Re: PIE voiced aspirates (?)

On 2008-05-28 03:58, etherman23 wrote:

> What's the objection to reinterpreting voiced aspirates as voiceless
> aspirates? It would be typologically natural. It fits with Greek,
> which preserves many phonological features of PIE. I-Ir simply added
> the feature of voicing. The Proto-Italic changes make more sense
> starting from voiceless aspirates. In Tocharian and Proto-Anatolian
> the feature of aspiration was simply lost. In Germanic and Armenian
> they became voiced, perhaps setting of a chain shift (Grimm's Law). In
> the other languages they simply merged with the existing voiced stops.

Aye, there's the rub. How do voiceless aspirates "simply merge" with
voiced stops? And why should they have been so prone to voicing that we
find their unambiguously voiced reflexes in IIr., BSl., Celt., Gmc.,
Arm. and Alb.? Also, if there's any truth in Olsen's preaspiration
hypothesis, PIE allophonic *[tH] and *dH give different reflexes at
least in Indo-Iranian.

Piotr