[gothic-l] problems with evolution of Gothic vowel system

[David Salo]

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><< >     Proto-Indo-European had only one sibilant... only one fricative
>really,
>> and that was s...
>
>Ok, that's not right, I can't agree. No derived Indo-european
>language has such a simple scheme. For such strong assert you
>need a good couple of books to convince me. >>
>
>Well, it sure seems like it ain't natural for a language to have a ton of
>stops and only one fricative, but it's so. And there ARE derived
>Indo-European languages with just one fricative, take Classical Greek for an
>example. The Modern Greek fricatives come from the Ancient aspirated and
>voiced stops.

   To be more precise, PIE had only one sibilant PHONEME /s/; but in spoken
PIE it may have been realized as two different sounds [s] and [z], with [z]
occurring before voiced stops (b, d, g, etc.) and [s] elsewhere.  Various
other conditioned variations arose, such as between [s] and [S] (=sh) in
Slavic and Indo-Iranian; as their conditions altered or vanished, they
became phonemic.

   In the Indic language Pâ.li, which has an even larger number of stops
than are usually reconstructed for PIE (it distinguishes labial, dental,
retroflex, palatal, and velar positions of articulation as well as
voiceless unaspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced
aspirated modes and it fills ALL of the slots with phonemically contrastive
consonants!) the three sibilants which it inherited from Sanskrit [s < PIE
/s/; .s (retroflex s) also < PIE /s/ and "s (palatalized s) < PIE /k'/]
have collapsed into a single phoneme /s/ which ALSO has the single
realization [s].  Not only is it the only sibilant, it's also the only
fricative, unless you count "v", a pronunciation of the phoneme /w/ which
was probably somewhat more fricated and less velarized than English w.  So
yes, it is possible that a language can have only one fricative but lots
and lots of stops!

/\     WISTR LAG WIGS RAIHTS
\/            WRAIQS NU IST                               <> David Salo
<dsalo at softhome.net> <>



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