Re: NATLANG: Maya pronunciation guide

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