On Wed, 02 Apr 2003 16:17:24 +0200, Piotr Gasiorowski
<
piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>From: "Miguel Carrasquer" <mcv@...>
>
>> I'm not aware of very many cases where we can follow the historical
>> development of glottalic consonants,
>
>One could probably find some relevant data in the languages of the Americas and the Causasus.
Well, the Caucasian languages are languages that have a full range of
ejective consonants at the present time. These have as yet not
evolved into anything else... The same is apparently the case in the
Americas: after a superficial glance through Lyle Campbell's book I
couldn't find any examples of developments ejective > something-else
for those language families which I know have ejectives (Athabascan,
Salishan, Mayan). Historical data are of course largely unavailable
for both geographical areas.
>> Assuming the pronunciation of Armenian grabar was close to the modern
>> East Armenian pronunciation, we have West Armenian /d/ etc. from
>> (unaspirated/glottalized) /t/ etc.
>
>I.e. assuming something that we have no real right to assume, if you mean the
>hypothetical presence of laryngealisation in Old Armenian (BTW, Ladefoged and
>Maddieson describe the East Armenian sounds in question as weakly glottalised
>at best and as unaspirated plain voiceless stops in many speakers; if you think
>they might have lost their glottalisation, East Armenian is an example of
>/t'/ > /t/ ;-))
Grabar had three contrastive series of stops, transcribed (taking the
dentals as an example) as <t`>, <t>, <d>, and written with letter
symbols ultimately derived from Greek theta, tau and delta.
Obviously, the Classical Armenian pronunciation was closer to that of
modern Eastern Armenian (where they are pronounced /th/, /t'/, /d/)
than that of Western Armenian (where they are pronounced /th/, /d/,
/th/, approximately).
Perhaps the Classical pronunciation of <d> was +aspirated besides
+voiced (that would explain W.Armenian /th/ and the actual
pronunciation /dh/ in some Armenian sub-dialects). As to <t`> and
<t>, I don't think there is any reason to suppose there has been any
change between Classical and Modern Eastern Armenian. <t`> is -voiced
+aspirated, and <t> is -voiced -aspirated, or, equivalently, <t`> is
+voiceless -glottalized, <t> is +voiceless +glottalized.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...