--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <G.and.P@...> wrote:
>
> >Please see the files section for a debate between Liberman and Thundy
> >on Grimm's Law.
>
> Why? Perhaps you could tell us what is significant about this
debate? I
> don't mean a summary, I mean why we should bother.
The only significance I can see is the question of whether the part of
Grimm's law expressed as 'voiced aspirates became unaspirated voiced
consonants in Germanic' is in any sense true if the glottalic
hypothesis is true and what are conventionally reconstructed as voiced
aspirates were not 'aspirated'. Truth would remain in the form of the
correspondences it captures - the question is then how much the
phonetic aspects of a 'law' are an essential part of the law. I would
say that the truth of a statement such as PIE *bH > Germanic *b is
independent of the phonetic realisation of the sounds.
Incidentally, I think a lot of confusion and heat is avoided by
treating the conventional reconstructions as merely a phonetic
spelling, where the relationship between symbols and sounds need not
be any more obvious than, say, pinyin.
Richard.