From: Joao S. Lopes
Message: 64529
Date: 2009-07-31
On 2009-07-31 15:21, george knysh wrote:
> ****GK: What about some of the languages that are substrate donors to
> Germanic (but not to Baltic or Slavic)? BTW I found the notion that both
> Baltic and Slavic lacked a phoneme "f" originally wildly
> interesting. ..Any other language groups in that category>*** *
PIE had no *f or *v, to begin with. Nor did Sanskrit, or Classical Greek
({phi} stood for an aspirated stop), or Proto-Celtic. .. In general,
early Indo-European languages had relatively few fricatives. If you want
examples of f-less languages in other families, there are plenty of
them. In the indigenous languages of Australia, where fricatives of any
kind are vanishingly rare, /f/ doesn't exist at all, I believe.
Piotr