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There are dialects of Armenian with breathy voice? No way!

Also, what was that Austronesian language that has breathy voiced stops? (Or is there more than one?)

Vijay wrote:Also, what was that Austronesian language that has breathy voiced stops? (Or is there more than one?)

That's Kelabit and possibly one or two of its immediate sisters, but the situation there isn't really comparable, because there those are true voiced aspirates, with a voiced stop which becomes voiceless partway through before giving aspiration, and their restricted to word-medial position (similar segments are found also in Tuu and Kx'a languages).

Frislander wrote:Are you really so caught up in your ruts that you think that those are the only two possibilities

So far as I see it, the options are: breathy-voiced stops, ejectives, pre-glottalised stops, implosives. The middle two are certainly "glottalic", and implosives could well be lumped in there. I'll grant that it was a poor choice of words, and I'll apologise for that.

However given the choice I would prefer the glottalic theory given that the evidence for the "voiced" stops having that quality comes from multiple different branches of the family and more general reconstructed phonotactic constraints, while the evidence for breathy voiced stops is just that Indo-Aryan has them and some dialects of Armenian.

Sure, that's the only direct evidence for breathy-voiced stops. But I've seen the so-called evidence for glottialic stops and I'm unimpressed. This isn't the right place to get into specifics, so if you want more, ask over in the Great PIE thread.

Frislander wrote:https://lateralfricative.wordpress.com/

Your friend’s blog isn’t evidence, especially when said person claims right there in the blog to be an undergraduate linguistics student who mocks professors of Semitic languages for refusing to see what they have “proven”.

Astraios wrote:

Frislander wrote:https://lateralfricative.wordpress.com/

Your friend’s blog isn’t evidence, especially when said person claims right there in the blog to be an undergraduate linguistics student who mocks professors of Semitic languages for refusing to see what they have “proven”.

An undergraduate student who describes "Proto-Indo-European" (their quotation marks) as 'questionable' (my quotation marks).

Vijay wrote:There are dialects of Armenian with breathy voice? No way!

I don't know about Eastern Armenian dialects (though I seem to remember reading somewhere that in some of them, the voiced stops were breathy-voiced), but in Western Armenian, the Old Armenian voiced stops merged into the aspirated ones, apparently "leapfrogging" the voiceless unaspirated stops (which became voiced in a probably later change). Now, if one assumes that the Old Armenian voiced stops actually were breathy-voiced, this becomes a simple loss of voicing.

The same kind of voicing loss (but without the merger, since the voiceless stops weren't aspirated) is apparently what happened in prehistoric Greek, so this language also can count as evidence in favour of the much-maligned PIE breathy-voiced stops.

A possible fourth point of evidence could be Ancient Macedonian, though I am no longer sure about that. There seem to be vacillations between using the letters β δ γ and φ θ χ for the reflexes of the breathy-voiced stops, which look like attempts to represent still preserved breathy-voiced stops, but I have been told that the inscriptions which use the aspirate letters probably just were in Greek (as the Pella curse tablet is).

All these languages, however, belong to one dialect area - Greco-Aryan. But what about Northwestern IE? Here, Germanic points at voiced fricatives, and so does Italic, which seems to just have devoiced the fricatives in initial position. In medial position, they would have first remained voiced, merging with the voiced stops in Latin, and either devoicing or staying what they are but written with the same letters as the voiceless ones because they were just allophones in Sabellic.

Vijay wrote:There are dialects of Armenian with breathy voice? No way!

yes

http://www.academia.edu/4101967/The_Pho ... f_Armenian

WeepingElf wrote:Here, Germanic points at voiced fricatives, and so does Italic, which seems to just have devoiced the fricatives in initial position. In medial position, they would have first remained voiced, merging with the voiced stops in Latin, and either devoicing or staying what they are but written with the same letters as the voiceless ones because they were just allophones in Sabellic.

Actually, it's much more likely that Latin had *bʰ > *pʰ > *f initially and *bʰ > *β internally, given how rare it is for voiced fricatives to devoice initially (I did find a few examples in the ID, but I can't easily find out if those languages kept voiced fricatives in other positions).

KathTheDragon wrote:

WeepingElf wrote:Here, Germanic points at voiced fricatives, and so does Italic, which seems to just have devoiced the fricatives in initial position. In medial position, they would have first remained voiced, merging with the voiced stops in Latin, and either devoicing or staying what they are but written with the same letters as the voiceless ones because they were just allophones in Sabellic.

