Re: Voiced aspirated plosives (was: phonetic)
| From: | Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, January 5, 2005, 20:32 |
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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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