--- 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?
No. I've uploaded to the files section an excerpt from
'The Sanskrit Language' by T. Burrows, and an excerpt
from 'Proto-Indo-European Phonology' by Lehmann on the
matter, in which each explains how the series arose as
combinations of plain stop plus laryngeal. I've named
them 'T. Burrow on the Voiceless Aspirates' and 'Lehmann
on the Voiceless Aspirates' respectively.
> Many books I've come across does not postulate them for PIE.
> On the contrary, my own teacher of IE Comparative Linguistics
> (W. Smoczynski) argues that their presence is necessary in
> order for the system to be phonologically complete (i.e. to
> have the opposition between the voiced and voiceless aspirates).
Even if typology truly requires a series of voiceless
aspirates for the P.I.E. sound system, it doesn't require
its members to have functioned as independent phonemes,
and so they could have well existed solely as allophones
of another series, such as of the plain voiceless stops
or the voiced aspirates.
David