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Re: Voiced aspirated plosives (was: phonetic)

From:Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 5, 2005, 20:32
Hallo!

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:47:52 +0000,
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

> It always struck me as rather odd that PIE was credited with a series of > voiceless plosives, voiced unaspirated and voiced aspirated plosives, but > no voiceless aspirated plosives. I know it makes sense from a backward > reconstruction from the 'daughter' languages, but it did seem an odd > system for a language to have. I know PIE linguistics have moved on since > I was last seriously looked at them. What is the present state of play, so > to speak, regarding the PIE 'voiced aspirated' plosives?
The present state of play is that many (though by far not all) Indo-Europeanists favour "glottal theory", according to which the stops traditionally reconstructed as voiced (*b, *d, *g, *gW) were glottalized stops, and the traditional voiced aspirates were simply voiced. I think this makes sense; however, my feeling is that this didn't last until the breakup, but the glottalized stops lost their glottalization (which is found only in Eastern Armenian), becoming some sort of "half-voiced" shortly before that. The result was a somewhat unstable system that moved into different directions in the attested branches. Greetings, Jörg.

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Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>