Re: Horses' Asses and the Indo-European Homeland

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, David wrote:
> >
> > Why would aspiration in _front_ of a vowel ever lead to
> > its lengthening? Do you know anything at all about the
> > sorts of sound changes that actually take place in real
> > human languages? Did an aspirated stop suddenly split
> > into a sequence of a stop followed by an 'h'? Did the
> > 'h' then somehow move to the other side of the vowel so
> > it could later disappear leaving a lengthened vowel?
>
> The process has been described at least a hundred times on
> this list and other related lists:
>
> Aspiration [h] becomes voiced [H] which is assimilated to
> the quality of the following vowel: [H] + [a] -> [a] + [a]
> -> [aa].

Give one real-world example of such a process, but not
before you give an example of an aspirated stop, which
is a single phoneme, becoming a sequence of two, as is
first required before your second change can even take
place.

This all reminds of your misunderstanding of affricates,
which you would have had be any sequence of homorganic
stop and fricative, treating them as a unit for the sake
of one posited change, but then elsewhere as a sequence
of two for the sake of another posited change. Just as
with so many of your formulas, the real end is to secure
as much illegitimate leeway for comparison as possible.

My question to the list in general is this: during the
evolution of any language has a single phoneme ever been
seen to split into two or more; merge yes, but split?

David