lenis and glottalic

Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com
Sun Mar 14 04:28:02 UTC 1999


JENS:
 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:

Which is the precise reason why I'm afraid of reconstructing ejectives
in IE proper. However, I don't think that it is better to just
reconstruct *ph, *kh, *th in absence of strong evidence just to balance
the stop system. That appears lazy in my view. IE lgs seem to only
support three types of stops.

On the subject of lenis/fortis, Miguel seems to be suggesting that lenis
stops (or "long stops") tend to voice more often than fortis stops. So
might I ask, is this true?

--------------------------------------------
Glen Gordon
glengordon01 at hotmail.com

[ Moderator's comment:
  "Long" stops are more often treated as "fortis" than as "lenis", in my
  experience.  Voicing of intervocalic stops is usually considered a lenition,
  of course, so one might expect lenis stops to be more subject to voicing.
  --rma ]



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