Early PIE stops

[Creyeditor]

How about thinking of phonemes as sets of allophones, like we do for living languages? Maybe more than one answer is accurate?

[Travis B.]

(1) we don't know whether IE and Uralic are particularly closely related or not

Apparently most of the IE-like words found in Uralic are actually transparent loans and not cognates in the first place.

[Travis B.]

How about thinking of phonemes as sets of allophones, like we do for living languages? Maybe more than one answer is accurate?

I would be open to considering *T to have been optionally aspirated and *D to have been optionally fricated myself, and whether they stayed aspirated or fricated would depend on the particular PIE branch.

[WeepingElf]

(1) we don't know whether IE and Uralic are particularly closely related or not

Apparently most of the IE-like words found in Uralic are actually transparent loans and not cognates in the first place.

They surely are loans! As I have laid out here, the sound correspondences between the IE and Uralic items are precisely the sound substitutions one would expect from such loans; especially, the vowels faithfully reflect IE ablaut and even vowel-colouring effects of laryngeals, both of which are surely not inherited from Indo-Uralic as Uralic shows no traces of them!

How about thinking of phonemes as sets of allophones, like we do for living languages? Maybe more than one answer is accurate?

I would be option to considering *T to have been optionally aspirated and *D to have been optionally fricated myself, and whether they stayed aspirated or fricated would depend on the particular PIE branch.

Indeed, it is not unlikely that there were ranges of allophones. Given the weakenings of *D set phonemes I mentioned in my opening post, the *D set probably was articulated with less effort than either the *T or the *Dh sets - which manifested primarily in the lack of aspiration, but could in some dialects at least result in a fricated pronunciation (while the glottalic theories essentially claim the opposite!). After all, we are dealing with a language that was spoken in a large area - the Yamnaya culture encompassed an area of about 1 million square kilometers, which is larger than any modern European country, Russia alone excepted - and was the parent of a huge family, so there must have been many dialects! Yet, I feel that the aspirated *T set theory is more parsimonious than the fricated *D set theory and to be preferred.

[Travis B.]

Indeed, it is not unlikely that there were ranges of allophones. Given the weakenings of *D set phonemes I mentioned in my opening post, the *D set probably was articulated with less effort than either the *T or the *Dh sets - which manifested primarily in the lack of aspiration, but could in some dialects at least result in a fricated pronunciation (while the glottalic theories essentially claim the opposite!). After all, we are dealing with a language that was spoken in a large area - the Yamnaya culture encompassed an area of about 1 million square kilometers, which is larger than any modern European country, Russia alone excepted - and was the parent of a huge family, so there must have been many dialects! Yet, I feel that the aspirated *T set theory is more parsimonious than the fricated *D set theory and to be preferred.

One argument in favor of the "aspiration theory" is that all plosives other than *D were fricated in PGmc when not adjacent to sibilants, which would go along with both *T and *Dh being aspirated and aspiration being the motivating factor in their frication.

[Talskubilos]

Apparently most of the IE-like words found in Uralic are actually transparent loans and not cognates in the first place.

That's right!

[WeepingElf]

Indeed, it is not unlikely that there were ranges of allophones. Given the weakenings of *D set phonemes I mentioned in my opening post, the *D set probably was articulated with less effort than either the *T or the *Dh sets - which manifested primarily in the lack of aspiration, but could in some dialects at least result in a fricated pronunciation (while the glottalic theories essentially claim the opposite!). After all, we are dealing with a language that was spoken in a large area - the Yamnaya culture encompassed an area of about 1 million square kilometers, which is larger than any modern European country, Russia alone excepted - and was the parent of a huge family, so there must have been many dialects! Yet, I feel that the aspirated *T set theory is more parsimonious than the fricated *D set theory and to be preferred.

One argument in favor of the "aspiration theory" is that all plosives other than *D were fricated in PGmc when not adjacent to sibilants, which would go along with both *T and *Dh being aspirated and aspiration being the motivating factor in their frication.

Yep.

[Zju]

Uvulars are the best answer to the frequency of IE "palatal/prevelar" versus "velar" series, because it is improbable that palatal/prevelar consonants would be so much more common than velar consonants, whereas if the "palatal/prevelar" consonants were velar and the "velar" consonants were uvular their frequency would make a whole lot more sense.

PIE dorsals could also have arisen from a split.

