On 04-10-24 01:24,
enlil@... wrote:
> If that's the case, would you see any problems with assigning such
> a value to *h3? Would it be odd within a phonological system that
> contains *h1 = [?]/[h] and *h2 = [h.]?
Not at all. Languages with numerous back obstruents often have skewed
phonemic inventories, simply because of the inherent instability of such
segments. See what a mess Old English velar/palatal obstruent were, in
phonological terms; I wouldn't expect much neatness of PIE either.
Anyway, the comparative evidence takes precedence over any a priori
expectations of phonological symmetry. The system may have been more
symmetrical once upon a time, with, say, velar /x/ and /G/ that later
developed, respectively, into uvular voiceless and pharyngeal voiced
fricatives. Such things happen -- cf. the change of Slavic *g into
fricative /G/ and further into breathy-voiced glottal /H/ in Czech or
Ukrainian, leaving an ugly gap in the stop system.
> My thinking is that it would
> be voiced at least in certain environments and unvoiced in some
> others but is this necessary to have a plausible system? Can a
> system contain only a voiced labial aspirate without an unvoiced
> counterpart?
>
> I know that in English, "h" has both values. We have "happen" where
> the initial "h" is decidedly voiceless and yet intervocalically, as
> in "ahead", we might have a voiced "h". At least this is how I
> pronounce it. Perhaps a similar situation occured in IE where both
> *h1 [h] and *h3 [hW] would have voiced and voiceless values depending
> on their context. Maybe it could be dependent on position within a
> word.
The problem is that the /h/ in <ahead> becomes "voiced" (actually,
breathy-voiced) by assimilation. This kind of allophonic voicing cannot
spread to any adjacent segments (the latter must be voiced in the first
place to make /h/ voiced!). In order to have caused the effect we're
talking about *h3 must have been _distinctively_, not _contextually_
voiced. Similarly, in a language in which /s/ is realised as [z] only
between voiced segments you won't find /-ps-/ --> -bz-.
Piotr