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Re: CHAT: Glottalized consonants

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Saturday, May 15, 1999, 16:34
Danny Wier wrote:
> The Neogrammarian system is a clear violation of linguistic universals, but > of course Greenberg came after the Neogrammarians. A voiced stop implies a > voiceless counterpart, so there would have to either be a four-way > distinction as in Sanskrit and daughter languages (t-th-d-dh), or the > three-way with ejective of Armenian (t-t'-d).
Well, to be fair, there was originally a reconstructed fourway contrast between t-th-d-dh, but th was later abandoned. It's been argued that the voiced aspirate is a holdover from the day when Sanskrit had an undue influence on reconstructed PIE. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor