--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
> My last objection, or really observation, is that I am not aware of
this
> 'hardening outside of PIE-derived languages though my best is that
Richard
> does.
Depends what you want. The velar fricatives are not difficult, as you
later said - Thai has syllable-initial *x and *G becoming kh-, making
to the letters kho khuat and kho khon becoming redundant. Of course
we have modern examples in IE languages - there is (or was) an island
dialect of Gaelic in which <dh> and <gh> were pronounced /g/, and we
have standard English <hough> homophonous with <hock> and deriving
from OE _hoh_, though perhaps via the compound _hohsinu_ 'hamstring',
and dialect 'hekfore' for standard 'heifer', deriving from OE
_heahfore_ and similar forms.
For glottal stops, examples are more difficult. Final glottal and
velar stops merge in many languages, but finding one where the merged
form becomes a velar stop is more difficult. The best I can do is
note MW16 at
http://seasrc.th.net/indic/indoref.htm , which implies
hardening of final glottal stops in some dialects of Malay.
A possible example of sporadic hardening is Khmer /tok/ table, whose
HK transliterations is <tu>, indicating a final glottal stop. The
corresponding form in Thai is /to?/ with the high tone, but I don't
know the history of these clearly related words, beyond the fact that
the Thai word cannot be a regularly inherited word.
Richard.