Elamite

[Anthony Appleyard]

 On 16 Nov 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote:

> Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible.  Did Classical Greek lack
> final tau's? If it had them, then it constitutes an example of a language
> that had this contrast.

Classical Greek did not have final {t}.
We can't tell with Mycenean (Linear B) Greek, as the spelling omits many
consonants which are at the ends of syllables.
But: Greek (1) {egraphe} = "he was writing" < IE *{eghrabhet}, but (2)
{graphe} = "write!" (imperative) < IE *{grabhe} without a final {t}. In
Classical Greek (1) adds a final n-ephelkoustikon if the next word starts with
a vowel or h-vowel, but (2) does not, as if that -n was altered from an
earlier -t derived from the old final consonant persisting in liaison.

The Greeks were capable of pronouncing final stops, as is shown e.g. in
Aristophanes: {op o:-op} as a spelling of a noise made while rowing a boat.

 Date:         Mon, 20 Nov 2000 14:12:02 -0500
 Reply-To:     Indo-European at xkl.com
 Sender:       The INDO-EUROPEAN mailing list <indo-european at xkl.com>
 From:         Rich Alderson <alderson+mail at panix.com>
 Subject:      Re: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o
               Ablaut)
 Comments: To: Indo-European at xkl.com
 In-Reply-To:  <4.3.1.2.20001116081819.00b4b420 at getmail.friesen.net> (message
               from Stanley Friesen on Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:28:17 -0800)

 Classical Greek had a very limited set of permitted finals:  All the vowels
 (5 short, 7 long), /Vn/, /Vs/, /Vps/ and /Vks/, where the two clusters involve
 neutralization of voicing and aspiration, as for example in /thriks/ "hair"
 where the genitive /trikhos/ undergoes Grassmann.  In those cases where a
 dental would cluster with /s/, an old rule reduces the cluster simply to /s/.

 > Or how about Sanskrit?  Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops?

 Indeed.  All absolutely final stops are voiceless and unaspirated, though the
 sandhi rules conspire not to allow many absolutely final stops.  The citation
 forms of nouns, though, is a good example, being the nominative singular--lots
 of cluster simplification and the like going on.

 BTW, the usual notation for the theta and edh sounds in 7-bit environments
 like mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups is /T/ and /D/ respectively, leaving
 /th/ and /dh/ to represent aspirates, all according to the 1992 ASCII IPA
 standard, described by the author at

         http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/

                                                                 Rich Alderson