Piotr,
Thanks for the explanation. I bet it felt good to do a real linguistics post
for a change.
The gist of Peter's original post was that there was nothing aberrant about
Vedic's reconstructable development, with the exception of the "major
phonetic problem in Sanskrit is reconciling Bartholomae's Law and Grassman's
Law,... each of which implies a different order of events."
As best as I could keep up, I take it that from the parts of your post below
that certain circumstances in the language's development can account for the
fact that Grassman's law seems to take effect prematurely. Is there anything
in these circumstances that could indicate some other path of development out
of PIE? Or that might suggest that Vedic is somehow older than previously
thought or that it did not develop directly out of the same parent in the
same way as other IE languages?
Piotr wrote:
<<Grassmann's Law is younger than Bartholomae's, but it interacts with some
phonological processes in an apparently paradoxical manner. In pre-Vedic
times *zH and *z^H (produced by Bartholomae's Law) were "deaspirated" into
Indo-Aryan s and s., and any preceding obstruent became voiceless (as well as
deaspirated) by assimilation: *-gHz^H- > -ks.-, *-dHzH- > -ts-, *-bHzH- >
*-ps. This change obscured locally the operation of Bartholomae's _and_
Grassmann's Laws, since it removed the features that had originally triggered
them...
...Such or similar forms are indeed found in the earliest and most archaising
layer of Vedic grammar, but the already productive Vedic type (and the only
possible one in later Sanskrit) was <bHotsyati, adHuks.at>. This
"modernising" type owes its existence to the analogy of forms like the root
noun *bHudH-s, where the loss of phonation contrasts in word-final clusters
produced *bHuts (> Skt. bHut) prior to Bartholomae's Law.
By the time of S'a:kalya (let alone Pa:n.ini) the new forms were so well
entrenched in Sanskrit that in S'a:kalya's <padapa:t.Ha> to the Rigveda they
are regularly substituted for the archaic ones even where the latter occur in
the text. The synchronic grammatical rule needed to account for the output of
Grassmann's Law was reformulated as "aspirate throwback" (Hock's term) rather
than the dissimilation of an underlying pair of aspirates;...
If we retained /bHudH-/ as the underlying form, we'd get the illusion of
Grassmann's Law operating before Bartholomae's: /bHudH-ta-/ --> budHta -->
[buddHa-]. This, I suppose, is the paradox that Peter had in mind. The source
of the paradox is the fact that the synchronic rules are subtly different
from their historical models. The actual development was *bHudH-to- >
*bHudHdHa- > *budHdHa- > buddHa- (phonologically regular).
.... the moral is: rule reordering obliterates the fingerprints of the
diachronically underlying changes. If we had no evidence of the older system
and no comparative data from outside Indo-Aryan, and if we could only rely on
the application of internal reconstruction to the "modernising" forms (the
only grammatical ones in the classical language), Grassmann's Law and its
interaction with other obstruent changes in pre-Vedic would be reconstructed
incorrectly.>>