Retroflexion

[David L. White]

> here are the regular processes that led to them in Sanskrit:

> ruki-s -> .s
> n that follows r or .s, even with vowels, labials, y, v intervening -> .n
> t/th that immediately follows .s -> .t/.th
> s' (from PIE *k') +t(h) -> .s.t(h)
> h from PIE gh' + t/dh -> .dh (with h -> zero, preceding vowel lengthened.)
> ruki s + d/dh -> .d/.dh (with s -> zero, preceding vowel lengthened if not
> long by position)

        Many thanks for the memory-refreshing examples.

> Only the last two have retroflexing environments that go to zero in
> Sanskrit. However, they are rare in practive: the penultimate can occur
> only with ani.t roots ending in *gh' (only a handful in Sans); the `standard
> examples of the last are isolated words such as ni:.da (< *ni-sd-o, nest)
> and aorist 2nd pl mid, an infrequent category.

        Of course it is only the lost retroflexing environments that are
relevant to phonemicization.  That they are rare is suspicious, though
strictly speaking only one case would be required.

> In Prakrits, -rt- sometimes becomes -.t.t- (and vocalic r+t can become
> a/i/u+.t). But this is dialect dependent and it seems to vary within other
> families as well. Similar developments seem to have occurred in Norwegian,
> and this is why Hock (loc. cited by Oberoi) objects to attributing this to
> `substratum'.

        The idea that only developments that cannot be explained internally
should be explained externally (which seems to be lurking here) is nicely
dismissed in one of the earlier chapters of Thomason and Kaufman.

> Turning now to substratum explanations:

> See now T.A. Hall in Lingua 102 (1997) pp. 203-221: Contrast of
> two laminal shibilants, one alveopalatal and one palato-alveolar (his terms),
> is rare to non-existent and when sound changes lead to such a contrast,
> a shift to a more stable system will follow. One common repair
> mechanism is to make one sound apical. This is the explanation for IA
> retroflex s.

        What is the supposed origin of the contrast between palato-alveolar
and aleopalatal sibilants in the first place?  I note (with some
trepidation) that L&M assert that having "high-domed palates", which renders
retroflex articulations unsually easy to make and distinctive in sound, is
an Indian racial trait.  I find it difficult to believe that it is just a
coincidence that the one IE language that went into India developed such
sounds.

> It is interesting to see the evolution of the view on .s: Once upon a time,
> it was considered to be limited to South Asia. Masica, "Genesis of a
> linguistic area" lists only Chinese in addition. Hall makes gives a large
> number of examples of .s vs 's like contrast, and deems it a
`near-universal'.

        What is this thing " 's "?  A palatalized /s/ or just a typo?  One
of the more common ways of making a [s^] sound is effectively
semi-retroflex.  Perhaps this has something to do with why such sounds in
Russian are now "hard", though in the beginning they should have been (I
guess) "soft".  In any event, it is the retroflex series as a whole that
arouses my suspicions, not just /.s/.

> Also, all the three sibilants fall together as s in MIA. If .s is due to
> substratum influence, this is weird. The substratum induces a change, then
> conveniently disappers allowing Prakrits (which one would to show more
> substratum influence) to reverse the process.

        Not necessarily.  There is a huge span of time involved.  Even the
Vedas do not "remember" a time when Vedic speakers were not in India.
"Language X" could well have died out in the interval, and would hardly be
expected to reach out and exert any sort of influence from the grave.

> Note also that -rt- becomes some sort of (apical) shibilant in (Late?)
> Avestan: This suggests that -rt- was already retracted in PI-Ir and that the
> development of -rt- to -.t.t- in MIA need not invoke the deux ex machina
> of substratum influence.

        Coincidence is, in its own way, just as much a deus ex machina.  The
question is whether the developments seen are really normal from internal
causes alone.
        It is fairly normal for /r/s to be retroflected, and assimilation of
a following dental, as evidently in Norwegian, would not be surprising.
Indeed traditional Sanskrit grammar, if I have understood it correctly,
regards the difference between /r/ and /l/ as being that /r/ is retroflex
whereas /l/ is dental.  So at least phonetically, this sort of development
is normal.  Whether that would lead to a whole retroflex series is another
question.
        I note that what we seem to have here is a conspiracy, as in the
Slavic Conspiracy of Open Syllables, where it seems that some substantial
portion of the population was thinking, or feeling, "We need more
retroflexes here", and seizing upon any convenient phonetic pretext to
create them.  Again we, or at least I, must wonder,  if this sort of thing
is normal from internal causes alone, 1) why we do not see it more often,
and 2) why it happened only in India, where the pre-IE population was
probably both racially and linguistically pre-disposed to favor retroflexes.

> Regarding phonemic status of retroflexes: First of all, note that s/'s/.s
> contrast of Sanskrit is exactly parallel to h/s/s^ of Avestan. Nobody, to
> my knowledge, worries whether Avestan has three phonemes here or
> two. Why then should we worry about Sanskrit?

        It would seem better to answer both questions than neither.  One
good question would be why the development was to /s^/ in Avestan and /.s/
in Sanskrit rather than the other way around.

> Secondly, I don't know how phonemes are defined in inflected languages:
> Do we use inflected words or dictionary forms?

        We use inflected words, in my opinion.

> An additional problem is sandhi: If two words are homophones in some
> contexts due to sandhi, but not in all contexts, do they count for contrast?

        Yes, in my opinion.

> Due to the fact that the conditioning environments for retroflexion do not
> generally go to zero in Sanskrit, it is hard to find inherited contrasting
> words.  If we add the accent, it gets even harder:

        We should not consider the accent, in my opinion.  What flies under
the phonemic radar, so to speak, and therefore is merely phonetic, is what
is predictable from phonetic implementation.  Unless there is something
about the phonetic implementation of stress in Sanskrit that somehow implies
retroflexion (and I find it difficult to imagine what this could be), stress
does not count.  So the task of finding minimal, or near-minimal, pairs is
easier.

        But please note that I am not questioning that the various
retroflexes were phonemic in Sanskrit (after a time), only how they got that
way.  What I would guess is that in the few cases where a
retroflex-conditioning environment went to zero, this was in part because
very many speakers already possessed the ability to hear retroflexes as
phonemic, so that for them, no new contrast was created.  Likewise I would
guess that the main reason that the phonetic implementation of Sanskrit (but
not of Avestan) tended to produced so many cases of retroflexion was that
many speakers already had retroflexes on the brain, or in the mouth.