My personal view is that there 4 series of stops /t d t_> t_h/ at each
point of articulation. The voiceless aspirates were apparently the
most marked, though this might be illusory since they were only
(partially) preserved in Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Greek, and Slavic.
Each of these langauge groups present difficulties in reconstructing
the voiceless aspirates. Indo-Iranian apparently lost /t_h/ word
initially (but preserved them in forms with s-mobile) and also
developed new aspirates when voiceless stops where followed by H1 or
H2. Armenian merged /t/ and /t_h/ into /t_h/ and developed aspirates
from s + voiceless stop. Greek lost the voiceless aspirates in
clusters. Slavic only preserved /k_h/. Grassman's Law would have also
possibly obscured some instances of initial voiceless aspirates. But I
digress.
The ejective series would have become voiced stops in most daughter
languages. In Indo-Iranian this would have chain shifted the voiced
stops to voiced aspirates. In Greek the voiced stops were chain
shifted into a merge with the voiceless aspirates. In Germanic it was
the plain stops that merged with the voiceless aspirates. Then these
voiceless aspirates became fricatives. This left the ejectives as
overspecified and they deglottalized. A similar shift occurred in
Armenian. Mostly though, it was a simple merger of the ejectives into
the voiced stops. Also most languages merged the voiceless aspirates
with the plain voiceless stops.
In particular, /p_>/ is a relatively rare sound. It's the most marked
ejective. On the flip side, /b/ is the least marked bilabial stop and
PIE *bH is extremely common. Much more common than either *p, *p_>, or
*p_h. I haven't heard anything about *b > *w though. What kind of
evidence for it is there?
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "meska_jd" <romanas.bulatovas@...> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I am new one to this group. My background - Lithuanian and Slavic
> languages, at the moment I study Irish.
>
> I have a questio re original *p and *b in IE. Somewhere around this
> list people mentioned *b was rare (or non-existant) because it has
> fallen with *w. This made me thinking - is it possible that *p was a
> voiceless pair thereof, .i. [f] or bilabial [F] (phita sign of Greek
> alphabet)? This would explain why *p was lost in Celtic - rather
> enigmatic phenomenon. The problem remain how to interpret *bh - any
> ideas on that?
>
> Best regards,
> Róman
>