Phonetic issues in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
Keywords:
Indo-European, efective consonants, aspirated voiced stops, breathly voice, typology of stopsAbstract
Basing on typological reasons, R. Jakobson (1957) argued that, in the PIE system reconstructed by comparatists, the existence of the aspirated voiced stops without the presence of the corresponding voiceless aspirated stops was questionable. Later, a series of attempts to solve this problem was made. One of the most successful, at first, was the so-called glottalic theory, which focused on ejective consonants. This paper discusses the phonetic bases of this theory and presents some arguments against the reconstruction it puts forward. Another solution consisted in considering the aspirated voiced stops as breathy. This article deals extensively with this approach with the aim of determining its phonetic characteristics and its typological possibilities. Given the fact that recent Indo-European studies (Clackson 2007) agree in saying that there is no evidence for the reconstruction of aspirated voiceless stops in PIE, one has to conclude that this system was typologically deviant. However, the descendant languages solve this anomaly by two divergent paths: either by maintaining voiced aspirated stops and creating voiceless aspirated stops (as in the case of Sanskrit), or by losing aspiration (as in Germanic, or Latin, for example). This paper also presents some arguments against the typological imposition.
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