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Re: NATLANG: Maya pronunciation guide

From:Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
Date:Thursday, June 16, 2005, 13:22
On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 07:47:52 -0500, Thomas Wier <trwier@...> wrote:

>Indeed, it's not very surprising. The voiceless labial ejective >/p'/ is highly marked crosslinguistically, with roughly a third >of languages having a glottalized series not having that one. Among >other things, it has been claimed as one of the arguments favoring >the glottalic theory of the PIE obstruent system. The markedness >hierarchy with ingressives, on the other hand, is the inverse, with >/b'/ being least marked and /g'/ being most. In principle, I find it >entirely plausible that the language originally contrasted simply >glottalization with nonglottalization, and the marked /p'/ arose as >or was lautgesetzed into being /b'/.
If the glottalic theory is correct for IE (which I think it is), do you think that could be what happened to */p'/? That is, it became */b'/ and then merged with some other labial phoneme? - Rob