The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

[KathTheDragon]

According to this, we only have *h₃ > ḫ after a resonant.

[hwhatting]

According to this, we only have *h₃ > ḫ after a resonant.

What do you mean by "only"? a) Retained as "ḫ"? B) Being "ḫ" as opposed to "ḫḫ"? If A), that's not corrrect - Melchert also assumes that H3 survives word-initially ("Word-initial *h3- is preserved as /x-/ in Hittite and Luvian").

[KathTheDragon]

B

[WeepingElf]

There may have been a language in Europe that kept the PIE breathy-voiced stops unchanged into historical times: Ancient Macedonian. There is an interesting article by Ivo Hajnal, "Methodische Vorbemerkungen zu einer Paläolinguistik des Balkanraums" in the volume Alfred Bammesberger, Theo Vennemann (eds.), Languages in Prehistoric Europe (Heidelberg: Winter 2003), pp. 117-146.

Ancient Macedonian, the language of a people whose status as Hellenes or barbarians was controversial in ancient Greece, is either a divergent dialect of Greek or a language closely related to it, which is of course a matter of definition. Hajnal (p. 123) observes that in Hesychian glosses and other Greek sources, the reflexes of the PIE breathy-voiced stops are usually spelled β δ γ, but on the Pella curse tablet, they are spelled φ θ χ, and the tablet otherwise shows Doric traits, in accordance to some ancient writers who considered the Macedonians a Doric tribe. Hajnal concludes that either the glosses are wrong or Macedonian shows dialectally different reflexes of the PIE breathy-voiced stops. In my opinion, this orthographic vacillation is what to expect if the breathy-voiced stops were unchanged, as the Greek alphabet cannot represent voicing and breath at the same time.

Hajnal (p. 137) also mentions the possibility that the breathy-voiced stops were still intact in Mycenean and that their devoicing was a post-Mycenean development. His evidence are two different sets of characters for CV syllables with a labial stop, where (he claims that) one set was used for words with /p/, and the other with /b/ and /ph/, the latter perhaps still having been /bh/ in Mycenean, thereby forming a class with /b/.

I don't know how good this evidence is, but it looks interesting.

[Šọ̈́gala]

Are the words in the Pella tablet recognizably Hellenic-like enough that the voiceless aspirates in question might be corrections by a scribe familiar with "correct" pronunciation? The possibility of voiced aspirates in Macedonian is fascinating, but without the Pella tablet data the possibility remains that Macedonian just had plain voiced for that series, like most branches of IE do.

[KathTheDragon]

If there really were a variation β~φ, we'd expect to see it within any single inscription. Since we don't, only when comparing inscriptions, I doubt its value for determining the sounds in these words.

[WeepingElf]

If there really were a variation β~φ, we'd expect to see it within any single inscription. Since we don't, only when comparing inscriptions, I doubt its value for determining the sounds in these words.

Did you understand me right? The β~φ variation occured only in the written language because the Greek alphabet had no letters for the breathy-voiced stops of the Macedonian language, and thus each scribe would have had to choose one or the other to represent those phonemes - which showed no variation in the spoken language at all.

Also, I would expect a scribe to be consistent within his/her text, so no vacillation within a single inscription. The writer of the Pella curse tablet would have used the aspirate letters because to her, a native speaker of Macedonian, the breathy-voiced stops were distinct phonemes from the plain voiced stops, and these letters were just at her disposal, with Macedonian lacking voiceless aspirates. Hesychius and similar authors may have chosen the voiced stop letters to highlight the difference from "mainstream" Greek, or may simply have identified the to them foreign breathy-voiced stops with plain voiced ones.

And then there's of course the possibility that the author of the Pella curse tablet wasn't native to Macedon and her language thus not Macedonian at all, though I think this is less likely.

[hwhatting]

The language of the Pella table looks really like a normal NW Greek dialect, not like a separate IE language. And if you look at forms like ΠΑΡΚΑΤΤΙΘΕΜΑΙ, you'll see that it has the usual Greek outcome of Grassman (/t^h/ > /t/), so there's no chance that it still has voiced aspirates (MA).
So I see the following possibilities:
1) Macedonian is what survives in the Pella tables. It is a bog standard Greek dialect. The forms with voiced stops for PIE MA labelled as "Macedonian" by ancient authors are mislabelled.
2) The forms with voiced stops for PIE MA labelled as "Macedonian" by ancient authors are labelled correctly. The Pella tablets (and similar inscriptions) were written by speakers of Greek living in Macedonia; the Macedonians spoke a different IE language.
3) The forms with voiced stops for PIE MA labelled as "Macedonian" by ancient authors are labelled correctly. By the time of the Pella tablets, this Macedonian had been replaced by a NW Greek dialect (similar to how Greek later was replaced by a Slavic language which is nowadays referred to as Macedonian).

