Re: [tied] Centum in Vedic?

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

From: Dean_Anderson

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 9:14 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Centum in Vedic?

>>PG: >The source of <s.> is IE *s in the "ruki" context, not a velar
>stop, so it's quite clear that <kH> is secondary.

> First of all, let me make sure I understand correctly: the sibilants
created in the Satem languages are different from the later 'ruki'
shift where Skt s. < IIR s?

 

The "ruki" rule is rather old. It operated in Indo-Iranian as well as Balto-Slavic. The result in both cases was *s^, which shifted to *x in Slavic (except before front vowels, where the palatoalveolar *s^ was either retained or restored) and to retroflex [s.] in Indo-Aryan.

 

> Perhaps I don't understand the comment "I don't think the last step (x > kH) is real as a sound change" but I should point out that this pronunciation of 'purukha' etc. is still very common wherever Shukla Yajur Veda is chanted in North India, i.e all over the place. And this is Vedic, not Classical, Sankrit. One would assume, given the obsession with proper pronunciation in Vedic rituals, that it has been passed down accurately, although the point of Deshpande's (controversial) article is to question that.

 

What I mean is that the dialect from which the words were taken probably had [x], but since the sound was alien to other dialects of Old Indo-Aryan, it was substituted with the acoustically similar phoneme /kH/, just as a [T] (a dental fricative) would have been replaced with /tH/ in loanwords that contained it. The ritual pronunciation of the Vedic text could only use "standard" Vedic phonemes.

How is /x/ pronounced? Are there any examples in nonSlavic European languages that I might recognize? Is there a good web site to illustrate these sounds? That would be a wonderful resource: a list of the International Phonetic Alphabet with an attached mp3 sound file so you could hear the sounds.

It's the German sound of <ch> as in <Bach> or <Nacht>, or Scottish <ch> in <loch>. If you want to hear it, I think you can find some examples at the following URL:

 

http://web.uvic.ca/ling/ipa/handbook/

 

Piotr