From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 20302
Date: 2003-03-24
----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2003 3:49 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Germanic Scythians?
> Suppose a system p, p', b. On any substrate without glottalics either p' > p or p' > b. This will "jam" the system apart. In the first case you must exaggerate the p-ness of the p, giving ph and a system ph, p, b.
There are no "musts" in such cases. If you don't "exaggerate the p-ness of the p", /p/ and /p'/ will simply merge (see below). In the case of the labial series, at any rate, no harm would have been done in an IE language, given the extremely low lexical incidence of *p' (in the glottalic transcription).
> In the second case you must exaggerate the b-ness of the b, giving bh
and a system p, b, bh (and further bh > ph in Greek, supplemented
with ph in Indo-Aryan). I can't see there's any other way.
Of course there are many other ways. For example, the original system might resist substratal influence and survive, which under your interpretation doesn't seem to have happened anywhere. Another obvious possibility is a merger of two or even three rows: the latter happened in Tocharian, the former at least in Celtic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian and Iranian.
Now isn't it curious that in all these groups the *d series merged with the *dH series, not with the voiceless stops? The traditional model of PIE phonology has an answer to this: *d and *dH were rather similar, the former being voiced, the latter breathy-voiced. If the original system was simplified, a merger involving the two of them (and producing a {t, d} system) was more natural than the merger of eithet of them with *t (sure enough, the latter didn't happen anywhere). How do you explain the fact that, in terms of your version of the glottalic theory, the unconditional merger of *t and *t' (to the exclusion of *d) never occurred, while the falling together of *t' and *d was so common?
There's also another problem with your "substraticist" explanation. If substratal influence is strong enough to undermine the original system, you could expect a merger rather than a shift UNLESS the substrate language also has three rows of stops. Otherwise, why give up the ejectives only to create a new row of aspirates? Was Neolithic Europe aswarm with languages having stop systems like {t, d, tH} or {t, d, dH}? Why attribute to an unknown and unknowable substrate a system that might just as well be PIE?
Piotr