From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 41776
Date: 2005-11-06
----- Original Message -----
From: "etherman23" <etherman23@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2005 4:04 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: PIE voiceless aspirates
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "aquila_grande" <aquila_grande@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > I wonder: Are there any instances of phonemic difference between
> > aspirated stops and stops + h in IE?
> >
> > If this is not the case, perhaps everything that look like aspirated
> > stops were stops + h(1,2or3) in IE, and the whole consept of aspirated
> > stops an illution?
>
> There are examples of Sanskrit having a voiced aspirate where
> everywhere else has a voiced nonaspirate. For example *eg'(H)o. These
> are probably best explained as voiced stop plus laryngeal. There are
> some instances of this with voiceless aspirates. For example *ponthos.
> In Sanskrit there's the expected pantHas, yet Iranian languages show
> alternation between a voiceless stop and a voiceless fricative (<
> voiceless aspirate). This makes sense if in Iranian languages a vowel
> sometimes existed between the stop and a laryngeal, and other times
> not. All of this suggests that stop+laryngeal > aspirated stop only in
> Indo-Aryan. Actually in the Slavic languages this has also been
> proposed for voiceless velar stops followed by a laryngeal. On the
> flip side there are examples where it seems unlikely that a laryngeal
> is the cause of the voiceless aspirate.
***
Patrick:
My own idea is that PPIE had the contrast glottalized / non-glottalized.
When glottalized stops were de-glottalized and voiced, non-glottalized stops
were aspirated. This meant that non-glottalized affricates, which had
previously developed to aspirated stops, became phonetically the same as
non-glottalized now aspirated stops.
*t > *tH; ts > *tH
When affricates were simplified, in some instances, the fricative element
remained.
***