[WeepingElf]

Thank you, Hans-Werner, this seems to be the best explanation: The Pella curse tablet and the few other inscriptions that agree with it are not from the same language as the Hesychian glosses, but from a Doric Greek dialect that replaced the original Macedonian language in the 4th century BC. So the idea that Ancient Macedonian had preserved the PIE breathy-voiced stops intact can be laid to rest. The presence of voiceless stops as outcomes of Grassmann's Law in the Pella curse tablet effectively falsifies the notion that the breathy-voiced stops were intact in the language of the tablet; the aspirate letters there represent Greek voiceless aspirates as usual, nothing else.

[hwhatting]

For those who are interested, I put a paper up for discussion on academia.edu
Abstract:

A connection between Hittite ḫumant- “all, each, entire” and Vedic ubhau “both” was proposed by Puhvel in his Hittite Etymological Dictionary. He analyses ḫumant- as ḫu- + suffix -want- (PIE -went-). For the first element, he assumes an original meaning “both” and for the lexeme a development “both-having” > “all-having” > “all”.
This paper argues that there is indeed a common element *h2u- in both words, but that it's original meaning was "all".

[Soap]

Karlgren and Yakhontov reconstruct Old Chinese with phonemic /bʰ/ and a series of voiced aspirates for other places of articulation, but with no phonemic /b/.

My first thought is that this is due to PIE influence, but both scholars seem to be known only for their work on Chinese historical linguistics. The more modern reconstructions further down the page seem to drop the voiced aspirates, but I think it's interesting to see this kind of setup in a language as recent as Old Chinese where there is a lot of historical evidence to build upon. Too bad that the Chinese never used an alphabet .... it's actually not that far back in history, only about 500BC or so ... so if it had been written phonetically we'd have perfect knowledge of the phonology and if it had voiced aspirates we'd have good comparative evidence for how they could evolve in daughter languages, and perhaps even how they arose in the first place.

Neither of the two scholars reconstructs a typical PIE system for Old Chinese; the only similiarities I see are the presence of voiced aspirates and the absence of a plain unaspirated /b/.

[Tropylium]

Karlgren and Yakhontov reconstruct Old Chinese with phonemic /bʰ/ and a series of voiced aspirates for other places of articulation, but with no phonemic /b/.

/bʰ/ but not /b/ is almost assured for at least some variety of Chinese, even if not Old Chinese specifically; even in reconstructions that assume this series being originally plain *b *d *dz *g etc. it still eventually turns into aspirates in some varieties, so presomably through voiced aspirates.

A more interesting question would be if there ever was a stage that had /d g/ but no /b/.

[Soap]

Karlgren and Yakhontov reconstruct Old Chinese with phonemic /bʰ/ and a series of voiced aspirates for other places of articulation, but with no phonemic /b/.

/bʰ/ but not /b/ is almost assured for at least some variety of Chinese, even if not Old Chinese specifically; even in reconstructions that assume this series being originally plain *b *d *dz *g etc. it still eventually turns into aspirates in some varieties, so presomably through voiced aspirates.

A more interesting question would be if there ever was a stage that had /d g/ but no /b/.

I'd be curious to see what paths they chose to derive those from the even older system that lacked the voiced aspirates.

And yes, Karlgren and Yakhontov both reconstruct a phonology with /bʰ dʰ gʰ/ and /d g/; only /b/ is missing, very much like traditionalist PIE. When I say I wonder if there was PIE influence I dont mean areal influence (theyre too far apart in time and space), but whether these scholars were influenced by traditional reconstructions of PIE into thinking that /b/ is commonly missing when other voiced stops are present, even if a full series of voiced aspirates also exists.

Im skeptical of voiced aspirates, even in PIE, but if in Old Chinese a solid basis can be found for reconstructing a similar inventory (even though it still has voiceless aspirates as well), I would consider that good evidence in favor of voiced aspirates in PIE as well.

