[tied] Re: PIE voiceless aspirates

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

> > > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "etherman23" <etherman23@...>

wrote:

> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dariusz_piwowarczyk"

<dariusz_piwowarczyk@...> wrote:

> > >
> > > Is there a necessity to reconstruct voiceless aspirates
> > > (i.e. ph th kh) for the Indo-European proto-language?
> >
> > The overwhelming majority opinion is that they're unnecessary.
>
> And that majority opinion is absolutely wrong.
>
> PIE *p/*t/*k and *ph/*th/*kh have different correspondents
> in related languages; and the correspondents for *ph/*th/*kh
> for the greater part, correspond to the _preserved_ voiceless
> aspirates in Old Indian.

But of course the two sets produced different results
in _some_ dialects, just as one would expect a single
phoneme and a sequence of two phonemes might, and of
course the second series corresponds to the voiceless
aspirates of Indo-Aryan, but that proves nothing at all
in regard to whether or not they were an independent
set of phonemes in P.I.E.

The best evidence indicates that they were not.

David