Re: NATLANG: Maya pronunciation guide

Thomas Wier wrote at 2005-06-16 07:47:52 (-0500)
 > Tim May wrote:
 > > From:    Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
 > > >
 > > > An odd feature of this is that it has b' but no simple b,
 > > > especially as the b' sound is characterized only as a voiced
 > > > labial stop.
 > >
 > > Yes, I noticed that, and it is rather odd.  /b/ _is_ sometimes
 > > implosive in modern Mayan languages.  And since it's the only
 > > contrastively voiced stop, one wonders whether it might resemble
 > > the glottalized series more than the plain...
 >
 >
 > 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'/.

Yes, I looked a bit further after answering, and this is the case -
some modern Mayan languages have a three-way /p/ /b'/ /p'/ contrast,
but apparently /p'/ arose (from both /p/ and /b'/) relatively
recently.  Note that there's no /p'/ row in the Maya syllabary I
linked to earlier.

See here for more details:
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~wichmann/EMC-Spain-submitwpd.pdf


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