Also, maybe Old Chinese was influenced by IE after all? Just not PIE. Perhaps some runaway PIE language made it all the way into central China and somehow influenced the Chinese speakers to develop a /p pʰ b bʰ/ type setup. Unlikely though, I'd think we'd have heard of those people by now.

[Soap]

It seems awfully strange to posit that PIE would lose its laryngeals, which must have included at least two fricatives, with /h x xʷ/ being a common proposal, and yet keep phonemic aspiration after its voiced stops, when such aspiration was, at best, equivalent in acoustic strength to the weakest of the laryngeal fricatives.

Assuming we dont swallow the glottalic pill,* is there still room to entertain the idea that the laryngeals were vowels, or at least appoximants? The Hittite reflex of /ḫ/ could easily be explained as a conditional development from a previously intervocalic vocoid or approximant. Positing the laryngeals as non-frticatives would of course ease the explanation for how they came to have all those effects on the vowels. Greek's triple reflex would be explained as preserving an original distinction whereas all of the other languages first made dipthongs and then turned them into new monophthongs, often with lengthening. This process is believed to have occured in PIE even with the regular vowels, so that e.g. /oe/ > /ō/ in all PIE.

I get that it's a bit weird when a laryngeal appears between 2 vowels, because PIE doesnt seem to have had much for vowel sequences generally, and making a laryngeal a vowel would turn VHV into VVV, suddenly having 3 vowels in a row instead of 1. But these are approximants, taking vocalic allophones only conditionally, and therefore we would be heating something like /µ/, / µʲ/, etc. Also, at least one would likely b e a schwa with an approximant allohpone of /ɰ/.

Im just floating this idea, I havent looked much into it. I note that unambiguous attestation of aspirates is found only in Graeco-Armeno-Aryan, but assuming the laryngeals existed, they are reflected in all of the branches and therefore cant be an innovation.

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*Not that I reject glottalic theory out of hand, but that it would negate the entire meaning of my post and therefore I treat it separately.

[Soap]

Perhaps aspiration was a suprasegmental feature in PIE such that it could surface either in a laryngeal (/h₁ h₂ h₃/), or, if the word contained a stop consonant, it could appear attached to that stop consonant. Some words would have no aspiration at all. The rule would be that only one aspiration could appear in a word:

1) If the word contains a laryngeal, that laryngeal grabs the aspiration and therefore all stops in the word are deaspirated. This is why */bʰh/ etc do not occur.
2) If the word contains no laryngeal, or the laryngeals are unaccented, a voiceless stop can grab the aspiration. Since all voiceless stops are underlyingly aspirated to begin with, this has no affect on the pronunciation of the word.
3) If there are no voiceless stops and no laryngeals in accented syllables, the aspiration can latch on to a voiced stop instead. This changes the pronunciation of that stop from plain voiced to voiced aspirated: /b d g gʷ/ > /bh dh gh gʷh/.

At a later stage of PIE, the following changes develop;

1a) Graeco-Armeno-Aryan phonemicizes the previously allophonic aspiration by developing Grassmann's Law. This causes aspiration to be analogized into places where it had not previously been able to occur, such as unaccented syllables. However, there is still no more than one aspirated consonant in each word root. (Armenian later drops even this and has true phonemic aspiration.)
1b) /b/ for some reason becomes aspirated all the time, although it still obeys the rule that the aspiration can only be pronounced when the word contains no voiceless stops or accented laryngeals.

2) In all other branches, aspiration disappears entirely, taking all the laryngeals that it had with it.

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I realize this idea totally slaps my other idea in the face .... Im not saying theyre both true. I kept them as separate posts because theyre 2 theories Ive come up with to explain the odd phonemic setup of PIE. The first idea isnt really mine originally, sicne I know the layngralizes were originally conceived of as vowels ... the idea in this post isnt totally original to me either, but I've done more independent thinking on this idea than on the other.

[KathTheDragon]

Assuming we dont swallow the glottalic pill,* is there still room to entertain the idea that the laryngeals were vowels, or at least appoximants? The Hittite reflex of /ḫ/ could easily be explained as a conditional development from a previously intervocalic vocoid or approximant. Positing the laryngeals as non-frticatives would of course ease the explanation for how they came to have all those effects on the vowels. Greek's triple reflex would be explained as preserving an original distinction whereas all of the other languages first made dipthongs and then turned them into new monophthongs, often with lengthening. This process is believed to have occured in PIE even with the regular vowels, so that e.g. /oe/ > /ō/ in all PIE.

