Re: [tied] PIE stops

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

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 10:01 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] (unknown)

> If they were merely allophones, of course I can't prove anything.  But Oscan and Umbrian consistently use F, never B or D.

 

... because in Oscan and Umbrian the fricative remained fricative in all positions, so why should they have spelt it with letters representing stops? If the spelling <f> was used for both [f] and [v] (whether from *T/D < *D < *dH, *v < *bH or *v < *GW < *gHW), how could one know the difference?

 

> Pre-Italic must have had *f, *T, *x and *xW in all positions.  /T/ > /f/ is a natural
development.  /D/ > /f/ is not.

 

But [D] > [v] > [f] at word margins is natural enough, and that's what I propose (after Meillet). If in your "Graeco-Italic" zone *dH = /tH/, how do we get /d/ in Macedonian (a _very_ close relative of Greek) and Illyrian/Messapic?

> There are some other examples of *kH > x (*ple^sI [you mean *ple^s^I, I presume]/*plIxU, *xorbrU), besides some examples of *kH > k.  Perhaps *kh2 > x and *kh1 > k, but there is not enough material to be sure.

 

What's the comparative evidence for *ploik-h2-o- (rather than, say, *ploik-s-o-)? I also wonder how (and with what comparative support) you'd analyse *xorbrU.

> Ladefoged & Maddieson's discussion mentions that the breathy voice stops in e.g. Owerri Igbo "appear to have a shorter breathy voiced period, and to have stronger voicing than the corresponding sounds in Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages".  But nowhere do they say that breathy voice is possible without audible aspiration, nor do they distinguish between "breathy voice" (a.k.a. "murmur") and what has traditionally been called "voiced aspirates" in IE linguistics.

 

Breathy voicing as a feature of stops can indeed be perceived mainly in release, but distinctive _aspiration_, in this case, has the form of a prolonged breathy offglide ([h^]) -- as in Indo-Aryan, where voiceless aspirated and breathy-voiced stops demontrate shared phonological behaviour (e.g. with respect to Grassmann's Law).

 

The treatment of phonation types in L&M is expert, but so condensed that you must read between the lines as well. On the very same page they go on to say: "The change from breathy voice to regular voicing often occurs after only a few vibrations of the vocal folds." That's the case of Owerri Igbo, where the typical duration of the breathy release is ca. 30 ms (barely exceeding the normal voice onset time for voiceless unaspirated stops in many languages), but not of Hindi, where, judging from the spectrograms in L&M, the onset of modal voicing may be delayed by 100-150 ms. Schiefer (1992) shows experimentally that a breathy release of 30-40 ms is not long enough to be perceived as aspiration by Hindi-speakers. L&M argue (correctly, IMO) in favour of regarding Hindi breathy-voiced stops as genuinely aspirated, but that's no reason for confusing breathy voice (which is a matter of glottal stricture) with aspiration (a matter of glottal timing).

 

Murmur, anyway, is not the only possibility; "slack voice" (see L&M) would do just as well: what I need for the {dH} series is an open ([+ spread glottis]) semi-voiced phonation. Breathy or slack voicing can optimally contrast with laryngealised (creaky or stiff) voicing, as in Indonesian (slack : stiff).

> Therefore, the PIE triad is in my opinion impossible.  Only the emergence of voiceless aspirates (C+h2 or C+h1, apparently not C + h3 (?)) made it possible, at least in an (Eastern) dialectal area.

 

How can a system that is actually attested (e.g. in Kelabit [Blust 1974]) be impossible? The fact is, we still know precious little about possible and impossible consonant inventories, and have no good general theory of such things. Most of the implicational "universals" found in the literature are mere inductive generalisation based on the knowledge of a limited number of actual systems, not always adequately described by fieldworkers.

> It is worth noting that the two branches that split off from PIE earliest, Anatolian and Tocharian, do not have voice as a distinguishing feature in their stop systems.  This must represent the PIE situation, and we can assign the values *dh = [th], *d = [t] and
*t = [t:], almost precisely as shown by Hittite orthography in medial position (*dh and *d = <t>, *t = <tt>).

 

You use the word "must" to categorically dismiss all other scenarios and interpretations. That's hardly fair. I wish I knew the actual pronunciation of Hittite stops, but it cannot be recovered with any precision.

 

Piotr