Munda in Early NW India

[Vidhyanath Rao]

From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote, on June 13, 2001,
> [...]  Hence it appears that Sanskrit has 5  phonemically distinct
> fricatives.

Four: visarga is an allophone of /s/.

>>>[...] OTOH if the traditional (Brugmannian) voiced aspirates were
>>> "really" voiced fricatives, the transition to voiced aspirates in Indic
>>> could be viewed as systematic substrate-induced fortition, if the
>>> Munda-substrate hypothesis is in the ballpark.

> It's not hard to find examples of voiced fricatives becoming voiced stops.
> [...] The phonetic systems in Iranian and MIA are thus viewed as more
> conservative than the Sanskrit system, and there is no need to explain "the
> aspirated series going to a voiced fricative". The trouble lies in explaining
> the reverse, namely the voiced aspirated series in Indic, and this is where
> substrate may be in the ballpark.

First of all, *d and *dh etc produced distinct phonemes in Germanic
which still needs to be explained: Doesn't the [d] in "da Bulls" merge
with [d] in "dun"?

I don't follow MIA being "more conservative in this regard": PIE *dh,
*gh, *bh all merge into /h/ in MIA (intervocally), but remained distinct
in Sanskrit, except for *dh going to h in verbal endings and
some words. We can see the process happening: The verbal adjective from
*dheH is dhita in RV fairly often, but hita becomes more and more common
as time goes on. How is MIA more conservative? Even in MIA we from -ddh-
(from Sanskrit -gdh-/-bdh-, if I remember right). How?

If the substrate was Munda (as suggested by somebody), why did it
conveniently disappear to leave MIA to change these fricatives to voiced
h, but leave survivors? Or is another case where a unknown substratum
operated only to disappear when it would have become troublesome for
observed outcomes? In both cases, why should we assume that the MIA
changes g, d, b -> zero and gh, dh, bh -> h were unrelated?

> My main point was that traditional PIE is short on fricatives and long on
> "laryngeals".

I have no opinions on the phonology of laryngeals. I am perfectly
willing to assume that PIE had a fricative with every series, with
laryngeals being what we can deduce of their existence, if  a complete
theory can be put forth. I object, on principle, to fix-ups that invoke
substratum explanations whenever somebody points out problems.

To put it more positively: Anyone who proposes a new systemic
reconstruction must provide a complete trajectory into attested daughter
languages that can reasonably be continued into historically known
subsequent changes. This is a tall order of IE, I know; but to ignore it
opens the door to unchecked speculation.