While this is nice on paper, there are good reasons to reject it. For starters, Anatolian /ḫ/ is a voiceless dorsal fricative, and I can't imagine how that would develop from a vowel or approximant. Then there's evidence from outside IE - a number of loanwords into Uralic show *k for an IE laryngeal, which unambiguously supports an obstruent value.

Perhaps aspiration was a suprasegmental feature in PIE such that it could surface either in a laryngeal (/h₁ h₂ h₃/), or, if the word contained a stop consonant, it could appear attached to that stop consonant. Some words would have no aspiration at all. The rule would be that only one aspiration could appear in a word:

1) If the word contains a laryngeal, that laryngeal grabs the aspiration and therefore all stops in the word are deaspirated. This is why */bʰh/ etc do not occur.
2) If the word contains no laryngeal, or the laryngeals are unaccented, a voiceless stop can grab the aspiration. Since all voiceless stops are underlyingly aspirated to begin with, this has no affect on the pronunciation of the word.
3) If there are no voiceless stops and no laryngeals in accented syllables, the aspiration can latch on to a voiced stop instead. This changes the pronunciation of that stop from plain voiced to voiced aspirated: /b d g gʷ/ > /bh dh gh gʷh/.

Again, nice on paper, but there are problems. For example, what about roots containing a laryngeal and a breathy-voiced stop such as *h₁egʷʰ-? How does this determine which voiced stop becomes aspirated when there are two of them?

[jal]

a voiceless dorsal fricative, and I can't imagine how that would develop from a vowel or approximant.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you say here, and note that I take the above in isolation, not with regards to the discussion at hand, but /j/ > /ʝ/ > /ç/ isn't that difficult to derive?


JAL

[KathTheDragon]

Well, consider that laryngeals are quite often found as the first consonant in an initial cluster, e.g. *h₂melǵ-.

[Soap]

Perhaps aspiration was a suprasegmental feature in PIE such that it could surface either in a laryngeal (/h₁ h₂ h₃/), or, if the word contained a stop consonant, it could appear attached to that stop consonant. Some words would have no aspiration at all. The rule would be that only one aspiration could appear in a word:

1) If the word contains a laryngeal, that laryngeal grabs the aspiration and therefore all stops in the word are deaspirated. This is why */bʰh/ etc do not occur.
2) If the word contains no laryngeal, or the laryngeals are unaccented, a voiceless stop can grab the aspiration. Since all voiceless stops are underlyingly aspirated to begin with, this has no affect on the pronunciation of the word.
3) If there are no voiceless stops and no laryngeals in accented syllables, the aspiration can latch on to a voiced stop instead. This changes the pronunciation of that stop from plain voiced to voiced aspirated: /b d g gʷ/ > /bh dh gh gʷh/.

Again, nice on paper, but there are problems. For example, what about roots containing a laryngeal and a breathy-voiced stop such as *h₁egʷʰ-? How does this determine which voiced stop becomes aspirated when there are two of them?

That would just be [hegʷ] as per rule 1, presuming the stress is on the root.

But if you have two consonants of the same category, you mean, like *bhendh-? The original PIE form is unknown and unknowable, but by Grassmann's Law the surface form of the word will have exactly one aspirated consonant, in both Greek and Indo-Aryan, whose different reflexes show that the aspiration was inherited differently in the two languages, and was likely movable in the original PIE. And in Armenian the aspiration seems to have been generalized in some dialects and completely deleted in others, which could be evidence either that Armenian doesnt belong in Graeco-Aryan at all or that it changed after it broke away ... also unknown and unknowable, since the oldest written Armenian texts are of a much later date than those two other languages.

Because voiceless stops attract the aspiration before voiced stops do, the aspiration on voiceless stops is allophonic and it makes sense that no daughter language developed a phonemic contrast deriving from primordial PIE /t/ vs /tʰ/ ... essentially, all voiceless stops are underlyingly aspirated, but this can only surface once in each root.

In traditionalist PIE, according to

1. No root contained a sequence of two plain voiced stops: there were no roots of the type **deg.
2. No root contained both a voiceless stop and a voiced aspirate: roots of the type **dʰek or **tegʰ were not attested.
3. On the other hand, the plain voiced stops were compatible with either of the other two series: *degʰ or *dek were both possible.

