1 post tagged “voiced aspirates”

I've been pondering about a problem for some time now. What is traditionally reconstructed as voiced aspirates, and is probably more accurately reconstructed as voiced stops in Indo-European at times seem to display voiced-fricative behavior rather than voiced or voiced aspirate.

Let me explain. The first thing that brought me on this thought is the odd reflex of *ǵʰ in both Sanskrit and Latin. They both reflect it as h. For example *ǵʰeiōm 'winter' is found as hiems 'winter' in Latin, and as hima- 'cold' (like in himalaya)in Sanskrit.

A *ǵʰ > h shift isn't that obvious. Taking it as a voiced stop it becomes slightly more probable, but still an intermediate stage must have been a voiced velar fricative [γ].

For Latin this is easy to understand the other voiced aspirates also become fricatives word initially (*dʰ > *ð > [*þ >] f, *bʰ > *v > f), but for Sanskrit this is a lot harder to imagine. Why would *ǵʰ become a fricative, while *dʰ and *bʰ become aspirates stops dh and bh respectively. It makes me feel that more is going on here.

Then there's the lovely Germanic languages.

Verner's law teaches us that the *f *þ *x *xʷ *s > *b *d *g *gʷ *z when directly followed by the Indo-European accent. This law can only be understood if *b *d *g *gʷ like *z were voiced fricatives rather than voiced stops. Which automatically implies that the reflexes of the Voiced Aspirates were in fact voiced fricatives.

Those are a whole bunch of voiced fricatives, or at least voiced stops that can't really decide on what they want to be. I'm currently thinking that the Voiced Aspirates were in fact voiced stops that alternated with voiced fricatives allophonically in some way. I'm just not completely sure in which way just yet.

Any thoughts?