Except it is hard to explain typologically common consonants all basically disappearing in a practically unconditional sound shift while typologically rare to mythical consonants are both very improbably common and are highly conserved outside of satem languages.

It's not hard if one posits that rests of the *D series shifted to plain voiced obstruents as part of the same shift, with *Dʰ already having shifted to various phonations in respective branches.

Overall, positing voiced fricatives for the *D series gives you two options about their origin - that they arose from either plain voiced or plain voiceless stops. The former gets you to square one (have they been allophones the whole time?) and the latter is highly improbable what with the many *DVC and *CVD roots.

[Ephraim]

Speaking of typology, my understanding is that a system with voiced fricatives contrasting with voiced stops but not with voiceless fricatives at the same point of articulation is very rare, although maybe not unattested.

This is from WALS:

Approximately another third (33.4%) of the languages surveyed have a voicing contrast in plosives but not in fricatives. This type is dominant in the most southerly parts of Asia, where it is typical of the Dravidian languages as well as languages from other families, and is prevalent in New Guinea. It is also well-represented in Africa and the Americas, but is largely absent from Europe and western Asia. These languages most typically have some fricatives but only voiceless ones. An African example is Yoruba (Defoid, Niger-Congo; southeastern Nigeria), which has three contrasting pairs of voiced and voiceless plosives, as well as three voiceless fricatives. Chickasaw, mentioned earlier, also belongs in this group although it has only the one contrasting plosive pair. It has four voiceless fricatives but no voiced ones. Ika (Chibchan; Colombia) and Murle (Surmic, Nilo-Saharan; Ethiopia) are unusual members of the group since they are reported as having only voiced fricatives, which therefore do not contrast with voiceless counterparts. Huave (Huavean; Oaxaca, Mexico) is reported to have some voiceless and some voiced fricatives, but no pairs at the same place of articulation, so this language also belongs in this group.

So probably more common than the traditional reconstruction of the PIE system, but still rare, as far as I understand.

I think it may be more common for languages to have voiced spirants (non-sibilant fricatives) or approximants, without corresponding voiceless ones, in cases where they don't contrast phonemically with plain voiced stops.

The reason to believe the *T series was aspirated to my knowledge mostly rests on Grimm's Law and that the fortis plosive series tends to be aspirated in modern Celtic languages (but this could possibly be explained away as Germanic influence). I am not sure if this is strong enough evidence to trace an aspirated *T series all the way back to PIE, since there is little evidence of aspiration of *T elsewhere in IE.

Right, this does not seem like strong evidence. While it seems quite plausible that the *T series was voiceless aspirated stops at least in the later stages of Pre-Proto-Germanic, the first stage of Grimm's law (i.e. the spirantization of the *T series) is typically dated to somewhere between 700–250 BCE. Considering the modern variation in aspiration among even closely related Germanic varieties (like say between Finland Swedish and Central Standard Swedish), it seems difficult to draw any conclusions about aspiration in PIE, let alone "Early PIE", based on what we might assume about the stops of Pre-Proto-Germanic millennia later.

[Travis B.]

The reason to believe the *T series was aspirated to my knowledge mostly rests on Grimm's Law and that the fortis plosive series tends to be aspirated in modern Celtic languages (but this could possibly be explained away as Germanic influence). I am not sure if this is strong enough evidence to trace an aspirated *T series all the way back to PIE, since there is little evidence of aspiration of *T elsewhere in IE.

Right, this does not seem like strong evidence. While it seems quite plausible that the *T series was voiceless aspirated stops at least in the later stages of Pre-Proto-Germanic, the first stage of Grimm's law (i.e. the spirantization of the *T series) is typically dated to somewhere between 700–250 BCE. Considering the modern variation in aspiration among even closely related Germanic varieties (like say between Finland Swedish and Central Standard Swedish), it seems difficult to draw any conclusions about aspiration in PIE, let alone "Early PIE", based on what we might assume about the stops of Pre-Proto-Germanic millennia later.

The variation in aspiration within Germanic seems to be the result of contact influence (with Romance in the case of Dutch, with Finnish in the case of Finland Swedish) or due to subsequent affrication or frication of aspirated voiceless stops (as in the case of Upper German). If anything it seems like ancestrally Germanic had aspirated voiceless stops, which were only lost in some daughter languages.