From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 11887
Date: 2001-12-19
----- Original Message -----From: Miguel Carrasquer VidalSent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 11:15 AMSubject: Re: [tied] Grimm and Verner
> There are no voiced allophones in O-U.I wonder how you know that. The spelling wouldn't have shown such a purely allophonic contrast (as it does not in Old English, where <f> = [f/v], <s> = [s/z], <T> = [T/D]). Umbrian rhotacism proves that *s had a voiced allophone in pre-Umbrian.> I accept *kH > x for Slavic (soxa ~ 'sakHa:). The argument itself is of course typological: we cannot have /dh/ without /th/. The Balto-Slavic evidence for *dh is even more indirect (it didn't lengthen a previous vowel like *d did, so assuming the lengthening was caused by the voicedness of *d, *dh must have been less voiced, as murmured stops are).
The evidence supporting Winter's Law is indirect but _systematic_, while <soxa> : <s'akHa:> is just an isolated equation -- definitely not enough to establish a "correspondence". The form is otherwise OK (but not so OK if you want to derive <s'akHa:> from *k^nk-h2-), and the semantic match looks good. However, we have even more impressive semantic matches in pairs like "day : dies" or "deus : theos", and yet these equations are patently false.The typological argument is only valid if you insist that PIE (or Proto-B/Sl) {dH} was distinctively aspirated, as in Indo-Aryan (that is, if the onset of modal voice was significantly delayed after its release), where {tH} appears as expected on typological grounds. But breathy voice is possible without audible aspiration. This, of course, is what makes the PIE triad (without phonemic aspirated {tH}) possible.Piotr