IE Plosive System: DLW Explains It All For You

iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu
Wed Mar 17 18:33:18 UTC 1999


	The Javanese system (it is relevant, bear with me) has recently
been re-analyzed as being one of, in L&M's terms, plosives with "stiff
voice" versus plosives with "slack voice".  These two are basically just
weaker versions of larngealization and murmur, respectively.  The two
series might also be termed "fortis' and "lenis".  (Thus I am in effect
agreeing with MCV after all, after much baring of teeth that would have
seemed to presage the oppostite.)
	But these distinctions, which are of course a matter of phonation
(states of the glottis and all that), are necessarily realized in the
associated vowels.  Not surprisingly, there are languages, for example
Bruu, that have the same distinction but regard it as part of the vowels.
Thus they have what might be called
	
		stiff-voiced/semi-laryngealized/"fortis" vowels
				versus
		slack-voiced/semi-murmured/"lenis" vowels.

	If PIE has such a thing, which it later re-analyzed as belonging
to the Cs, that might explain a few things.  In an original TVT(not
followed by V) syllable, a fortis vowel if reanalyzed in such a way could
only lead to a newly "modal" vowel flanked by two fortis plosives, and
likewise a lenis vowel could only lead to two lenis plosives. Thus mixing
of the two types in one root could wind up effectively (though
accidentally) illegal, if the restrictions originaly proper to the closed
syl type were generalized.
	Before going on to the next part of my brilliant "tour de force",
I need someone to answer for me a very basic question: does Semitic permit
consecutive pharngealized ("emphatic") consonants in its roots?

					DLW



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