Re: NATLANG: Maya pronunciation guide

From:    Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
> 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?
It is safe to say that by far the Glottalic Hypothesis is not
the majority opinion nowadays. Although it clarifies why so few
Traditional Brugmannian *b's (as opposed to *p's or *bh's) are
reconstructable, it complicates other changes.  (For details, I
suggest you review Joseph Salmon's _Glottalic Hypothesis: Survey
and Synthesis_.)  The original idea behind it was not that there
was ever any *p' in the first place, but just that there was a
gap in the series, which as I noted is not uncommon. Thus I see
no reason to assume some progression like *p' > *b' > (say) *bh
or whatever, since the gap appears to extend as far back into
the history of Indo-European as anyone can reconstruct protoforms
for.


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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
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Chicago, IL 60637