Actually, it's much more likely that Latin had *bʰ > *pʰ > *f initially and *bʰ > *β internally, given how rare it is for voiced fricatives to devoice initially (I did find a few examples in the ID, but I can't easily find out if those languages kept voiced fricatives in other positions).

Fair. And in Germanic, what seems to have happened is this:

1. The voicing distinction between the *T set and the *D set shifts to an aspiration distinction, while the *Dh is unaltered: *T D Dh > *Th T Dh. The same change as in Armenian (though independent). Thereby, the former *T and *Dh sets fall into a class sharing a feature, [+breath].

2. The two stop types characterized by [+breath] turn into spirants: *Th T Dh > *Þ T Ð.

There is no reason to assume that the voiced fricatives are original; it indeed makes better sense with original breathy-voiced stops.

As for the alleged typological oddity of the *T D Dh system, one must not forget that breathy-voiced stops are so rare (outside India, where they are either inherited or imported by borrowing from a single language, Old Indo-Aryan, and southern Africa, where they occur in a cluster of closely related Bantu languages) that typological generalizations are hardly possible!

Yet, the co-occurrence constraints seem to point at a specially marked manner of articulation of the *D-set, but this topic is better relegated in the Great Proto-Indo-European Thread.

KathTheDragon wrote:

WeepingElf wrote:Here, Germanic points at voiced fricatives, and so does Italic, which seems to just have devoiced the fricatives in initial position. In medial position, they would have first remained voiced, merging with the voiced stops in Latin, and either devoicing or staying what they are but written with the same letters as the voiceless ones because they were just allophones in Sabellic.

Actually, it's much more likely that Latin had *bʰ > *pʰ > *f initially and *bʰ > *β internally, given how rare it is for voiced fricatives to devoice initially (I did find a few examples in the ID, but I can't easily find out if those languages kept voiced fricatives in other positions).

Initial obstruant devoicing seems trivial. For example, in Dutch. [van de Velde et al on the devoicing on fricatives in Dutch says "Quantitative studies have already shown that voiced fricatives in word-initial position are more often devoiced than those in word-internal position" and cites three different studies showing that, refers to a general 'devoicing hierarchy' supporting that, and confirms that though its own study*].


I haven't - and indeed probaby can't - read the whole of the book you cite. But the section on previous arguments appears to accept that the version with voiced fricatives everywhere is the more mainstream, and there seems to be persuasive evidence. For instances, the correspondance of Latin formica with murmex and other cognates (dissimilation m>v and then devoicing v>f seems much more likely than dissimilation m>ph and then ph>f) and Latin faunus with Illyrian daunus; as well as the change gh>g before initial *l or *r (gradior, etc), which makes less sense as ghr>khr>gr than it does as ghr>ɣr>gr.

Another issue is the behaviour after consonants. The development mbh>mv>mb seems rather roundabout; de Vaan suggests instead mbh > mb directly, but I'm not sure what the motivation is there. Likewise and even more so, sbh>sv>sb, or sbh>sb. [though I suppose deaspiration after a sibilant isn't unheard of!]. It would be neater, though, if we could assume fricatives already for proto-Italic...


...so I'm tempted to wonder if we don't have something like:

*p - *p' - *b >> *p - *b - *ph [graeco-aryan, "core"]
*p - *p' - *b >> *p - *b - *v ["periphery"]

That is, as the ejectives (or implosives, if you prefer) become plain voiced, the plain voiced get pushed out of the way; within the "core" sprachbund, which is probably "everbody still on the steppe", the innovation of breathy voicing (let's say) occurs, but outside of that sprachbund the more likely development into voiced fricatives occurs (or in some language just the immediate merger of the two voiced series).

That is, I'm not wholly convinced that it's necessary to postulate voiced aspirates across the whole of late PIE, rather than them being a specific development in the graeco-aryan sprachbund.



*in the case of Dutch, allophonic devoicing is much more common initially than non-initially for all voiced fricatives, but there is not yet a phonemic difference.

Just that was my train of thought; but as discussed above, the Germanic and Italic developments can be explained without assuming that the *Dh set was realized differently in NW IE than in Greco-Aryan. That dialectal division is of course not impossible, but the evidence is not all that forceful, and it is more parsimonious not to assume it.