There were never any roots with 2 aspirated consonants. There were also no roots with 2 plain voiced stops. This can be explained by assuming that aspiration was a suprasegmental feature in early PIE that was attracted to stops, but would cling to a voiceless stop if one was present, and to a voiced stop only if both stops in the root were voiced. This explains why
1) No root could contain two plain voiced stops .... one of them would have attracted the aspiration.
2) No root could contain a voiceless stop and a voiced aspirate, because the voiceless stop would grab the aspiration first (and voiceless stops are underlyingly aspirated as explained above).
3a.) Plain voiced stops can appear with either of the other two types. the /degʰ/-type root is really /deg/, which feeds into condition #1, meaning that one of the two voiced stops must become aspirated. The choice of which one seems to have been dependent on stress and perhaps some other variable, which is why the different daughter languages reflect the aspiration in different places .... some languages put it on the /d/, others on the /g/.
3b.) Likewise, the roots of the /dek/ type feed into condition #2, and /dek/-type roots never show up as */dhek/ in daughter languages because the voiceless stop always took the aspiration first, meaning that the voiced stop could never become aspirated even allophonically.

Put another way, in a root with 2 stops, there must be one and only one aspirate, but if both were voiced, the aspiration could migrate from one stop to the other, indicating that both of the stops likely belonged to the same phonetic category.

As the laryngeals were lost in the daughter languages, aspiration itself also was, and in some languages, such as Germanic, aspiration seems to have become restricted to allophonic alternation of the voiceless stops only, meaning that they still behaved as a single category in future sound changes. Phonemic aspiration was preserved in Graeco-Indo-Aryan, however, because all three branches of the family evolved a new phonemic /h/ unrelated to the inherited laryngeals.

[KathTheDragon]

Sorry, I'm struggling to understand exactly what you're trying to say.

But if you have two consonants of the same category, you mean, like *bhendh-? The original PIE form is unknown and unknowable, but by Grassmann's Law the surface form of the word will have exactly one aspirated consonant, in both Greek and Indo-Aryan, whose different reflexes show that the aspiration was inherited differently in the two languages, and was likely movable in the original PIE. And in Armenian the aspiration seems to have been generalized in some dialects and completely deleted in others, which could be evidence either that Armenian doesnt belong in Graeco-Aryan at all or that it changed after it broke away ... also unknown and unknowable, since the oldest written Armenian texts are of a much later date than those two other languages.

Um, what? Grassman's law wasn't a feature of PIE, it operated independently in Greek and Indo-Aryan. On the other hand, Germanic, which keeps all three series distinct, shows *bind-, with the reflexes of two voiced aspirates.

In traditionalist PIE, according to

1. No root contained a sequence of two plain voiced stops: there were no roots of the type **deg.
2. No root contained both a voiceless stop and a voiced aspirate: roots of the type **dʰek or **tegʰ were not attested.
3. On the other hand, the plain voiced stops were compatible with either of the other two series: *degʰ or *dek were both possible.

There were never any roots with 2 aspirated consonants. There were also no roots with 2 plain voiced stops.

No, no, you're misinterpreting the root constraints. There are six possible root shapes with two stops in PIE: *tek, *ted, *det, *dʰegʰ, *degʰ, *dʰeg. All of these are assured by branches like Germanic.

[Sumelic]

Um, what? Grassman's law wasn't a feature of PIE, it operated independently in Greek and Indo-Aryan. On the other hand, Germanic, which keeps all three series distinct, shows *bind-, with the reflexes of two voiced aspirates.

Not to disagree with your overall point, but doesn't PG sometimes have voiced reflexes of PIE tenuis stops after nasals? E.g. English and, end, PG "angô" (according to Wiktionary). Do you know if there is any pattern to it? I was wondering about this.

[KathTheDragon]

That's just Verner's law, and it applies much more widely than just after nasals.

[Sumelic]

Hmm, for some reason I unconsciously discarded that as an option ... it certainly seems to explain end and angô. With "and", is the explanation something like as a function word, it lost stress? Or is it supposed to be partly derived from forms of the word with stress placed further to the right?

[KathTheDragon]

It's certainly possible that the preform was *h₂enti, lacking stress, but it's also compatible with *h₂entí, with end-stress.

[Soap]

There were never any roots with 2 aspirated consonants. There were also no roots with 2 plain voiced stops.

No, no, you're misinterpreting the root constraints. There are six possible root shapes with two stops in PIE: *tek, *ted, *det, *dʰegʰ, *degʰ, *dʰeg.

