> >Thanks, Glen! Very interesting. This looks much more like a real
> >language than the traditional phonological reconstructions (eg,
> >Beekes).
>(I meant a/& vs o/e, and t/t:/d vs t/d/dh etc.) Marc
>Oh. Right. Well, it would seem that IE had *a as well, at least next to
laryngeals. As for t/d/dh, I'm not sure about how Piotr feels but, the odd
contrast may have been somewhat short lived (ending up t/th/d/dh in
Sanskrit, th/t/d in Germanic, etc). The fortis stops *[t:, k:] for
Mid IE are a way of acknowledging the typological oddity of a missing **b
(which would derive from **p: and ultimately from **p? if it had existed)
without accepting outright the existence of ejectives in IE itself. Rather,
the ejective stage of IE exists but is pushed into the remote past where it
belongs.
>Thanks again for the examples (very interesting - as always :-)). Sorry I
>was vague. I was thinking of examples comparing the traditional
>phonol.reconstructions (eg, p, t, k, kW) with yours (p, t, tW, k, kW).
>Well, I reconstruct *tW for Steppe, IndoTyrrhenian, Old IE and Mid IE but
*not* for Late IE. For some reason, labiodentals don't seem to be treated as
single phonemes in Late IE even though I imagine they must have existed once
(Mid IE *sWekse "six", *t:Waxe "two" > *sweks, *dwo:u). For instance,
I reconstruct Steppe *kut:u for "five" (yes, "five", not "four" as in
IndoTyrrhenian). I realise now that Steppe *i and *u are treated differently
in IndoTyrrhenian such that *i > *ë and *u > *a (I used to think that both
*i and *u became *ë but this new rule better explains the origins of *e/*o
ablaut in verb roots).
But IT *& > IE *e, and *a>o, so why this "deviation"? why not directly
Steppe *i > IE *e, and *u>*o, instead of *i>&>e, and *u>a>o?
>Hence, we obtain IndoT *kWat:Wa "four" (with residual labialisation and a
bit of a semantic shift). This becomes Tyrrhenian *xotta and Old IE
*kWátWe-n (with the inanimate *n-suffix), later *kWetwóres with *-es plural
and predictable accent shift). So from this, we can see that
labiodentals are the result of Steppe plain dentals in the environment of
*u. However, by late IE instances of *tW or *sW end up *tw and *sw
respectively and only labiovelars are retained as single phonemes. Does that
make any sense? I'm not sure why this is but I'm not a real linguist anyway
:)
Nor am I.
> Are there extant languages with a comparable phonology?
>NorthWest Caucasian languages... but I suspect that early IE was heavily
affected by them. Hmm, I can't think of any languages lacking palatal
consonants but having labial consonants off hand, if that's what you are
wanting. Although come to think of it, there is French /ma/ [ma] versus
/moi/ [mwa] without a *[mja] or /pas/ [pa] versus /poid/ [pwa] without any
*[pja] afaik. I'll have to think more on that.
Why not IE *pW?
Thanks for the rest, Glen. Very interesting.
Marc