Re: [tied] Animate Dual in -h3 (was: IE Roots)

From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 25357
Date: 2003-08-27

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:37:26 +0000, elmeras2000 <jer@...> wrote:


>> I think the solution has already been provided by Jens. His *R
>> (the "causative morpheme") syllabifies as /o/ everywhere, not just
>> in Greek.
>> The dual oblique suffix was therefore voiced *RW (*GW), as
>> expected in my
>> "asyllabic affix voicing theory" for an asyllabic nominal suffix
>> (or prefix, such as "causative" *R) (cf. nominative *-s > *-z).
>> [This implies
>> that *h3 was in my opinion itself not normally voiced].
>
>Thanks, but no thanks: I believe you are compromising the good parts
>of the "consonantal o" analysis by hooking it up with sheer
>nonsense. To my knowledge, no phonetic rules have been found to back
>any of this.

I'm sorry to hear you think that is "sheer nonsense" (see
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/21817> for more details).

Why would asyllabic endings like *-s, *-t become voiced *-z, *-d (at least
when not sentence final)? I did not address that issue in message 21817,
but it's not terribly difficult to come up with a possible explanation.
The phenomenon occurs at a morpheme boundary (e.g. *pod-z, *to-d). If
morpheme boundaries were previously word-boundaries (that's teh principle
of agglutination), then perhaps there was some overt prosodical marking of
the word/morpheme boundary, such as a rise in pitch, or a glottal stød.
Phonetically [pá:d?s], [ta:?t]. With syllabic endings (e.g. Gen.
*[pa:d?ás] or perhaps, depending on the exact time-frame, an earlier
*[pa:dá?si]), the feature simply vanished without a trace, "absorbed by the
vowel". In the vowelless ("strong") endings, however, the result was
voicing of the consonant: [pá:d?s] > [pod-z] > [po:dz], [ta:?t] > [to-d].

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...