From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 11868
Date: 2001-12-18
>> So any connection with Celtic (see my other message) would not beHmm.. My focus was more on the aspiration of the voiceless series (*t
>profitable either, I suppose.
>
>Contrariwise, there could be at least an areal connection, if not a genetic one. As a matter of fact, I think that the spirantisation of the breathy series may be a very old process, _perhaps_ a shared apomorphy of "Northwestern IE" (with *dH > *D merging with *d in Celtic).
> *th), and, for "Western-IE" in general (including Armenian and someof the Balkan languages, but excluding Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian and
>> If there is a voice contrast, it's more likely to be in the stopsThat's why I worded it like I worded it. I wasn't dismissing it "on
>alone than in the fricatives alone (speaking as an Hispano-Hollandish
>person, but I believe it tends to be true in general).
>
>The fact that something "is more likely" or "tends to be true" does not mean that counterexamples should be dismissed. Who says that reconstructed Proto-Germanic must represent the cross-linguistic average? The {T, D, t} triad is not my invention but the standard Germanic reconstruction, and it looks solid enough on comparative grounds. Theoretical considerations (Boersma 1989) do not rule such a system out; they merely suggest that it would usually evolve into the more stable {T, d, t} configuration, which is just what the bulk of Germanic did in due time.
>There would have been no labial gap in the stop series. First, the spirantisation of voiceless stops failed in sC clusters, where the second element merged with the reflexes of the PIE "plain" [or maybe not so plain] voiced series. Secondly, there were at least a handful of lexical items like the "apple" or "lip" words, which means that PGmc. *p < *b was never non-existent, though it may have been pretty rare.Sure enough: rare but not absent.