The Sphinx language only had eight vowels (red text below), similar to its descendant—Intergalactic Standard (green text below). Would the changes involved have been logical, noting the related processes in parentheses?

[ä→ɑ] (backing)
[ɛ→e] (closing)
[ʏ→i] (closing, fronting, unrounding)
[ɔ→o] (closing)
[ɯ→u] (rounding)
[äʏ̯→ɑi] (centering?, closing, unrounding)
[äɯ̯→ɑu] (backing, rounding)
[ɔʏ̯→oi] (closing, fronting, unrounding)

Those sound changes make perfect sense.

Indeed, the sound changes make perfect sense in the sense that they're rebalancing a wildly unnatural inventory; having front-rounded and back-unrounded close vowels but not front-unrounded and back-rounded is highly unnatural.

As sound changes go though they are by no means the most radical you could be; there's far more you could do, like stress-based hanky-panky, umlaut and the like. Just check out Proto-Uralic to Saamic for the of the craziest stuff to ever happen with vowels you'll ever see.

It is no secret to anyone that the current vowel system of English - both General American and RP - is chronologically unstable, but what stable systems can it potentially evolve or collapse into, aside from the standard /i e a o u/?

@Knit Tie
See this thread

The AmEng dialects that have managed to avoid the NCVS and the cot-caught merger have systems that aren't too unstable. Estonian with the rhotic vowel instead of the two front rounded vowels, essentially. Plenty of room for the diphthongs to bounce around and provide sociolinguistic distinctions without major restructuring. Might see more consonant shifts.

Christ, you're right! GA English vowel systems without the two sound changes you mentioned really do look semi-stable and symmetrical, a la Maasai with one extra rhotic vowel, so it doesn't look to me like anything major is going to happen to them. Do you think nothing at all will change in the forseeable future, though, or we will still see some minor changes like the arrangement of all vowels into tense-lax pairs or the loss of near-close vowels?

Not Maasai.

new maxim: all discussions of historical phonology eventually degenerate into being about either the PIE stop system or about the English vowel system (and, apparently, sometimes both).

Speaking of vowel shifts, does anyone have information on the Latin -> Old French vowel shift? Index Diachronica has a list, but it's hard to try to model anything on it.

Nortaneous wrote:Speaking of vowel shifts, does anyone have information on the Latin -> Old French vowel shift? Index Diachronica has a list, but it's hard to try to model anything on it.

Wikipedia has quite a lot of information on this topic.

Tropylium wrote:new maxim: all discussions of historical phonology eventually degenerate into being about either the PIE stop system or about the English vowel system (and, apparently, sometimes both).

Where is the lie?

Does the maxim apply when the discussion is not in English?

So I have this phonology:

/m mˤ n n̪ˤ/
/p pˤ b bˤ t t̪ˤ d d̪ˤ k g q (ʔ)/
/f fˤ v vˤ s s̪ˤ z z̪ˤ ʃ ʃˤ ʒ ʒˤ χ h ħ ʕ/
/l l̪ˤ ɾ ɾ̪ˤ/
/w j/
/i ɛ u ɑ/

And I want to eliminate all the pharyngealised consonants in a naturalistic-feeling way while keeping the number of phonemes as high as possible. So far, my idea was first to go to this, where the non-emphatic alveolar fricatives palatalise and push all the postalveolars together into /ɬ/ and /g/ becomes /ʁ/:

/m mˤ n n̪ˤ/
/p pˤ b bˤ t t̪ˢˤ d d̪ᶻˤ k q (ʔ)/
/f fˤ v vˤ ʃ s̪ˤ ʒ z̪ˤ ɬ χ ʁ h ħ ʕ/
/l ɮ̪ˤ ɾ ʒˤ/
/w j/
/i ɛ u ɑ/

And then to this, where the emphatic /n/ velarises, /ɮ̪ˤ/ merges with /l/, /ʒˤ/ with /ʒ/ and /ɬ/ with /s̪/.

/m n ŋ/
/p pˤ b bˤ t̪ t̪s̪ˤ d̪ d̪z̪ˤ k q (ʔ)/
/f fˤ v vˤ ʃ s̪ ʒ z̪ χ ʁ h ħ ʕ/
/l~ɮ ɾ/
/w j/
/i ɛ u ɑ/

What do you think?