Indian Retroflexes (was: Witzel and Sautsutras)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> What are the boundries of retroflexed consonants in and around the Indian Subcontinent? My understanding is that Pashto picked them up. Wiki says Baluchi did. Any languages north of the Himalayas?

Tibetan seems to have mostly lacked them, though they seem to have made an appearance *after* the adoption of writing. Tibetan reverses letters to represent Indic retroflexes, just as it reverses the vowel <i> to represent Sanskrit syllabic laterals.

Austroasiatic is reconstructed without retroflexes, so it is by no means certain that they are ancient for Munda.

Dravidian is of course quite different to the Indic dental-retroflex contrast. It has a dental-alveolar-retroflex contrast, and it has been suggested that this contributed to the *loss* of some dental-retroflex contrasts in Prakrits.

Going farther afield, retroflexes are reconstructed for Tai-Kadai, though I don't know the details.

Richard.