Lenis and Fortis in IE

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Glen Gordon" <glengordon01 at hotmail.com> wrote:

Just a few loose comments:

>However, I figure that the _fortis_ stops are what Gam. call the
>"glottalic" and would thus correspond to the *d/*g series. The lenis
>consonants are the voiced aspirate (*dh) and voiceless plain stops (*t)
>of old

But the internal PIE evidence, if you want to introduce the
notions of lenis and fortis at all, is that *t is consistently
fortis/unvoiced, and it's even written <tt> in Hittite.

>Optionally, assuming only that you accept Etruscan and IE relationship,
>a correspondance can be seen between the two as shown above. Note if
>Etruscan <pi> matches IE *bhi then it suggests to me that a loss of *p:
>was very early and affects both languages.

Two things about Etruscan: spellings with plain (p, t, c) and
aspirate (ph, th, ch) stops often occur for what are apparently
the same lexical items (which may depend on dialect and/or
period).  The other thing is the existence of the fricatives <f>,
<z> /ts/ and <h>, which must also be accounted for.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam