Re: Can relationships between languages be determined after 80,000 y

From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 52085
Date: 2008-01-30

----- Original Message -----
From: Rick McCallister
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 12:04 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Can relationships between languages be determined after
80,000 years?


Oooh, missed Welsh --my ancestor Gruffudd ap Llewelyn
will never forgive me.
I suppose it also existed in early Gaelic and perhaps
long ago in some variety of N. French e.g. "faith" <
Latin fides
But is /T/ essentially a transitory phoneme? --if one
can say that, i.e. one that normally only exists for a
short period of time? English has had it since the
days of Gmc but most other Gmc languages have lost it.
Modern Hebrew and most dialects of modern Arabic have
lost it. In Ibero-Romance, it's limited to N Spain,
where I think it crosses over to Galician and I don't
know about Asturian or Aragonese or if any arcane
forms of Catalan have it.
The Arabic emphatics are often said to be extremely
rare, especially emphatic /d./ but mainly by people
who teach Arabic. Is this so? Does 'ayn exists outside
Semitic or AA? It once existed in Hebrew and I can
only guess that it exists in Aramaic, since it's
mainly a relic language surrounded by Arabic
==========
tsalam? t?ob

What are you noting /T/ ?
is it <th> in th-ink ?
or emphatic /t?/ ?

Arnaud