Re: PIE voiced aspirates (?)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> 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?

The change of voiceless stop to voiced stop is pretty common. So I
assume that you accept that this change is possible. I also assume
that there no objection to the possibility of loss of aspiration,
since that would have to be common in the traditional reconstruction.
And of course phonological mergers happen quite frequently (and indeed
would have been common in the traditional reconstruction). So what's
the rub in three common changes actually happening?

> 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.?

Because lenition is a common change. One might just as well ask why
RUKI is so common, or why /a/ and /o/ frequently merged, or why
rhotacism is so common, or why umlaut is so common in Germanic languages.

> Also, if there's any truth in Olsen's preaspiration
> hypothesis, PIE allophonic *[tH] and *dH give different reflexes at
> least in Indo-Iranian.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with his arguments.However,I would assume
that laryngeals in IIr. aspirated stops after the voiceless aspirated
series became voiced. In no other IE language do we see this
aspiration occur (except possibly Slavic and then only *k) so I have a
hard time believing that this aspiration was a PIE feature.