From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 41810
Date: 2005-11-06
----- Original Message -----
From: "david_russell_watson" <liberty@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 06, 2005 1:23 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: PIE voiceless aspirates
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
<snip>
> If <prthus> really represents something like /pRt-xus/ then <th>
> does not represent an aspirated voiceless stop. Why would Old
> Indian have used one letter to represent what, to their ears,
> would have had to have been a sequence of two sounds /t/ + /x/,
> in this case, in two different syllables?
The change of *t + *h2 to *th is at least as old, I assume,
as Proto-Indo-Aryan, and maybe even as old as Proto-Indo-
Iranian, and so came centuries before the analysis of Vedic
and Sanskrit by the ancient Indian grammarians. The actual
writing of those languages, of course, came even later still.
***
Patrick:
Well, let me start with a few questions since what you are writing makes no
sense to me.
Let us say, as you do, that the change from /t-x/ to /tH/ happened in
Proto-Indo-Aryan.
The writing system came centuries later.
If /tH/ had been in force for centuries, then the letter for <th> could only
have represented /tH/.
Written <prthus> could only have represented /pR-tHús/.
After the conversion, and after the invention of the letter, why would
anyone have divided it any differently? Why would they even have been
motivated to try to do so?
If there is evidence that it was divided differently, then our understanding
of Old Indian syllabic division needs revising since /t-x/ could not have
figured into the equation.
***
<snip>
> If Old Indian <th> represented an earlier affricate /ts/, would the
> syllable division not have been /pRt-sus/?
No, if it were truly an affricate, then it could be divided
in no other way besides [pR.tsus], as the very definition of
an affricate is 'a sequence of stop plus homorganic fricative
between which no syllable boundary may occur'.
"Tree chopper", [trIj.tsa.p&r] contains an affricate, while
"treat shopper", [trIjt.sa.p&r] does not.
***
Patrick:
Are you really sure. German Karpfen is /karp-fN/, is it not? And is <pf> not
an affricate? And where did you get the definition of 'affricate' above? Do
you think that the sequence spread over one or two words makes a difference?
***
David
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