From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 70277
Date: 2012-10-25
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@> wrote:Some combination of (a) and (b) easily accounts for the absence of any evidence of retroflexion in Mitanni Aryan. It took long enough for the Akkadian-speakers to sort out how to use Sumerian symbols to distinguish voicing and emphatics.
> [..]
> > Among items that I offered, Shiv doesn't tell why retroflexed consonant sets do not show up in IE languages that are not from the subcontinent.
> For the same reason:
> a) That British after living in India for many years did not pick up retroflex consonants. See the hindi spelling of Pune where the n is retroflex and contrast it with how british wrote it.
> b) That people in south east asia (thailand/burma/cambodia etc) who were taught religious texts both in Sanskrit and Pali did not pick up retroflex consonants.
> c) And most importantly the Gypsies who migrated out of India lost their retroflex consonants once they got to Europe.Retroflex and dentals should show different reflexes if they lasted long enough. For example, Romany has r and r^ as reflexes of the retroflex stops. However, I thought phonetically unmotivated retroflexes were infrequent in the oldest Vedic, suggesting that phonemically distinctive emphatics were a recent innovation in Old Indic.
> d) Lastly do retroflex stops in Swedish and Norwegian count?No. The only major commonality with Sanskrit is the parallel development of -rn-, and Sanskrit keeps that as a sequence of distinct consonants.