From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 47865
Date: 2007-03-15
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:
I've converted the character entities (ʰ) that sneaked in to
nornal Cybalist notation (H).
[> Richard Wordingham wrote:]
> > However, please leave out the examples
> > that can be explained by Grassman's law -
> See that is the problem here.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassmann's_law
> "The fact that deaspiration in Greek took place after the change of
> Proto-Indo-European *bH, dH, gH to /pH, tH, kH/, and the fact that no
> other Indo-European languages have Grassmann's law, show that
> Grassmann's law developed independently in Greek and Sanskrit; it was
> not inherited from PIE."
> Why independently? I would just put Greek and Sanskrit in one family.
At most it's a phonetic constraint common to them. Actually, the law
also applies to Tocharian.
How widely could the law have applied? In most groups the effects
would have been obliterated by the subsequent merger of aspirated and
unaspirated voiced stops, though if it had applied to Slavonic it
would have affected the operation of Winter's law.
> "http://ablauttime.blogspot.com/2004/10/those-old-ie-sound-laws.html
>
> "I've spent the better part of the last two days (or so it seems)
> either explaining to students how Grassman's Law can possible explain
> exceptions to Grimm's law when it didn't even occur in Germanic or
> trying to convince them that there is some reason that they should
> learn what Grimm's Law, Verner's Law, Grassman's Law, and the Great
> English Vowel Shift are.
He should have thrown in some examples from Latin, which has distinct
reflexes for word-initial voiced stops and voiced aspirated stops.
> If one needs two more laws to explain
> exceptions to an earlier law then its best to get rid of all three and
> replace them with the ancient Indian tradition.
> "A different analytical approach was taken by the ancient Indian
> grammarians. In their view, the roots are taken to be underlying
> /trikH/ and /tapH/. These roots persist unaltered in [trikH-es] and
> [tapH-ein]. But if an /s/ follows, it triggers an "aspiration
> throwback" (ATB), in which the aspiration migrates leftward, docking
> onto the initial consonant ([tHrik-s], [tHap-sai])."
Ancient Indian grammarians' views on Greek morphology?
Grassmann's law also explains the stop consonant of the reduplicating
syllable in Greek and, apart from the Law of Palatals, in Sanskrit.
The Indian tradition also fails to explain why ATB applies to a voiced
consonant in Sanskrit and a voiceless consonant in Greek (or does
Grassmann's law affect any voiceless aspirates in Sanskrit?)
Finally, you are still left with correspondences such as
Skt _bandHati_, Greek _pentHeros_, English _bind_
I don't see how the Indian tradition explains such correspondences.
It isn't just Germanic which testifies to an initial voiced aspirate
in such words - Latin does to, e.g.
Skt _budHna_, Greek _putHme:n_, English _bottom_ (OE _boþm_ is more
representative of Germanic - I'm not sure of the relevance of the
surname _Botham_), Latin _fundus_.
Skt _dahati_ 'burn', Greek _tepHra_ 'ash', Latin _foveo:_ 'to be warm'.
You are only talking of an exception to Grimm's law if you start from
the Greek or Sanskrit form - the Latin form also has an exceptional
correspondence to the Greek and Sanskrit.
Richard.