Re: Hellenish oddities

At 11:28 am +0100 25/11/00, BP Jonsson wrote:
[...]
>
>The double aspirates are probably just an Ancient Greek spelling
>convention.
So why didn't they write geminate aspirates as phi-phi, theta-theta and
khi-khi?

It would surely be a particularly perverse spelling convention which said:
(a) if two voiceless plosives are heterorganic and the second is aspirated,
write them both as aspirates;
(b) if two voiceless plosives are homorganic nd the second is aspirated,
write the first unaspirated and only the second as an aspirate.

It seems more credible to me that the former with written with two
aspirates because that's how they were pronounced (regressive
assimilation); but the latter were written as pi-phi, tau-theta and
kappa-khi because aspiration did not occur until the geminate plosive was
released.  That is, the spelling reflected the actual pronunciation and the
ancient greeks were not guilty of a bizarre & illogical spelling convention.

>It is anatomically very hard/impossible to pronounce two
>aspirates without a vowel between them
So how the Armenians manage _a£ot'k'_ [aGot_hk_h] "prayer", the Georgians
_p'k'vili_ "flour" & _t'it'k'mis_ "almost", and the Abaza speakers _ap'q'a_
"in front"?

It seems to me that the arguments currently being advanced against the
"impossibility" of [p_ht_h] would also imply that initial [pt] is also
impossible.

A plosive is produced when there is a complete closure of the vocal tract,
and when the closure is released the air moves outward with a (slight)
explosive sound.  As I understand it, this release may be accompanied by
aspiration or not.

But the argument seems to me, as far as I can follow, that having release,
e.g. [p], one can't then release [t] without some pause or "hidden vowel"
between the two.  As far as I can see, this should also mean syllable final
plosives are not possible.

If, however, it is admitted that syllable final plosives are possible and
that non-aspirated initial combinations such as [pt] or [kt] are possible,
then I do not see the logic in saying that they are no longer possible if
the plosives are released with aspiration.  Certainly, in the case of
syllable finals, Irish and some Brit dialects of English make it quite
clear that syllable final aspirated plosived are certainly possible.

In any case, this difficulty applies only the initial phi-theta and
khi-theta.  If such combinations appear medially there is no difficulty;
the first could surely have pre-aspiration (as do final -t, -p and -c in
Gaelic) and the second post-aspiration.

Of course, aspirated geminates could've been handled this way also - but
ancient Greek was somewhat restrictive in the plosive geminates it
permitted, thus:

         Voiceles           Voiceless
         unaspirated        aspirated       Unvoiced
Labial     pp                 pph          (not found)
Dental     tt                 tth            *
Velar      kk                 kkh          (not found)

* {dd} is found in certain ancient dialects (Elis in Laconia, in Boiotian
and Thessalonian and some central Cretan dialects) where other dialects
write Z.  This resulted from assimilation of earlier [dz] or [dZ].

Ray.





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