Re: PIE -> Sanskrit

 --- Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> wrote:
> I'm skimming through this enormous reference work on
> Proto-IE, "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" by
> Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, and it brought up some
> rather
> fascinating points.
>
> ('Gamkrelidze' sounds familiar, for some reason...)
>
> I was wondering how the Sanskrit retroflexes came
> about, since PIE had no contrast between those and
> dental phonemes. In one chapter, it points out that
> the Sanskrit retroflex plosives were the result of
> the
> erosion of medial [st] and [sd]-type clusters; the
> [s]
> was an alveolar phoneme and quite handily imparted
> its
> alveolar qualities onto the following dental
> phoneme.
> Thus (and I'm just making up an example here):
>
> *nis-dha -> nis-.dha -> niz-.dha -> nih-.dha ->
> ni-.dha
>
> Or something like that.
>
> I could understand that, although I'd be more
> inclined
> to believe that in [st]-type clusters, where the [t]
> is dental, it would remain dental, as in the Romance
> languages.
>
> What I'm wondering is how the retroflex fricatives
> came about. My first thought is that they could have
> come about through [rs]-type clusters, since that's
> how it works in Norwegian, and the [r] in Sanskrit
> seems to make following coronals retroflex anyways
> (as
> in 'krsna', where the entire medial consonant
> cluster
> [rsn] is retroflex, if I'm not mistaken).
>
> Are there any other ideas as to how a retroflex
> series
> could have originated without using such processes?
> And how on Earth did Sanskrit get a series of
> voiceless aspirates, when, according to both major
> theories of PIE phonology, there were none in the
> first place?
>
>
> 	
>
> 	
> 		
>
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I recall reading that the retroflex series came from
the Dravidian languages. I shall try to dig out a
reference for you.

=====
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