Re: Nostratic (was Re: Schwebeablaut (was Re: tolkien?))

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Joe wrote:

> John Cowan wrote:
>
> >Yes, the so-called "glottal theory", which reinterprets the traditional
> >voiced-aspirated / voiced / voiceless stops as voiced / voiceless ejective /
> >voiceless respectively.  There are two main advantages to this:  1) It
> >is typologically more reasonable.  No known language has voiced aspirated
> >stops without voiceless aspirated ones.  2) It neatly accounts for the
> >rarity of traditional *b, since it is known that labial ejectives are
> >less common than non-labial ones.
>
> It would make the Germanic b>p g>k, etc. look more reasonable, too.
There's nothing unreasonable about it. All you need to do is aspirate (and
eventually---cf. Greek, German---fricate) the voiceless stops. Later the
voiced-aspir/voiced/voiceless gets re-analysed as voiced/voiceless/
aspirate (again, cf. German and apparently Australian English,* though
ignoring the v-aspir -> voiced in both).

* The only time I've heard this is from John,** but this could just be
  that it's easier to hear things about the vowels of AusE. OTOH, I find
  /sd/ (etc.) easier to say than /zd/, though no difference vice versa,
  and perhaps /s/+/tS/ -> /sdZ/ (e.g. nextyear).

** Do you have any source on this?

On the other hand, _with_ the glottal theory, you have to voice voicless
ejectives in just about every language family other than Germanic. I don't
know if that's usual, but it seems like more work, so you'd probably want
it to be incredibly common.

[Not trying to argue against the glottal theory, I don't know enough to
 have a position either way.]

--
Tristan

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