--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> On 2006-06-20 17:29, mkelkar2003 wrote:
> > Says
> > Gamkrelidze, the new system "has brought the protolanguage closer to
> > some of its daughter languages without resorting to such difficult
> > phonological transformations as that from /g/ to /k/."
> I see. Ejective /k'/ to voiced /g/ (in about ten branches!) is fine and
> dandy, but simple devoicing (in two branches) is "difficult".
Kortlandt's examples (Cockney, Winter's law and Sindhi implosives)
seem to argue for an intermediate preglottalised intermediate *?g. I
don't know how difficult the change from ejective to preglottalised
is, but the change from preglottalised to voiced has occurred in most
of the Tai languages. Of course, this may just be diffusion - the
deviations (as opposed to conservative hold-outs) are in Burma and on
the Chinese coast, where we have *?b > /m/.
Don't we have (apparent) devoicing in more than two branches? Besides
Germanic and Armenian, we have Tocharian, Anatolian and possibly
Thracian. I'm not sure how consistent this is with a notion of
diffusion in the development of *[k'] to /g/.
Richard.