On 2007-06-07 21:33, tgpedersen wrote:
> Did you want to comment on my proposal for PIE spirantization or not?
Not in the last posting, but in one of the earliest ones I admitted the
possibility that *p and *k had fricative allophones (before *t and *s)
well before Grimm's Law. This could be a feature linking Germanic with
Celtic, at least areally (but hardly with Iranian, which had
spirantisation in a different context). I doubt , however, if anything
of the sort can be proposed for PIE. You'd have to propose massive
despirantisations not only for Baltic, Indic or Latin but also e.g. for
Greek and Hittite. That's more expensive than "no change at all". Both
pre-obstruent lenitions like pt, kt > ft, xt and fricative
dissimilations like xT, fT > xt, ft are fairly common changes
cross-linguistically. Both of them have taken place in colloquial Modern
Greek, for example:
ptero- > ftero 'feather'
hepta > efta 'seven'
okto: > oxto 'eight'
kHtHes > xtes 'yesterday'
etc.
Piotr