Can Armeno-Germanic Occlusives be Original? (was: Latin barba in di

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> I Tocharian, all rows of stops fall together, and traces of Grassmann's
> Law in Tocharian (demonstrable omly for *dH) show that after the

loss of

> aspiration *dH merged with *d. Since PToch. *d was lenited out of
> existence before sonorants, it must have been some sort of [d] rather
> than an ejective or a plain voiceless stop.

What about a preglottalised stop? However, Grassman's law seems a
pretty good indicator of something like [dH].

> There is therefore nothing
> exotic about the pre-Tocharian system: it was most likely just
> *t, *d, *dH.

Which is itself pretty exotic :) However, Tocharian matching the
majority is a pretty good indicator that Germanic and Armenian have
innovated.

> In Anatolian, we have a two-way contrast between voiced and
> voiceless (or lenis and fortis) stops, with a merger of *d and *dH on
> the voiced/lenis side. How is that supposed to resemble Germanic or
> Armenian?

Fortis v. lenis is not very different from aspirate v. voiceless. As
to the reflex of *dH, that could merge either way if it started as
[d]. For example, in Western Armenian, we appear to have /d/ > /tH/,
though worldwide the commoner merger is [d] > [t] rather than [d] >
[tH]. (What is the merger path for Western Armenian?)

Richard.