zompist bboard

WeepingElf wrote:For example, nobody really knows what the laryngeals really were; all we can say about them is that they probably were fricatives or approximants in the velar-to-glottal region. That still leaves a lot of possibilities.

Radical, man!

ObsequiousNewt wrote:

WeepingElf wrote:For example, nobody really knows what the laryngeals really were; all we can say about them is that they probably were fricatives or approximants in the velar-to-glottal region. That still leaves a lot of possibilities.

Radical, man!

Radical, maybe; but they could just as well have been dorsal. My pet theory is that the three laryngeals were voiceless dorsal fricatives with POAs matching the three velar stop series: *h1=/x/, *h2=/χ/, *h3=/χʷ/, or something like that. Thus, PIE would have a nice set of voiceless fricatives missing only a labial member (but that one may simply have fallen together with *h3, or with *p); and I have recently been attracted by the idea that the traditional PIE "voiced aspirated" stops actually were voiced fricatives.

WeepingElf wrote:Radical, maybe; but they could just as well have been dorsal. My pet theory is that the three laryngeals were voiceless dorsal fricatives with POAs matching the three velar stop series: *h1=/x/, *h2=/χ/, *h3=/χʷ/, or something like that. Thus, PIE would have a nice set of voiceless fricatives missing only a labial member (but that one may simply have fallen together with *h3, or with *p);

That's how I usually think of the laryngeals, although I tend to think of *h1 as /h/ rather than /x/ with *h2 being the result of collapse between an older /x/ and /χ/, but I definitely think it's possible that *h3 could have been /χʷ/ and /ɸ/ in an earlier stage.

WeepingElf wrote:...and I have recently been attracted by the idea that the traditional PIE "voiced aspirated" stops actually were voiced fricatives.

Intriguing. If this idea where correct, how would you then explain their shift to voiceless aspirated plosives in Greek?

sangi39 wrote:

WeepingElf wrote:...and I have recently been attracted by the idea that the traditional PIE "voiced aspirated" stops actually were voiced fricatives.

Intriguing. If this idea where correct, how would you then explain their shift to voiceless aspirated plosives in Greek?

I am not sure about that voiced fricatives thing at all. The Greek development would require breathy-voiced stops, as traditionally reconstructed, as an intermediate stage; this casts quite a shadow of doubt on the voiced fricatives hypothesis.

Could the voiced fricatives not simply become stops?

KathAveara wrote:Could the voiced fricatives not simply become stops?

The phonemes in question indeed merged with the voiced stops in many branches of IE: in Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, Iranian and Anatolian (and of course also in Tocharian, where all three manners of stop articulation collapsed into one). But not in Greek. The development from voiced fricatives to aspirated stops couldn't have gone via voiced stops, because then they would have merged with the PIE voiced stops, unless the latter changed to something else and later back to voiced stops. While it is not logically impossible that such a scenario is true, it is certainly not parsimonious and violates Ockham's Razor.

For those who get bored of the PIE discussions here, I have good news: I have opened a new thread in L&L where the discussions of PIE can go instead of cluttering this thread.