots don't live
>long.

Glen:

 

Not so sure. I know what you're saying but we aren't dealing with a
garden-variety *p as in Germanic but rather *p: which is something not all
that common. I think that these are different scenarios.

...

In the phonetic development arena, I can think of no opportunity for a *p:
to accidentally happen in any earlier stages of IE/Steppe/Eurasiatic except
via a simplification of some consonant cluster. The early typology is
self-evident when comparing all Eurasiatic languages - only medial consonant
clusters occur. The phoneme *p:, if existant, would be medial only. How
might we obtain a medial *p: except perhaps through a very specific
compounding of a word *CVp to a stop-initial stem. Not much productive
opportunity here to fill out the gap even if we were to prove this special
development of *-pC- to *-p:-.

Perhaps then, we might play around with the possibility of borrowing.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a language that IE or its ancestors could
possibly have come across to borrow words with *p:, except for NWC. Can you?
An NEC-IE contact doesn't seem possible. It's hard enough finding ANY human
language with *p:, let alone one that could have influenced IE.

A good argument. But why necessarily a phoneme *p:? A geminate *pp in a neighbouring language would do just as well. Phonologically (especially in terms of distribution) a long consonant is different from a geminate, but phonetically they would have been hardly distinguishable in intervocalic position, and -pp- is common enough in some of the potential loanword donors. Sure enough, word initial *p: can't have been added in this way. You've got a point here.

 

 

It's all nice to throw away my pretty theory (based on many other pretty
theories done by other pretty people) but do you have an alternative pretty
suggestion that works pretty better in regards to pre-IE?

 

I'm not throwing anything away. I'm just looking for its potential weaknesses and asking you to address my doubts. Someone's gotta do it for you. As you can see, I'm willing to concede a point if it's convincingly argued. When I work out an alternative suggestion I'll let you know.

 

Piotr