lenis and glottalic

Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen jer at cphling.dk
Thu Mar 11 23:40:11 UTC 1999


On Wed, 10 Mar 1999,

[Quoting Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen for]:

> > Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask
> > this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen?

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> I think so.  English and Danish (fortis-lenis) vs. Dutch
> (voiceless-voiced), for instance.  Or East Armenian vs. West
> Armenian.  Finnish vs. Estonian (or is that just the spelling?).

JER (now): Do you mean that the Dutch voiced d comes from a voiceless
lenis d - how can that be known? And that English lenes are voiceless??

[Quoting JER:]

> >- Isn't the only thing "wrong" with the IE system
> >that the aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh ...) have not been accepted?

>[MCV replied:]

> Murmured stops are extremely uncommon. There's also the matter of
> *b.  A labial series *p, *bh simply doesn't make any sense, not
> even if you add a teaspoon of *ph's.

JER (now:) But if bh dh ... are so uncommon, aren't they very unlikely to
arise secondarily out of any other system which must, by implication, be
more stable?

[Quoting JER:]

> >  Is it not a very
> >strong claim that ALL cases of asp.ten. are in last analysis based on
> >mistakes?

>[MCV replied:]

> Not mistakes, but stop+laryngeal, I think.

JER (now): That's what I mean by "mistakes". How can we KNOW that ALL
cases of ph, th, kh are from p t k + laryngeal? The truth is we cannot
know. Then, why do some take this for granted and rush out and change the
system so that their arbitrary choice does not compromise the system then
emerging? Why not simply make the opposite arbitrary choice and assume
that SOME words had aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh) all along (i.e. even
before plain p/t/k + H created some more) and there never was any trouble
with the system? What's the point in looking for trouble? --- I know about
the scarcity of /b/ and the ban on roots of the type deg-/ged-, and I
accept the glottalic theory as the best explanation of these details, but
only for the relevant period: Roots weren't created (or, recreated) the
day before the IE unity broke up. If the lack of *deg- means that it was
once *t'ek'- with TWO glottalics one of which changed into something else,
that change can have any age. We only know that its RESULT was present in
the IE protolanguage, not that its CAUSE remained: there are comparable
holes in the daughter languages (say, Latin) for which glottalics are not
assumed to be synchronically present.

Jens



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