WeepingElf wrote:Talskubilos wrote:Goatface wrote:Talskubilos wrote:Armenian has glottalic stops like Kartvelian
Since when? Armenian has a three-way voiced/voiceless/aspirated contrast.
You're right, but Armenian phonology has surely been influenced by Kartvelian, which has glottalics.
Some Eastern Armenian dialects have the voiceless unaspirated stops realized as glottalics, probably indeed under influence from Kartvelian, yes. Whether the "Armenian sound shift" (*/t d dh/ > /th t d/ etc.) has anything to do with Kartvelian is uncertain.
Kortlandt has shown (1984: "Proto-Indo-European glottalic stops: The comparative evidence") that a glottalic stage must be presumed even for precedessors of some Armenian dialectal systems that do not have glottalics currently. In particular, there is a dialect group that
flips classical *d *t
/t d/, and since it also retains classical *tʰ separate, this requires some fourth (or fifth, considering the /dʰ/ in some areas) intermediate to be possible. His interpretation is that classical *t was /tʼ/ which in this dialect (and possibly, also the others that spontaneously changed voiced stops to voiced as well) underwent
/dʼ/
/d/. As independant evidence, in erly loanwords from Russian, voiceless unaspirated stops (no Slavic variety as aspiration in stops I think) are substituted by
aspirated stops, not voiceless unaspirated (though he does not mention what the dialect to be in contact with Russian would have been; if it were /d tʰ/ dialects, that would explain that as well).
None of this rules out early Kartvelian (or hell, even Semitic, depending how arcaic the neighboring Aramaic varieties may have been) influence on
proto-Armenian, however.
I agree that Kartvelian influence in Germanic is ridiculous, but I've seen a number of folks who try to postulate an Eastern origin for Germanic to work this in… I would say the similarity can be accounted by slightly modified Glottalic Theory and some simple phonetic universals:
0) PIE had an unstable voiced glottalic series.
1) Most branches resolv'd this in favor of deglottalizing, usually merging them into plain voiced stops (but Italic, Greek and Indo-Iranian by adding aspiration to the plain voiced stops, to retain the contrast).
2) Armenian and Germanic were two branches to opt for resolution by devoicing. This resulted in the voiceless stops becoming aspirated (or they may have been allophonically aspirated originally; it's difficult to say).
3) Germanic later spirantized its aspirates (as did Italic, Iranian and Greek).
In other words, we
expect *dʼ to become either *tʼ or *d, which is the easiest explanation for why we could have two separated *tʼ-areas. (We
do not expect to see a far-reaching areal change *tʼ
*dʼ (:> *d), so shared retention cannot be evoked here.)
BTW, while I haven't taken any particularly close look at Uralo-Dravidian, my initial impression has been that it's about as plausible as Hungaro-Sumerian (ie. a bunch of
*pućka). The comparisions have a large degree of semantic leeway and appear to be assembled by perusing the UEW side-by-side with a Tamil dictionary. I have no dout many would fall apart immediately if we had a detail'd reconstruction of proto-Dravidian (which, AFAIK, we don't.)