As far as Im aware, there are no written examples of roots with two aspirate stops in either Greek or Indo-Iranian, which are the only two branches reconstructed as inheriting their aspirate series from PIE. (Armenian underwent a chain shift similar to Germanic.)

My understanding is that diaspirate roots were set up originally to account for examples where a root appeared with an aspirate on the first consonant in one language, and on the second consonant in another. Later, people realized that the same alternations often appeared within one language, and Grassmann formulated a pattern for the correspondences, which we now call Grassman's Law. Since it would be highly inconvenient to index a root as *degh, *dheg, and *dhegh, we retained the diaspirate notation for convenience, showing that it could appear on either of the two consonants, depending on environment and other factors, but never on both. Since the aspiration could never appear on both consonants in the same word, all roots previously reconstructed as monoaspirates were thus reinterpreted as underlying diaspirates. Put another way, traditional monoaspirates and traditional diaspirates behave identically.

This is why Grassman's Law has, in Sanskrit, also been referrred to as aspiration throwback: in any "diaspirate" root, aspiration can appear on either the leading or the trailing consonant: always the trailing consonant when in an open syllable, and always the leading one when the syllable is closed. But again, never on both.

Looking for counterevidence to my theory, I can see browesing through Wiktionary there are some examples of roots that are reconstructed with just a single voiced aspirate alongside either a voiceless stop or a voiced stop, which I place into four categories:
1) Apparent compounds, such as ghew-d "to pour", which is also attested without the -d affix. It makes sense that a grammatical affix would be analogized and thus resist Grassman's Law.
2) Likely loanwords such as /gʰaydos/ "goat", found only in language families that have no attested history of aspirated stops as a distinct class.
3) Words where the sole aspirate is /bʰ/. This class account for the majority of monoaspirate roots listed on Wiktionary. However, the traditional reconstruction lacks a plain voiced /b/, so it may simply have been that wherever ["b"] might be expected, ["bʰ"], is found instead,* and attracts the suprasegmental aspiration away from another voiced stop even in environments where Grassmann's Law would predict the opposite.
4) Roots with laryngeals which might be objectionable under the standard theory, but make perfect sense if aspiration was a suprasegmental feature. Example: *ǵʰreh₁d-. Examples of this are so few, however, that I imagine they could be sorted into the other three categories and that the laryngeal may be just a red herring.
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In short, I dont believe there were ever any minimal pairs in PIE between *dʰegʰ, *degʰ, *dʰeg. If we accept that
1)these three classes are synonymous, and
2) There were also no roots of the type *tegʰ/*dʰek, then

Voiced aspiration was never contrastive in roots, and must have been a suprasegmental feature or some other non-grammatical element that did not play a part in forming distinct roots. Thus all monoaspirates *and* diaspirates can be rewritten with simple voiced stops.
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But if you have two consonants of the same category, you mean, like *bhendh-? The original PIE form is unknown and unknowable, but by Grassmann's Law the surface form of the word will have exactly one aspirated consonant, in both Greek and Indo-Aryan.

Um, what? Grassman's law wasn't a feature of PIE, it operated independently in Greek and Indo-Aryan. On the other hand, Germanic, which keeps all three series distinct, shows *bind-, with the reflexes of two voiced aspirates.

It's entirely possible that Grassman's Law never operated outside of the Graeco-Indo-Armenian clade, and thus was not a part of PIE. This wouldnt mean much either way for my theory of PIE, since Grassman's Law is merely a later stage of the phenomenon whereby the alternation of aspiration has become ingrained in the grammar and is no longer truly suprasegmental. I prefer to derive it from PIE proper because the only two branches that have directly inherited aspiration also have Grassman's Law, and it operates nearly identically in both languages. My theory only concerns those languages that did inherit aspiration from PIE, and thus Germanic doesnt really play a role in my theory. That said, I have an opinion about that too:

I doubt that proto-Germanic had phonemic aspiration. It's generally agreed that long before Verner's Law, Grimm's Law, and (if it was real) Cowgill's Law, proto-Germanic had lost its laryngeals. If you believe that the aspiration contrast was still present at this stage, you'd be stuck with a phonology that has a robust aspiration contrast on voiced stops, but not on voiceless stops, and which also lacks an independent /h/ or any other fricatives besides /s/. This would be even more typologically strange than the already questionable phonology reconstructed for PIE.
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*used quotes to keep BBCode formatting