Zompist Bboard Again

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 4:43 am But the other examples hint at least at a sporadic sound change in Romance. Are there any known Romance varieties that have consistent voicing of initial stops?

In Campidanese Sardinian, initial voiceless stops are realised as voiced fricatives after vowels, a permissible realisation of phonemically voiced stops - source: Katz, J. & Pitzanti, G., (2019) “The phonetics and phonology of lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian case study”, Laboratory Phonology 10(1): 16. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.184. (Note that /tʃ/ then surfaces as [ʒ].) Does this answer your question?

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 10:00 am

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 4:43 am But the other examples hint at least at a sporadic sound change in Romance. Are there any known Romance varieties that have consistent voicing of initial stops?

In Campidanese Sardinian, initial voiceless stops are realised as voiced fricatives after vowels, a permissible realisation of phonemically voiced stops - source: Katz, J. & Pitzanti, G., (2019) “The phonetics and phonology of lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian case study”, Laboratory Phonology 10(1): 16. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.184. (Note that /tʃ/ then surfaces as [ʒ].) Does this answer your question?

That sounds like an extension of intervocalic voicing and frication, which is very widespread in Romance.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 10:23 am

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 10:00 am In Campidanese Sardinian, ...

That sounds like an extension of intervocalic voicing and frication, which is very widespread in Romance.

Yep. There are two significant aspects:

• It affects initial consonants, which is allegedly rare. One can also note that VtV exists - the word for 'cat' is an example.
• Voicing of initial /k/ to /g/ in Romance is usually sporadic.

While #kL > gL in French may previously have been regarded as sporadic, I don't think those words were significant on the list I saw.

A mischievous thought occurred to me. Could PIE *ɡ́ʰerd 'heard' be original, and *ḱerd be by the influence of Kartvelian *mḳerd 'chest'? (The dot below marks ejectivity.) I'll admit the direction of the shift isn't very persuasive, but the Indo-Iranian could conceivably be a relic.

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 2:25 pm A mischievous thought occurred to me. Could PIE *ɡ́ʰerd 'heard' be original, and *ḱerd be by the influence of Kartvelian *mḳerd 'chest'? (The dot below marks ejectivity.) I'll admit the direction of the shift isn't very persuasive, but the Indo-Iranian could conceivably be a relic.

An interesting idea, I must say; while I am not immediately sold to it, I consider it worthy of discussion.

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 2:25 pm

• It affects initial consonants, which is allegedly rare. One can also note that VtV exists - the word for 'cat' is an example.

On an only slightly-related note, there is marginal initial voicing after sonorants in NAE of all things. In unstressed speech the initial /t/ in to, today, tonight, and tomorrow is liable to be realized as a voiced flap [ɾ] if the preceding word ends in a sonorant.

Surely that's just intervocal flapping jumping across weak word boundaries? I have the same thing in a sentence like "I bought two today." Flapping in NAE is common after sonorants and vowels, which is exactly what I observe in these rapid, unstressed initial flapping examples.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 6:34 pm Surely that's just intervocal flapping jumping across weak word boundaries? I have the same thing in a sentence like "I bought two today." Flapping in NAE is common after sonorants and vowels, which is exactly what I observe in these rapid, unstressed initial flapping examples.

To me the example of Campidanese is much the same except more generalized.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 2:31 pm

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 2:25 pm A mischievous thought occurred to me. Could PIE *ɡ́ʰerd 'heard' be original, and *ḱerd be by the influence of Kartvelian *mḳerd 'chest'? (The dot below marks ejectivity.) I'll admit the direction of the shift isn't very persuasive, but the Indo-Iranian could conceivably be a relic.

An interesting idea, I must say; while I am not immediately sold to it, I consider it worthy of discussion.

He's making fun of you. This is a Janko post.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 10:41 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 2:31 pm An interesting idea, I must say; while I am not immediately sold to it, I consider it worthy of discussion.

He's making fun of you. This is a Janko post.

No, I was pondering what could be used to fix the original phonation of the 'heart' word. So far as I am aware, the Anatolian and Tocharian cognates provide no evidence either way, and the Kartvelian is the one possible extra-PIE cognate I could think of. However, it could also be a contaminant - or just an outrageous coincidence.

The 'heart' word is not the only outstanding IIr velar phonation anomaly, though. Another well-known one is PIE *eɡ́- v. pre-IIr *eɡ́ʰ- for 'I', though possibly not a word dating back to PIE.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 8:42 am

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 4:43 am The "cat" word is a known wanderwort, so the rendering of the stop as voiced or unvoiced may reflect something in the (unknown) source language.

In Germanic this word is reflected with a consistant voiceless stop, of course.

In Slavic and Celtic, too. But I don't know by which paths all those languages loaned the word and whether it's from the same source language in all of them.

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 10:00 am In Campidanese Sardinian, initial voiceless stops are realised as voiced fricatives after vowels, a permissible realisation of phonemically voiced stops - source: Katz, J. & Pitzanti, G., (2019) “The phonetics and phonology of lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian case study”, Laboratory Phonology 10(1): 16. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.184. (Note that /tʃ/ then surfaces as [ʒ].) Does this answer your question?

Yes and no. Now I know there are such variants, but I don't know whether that development is old enough to be the source of the /g/ variants for /k/ in the other Romance languages discussed, and then Sardinian, which IIRC is the variety that participates in the least number of historical isoglosses in Romance, would not be the ideal originator for a variation with examples all over Western Romance.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 10:41 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 2:31 pm

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 2:25 pm A mischievous thought occurred to me. Could PIE *ɡ́ʰerd 'heard' be original, and *ḱerd be by the influence of Kartvelian *mḳerd 'chest'? (The dot below marks ejectivity.) I'll admit the direction of the shift isn't very persuasive, but the Indo-Iranian could conceivably be a relic.

An interesting idea, I must say; while I am not immediately sold to it, I consider it worthy of discussion.

He's making fun of you. This is a Janko post.

Pardon? What has poor numeral-collecting Janko to do with this? This is not even about numerals. Perhaps you are confusing Janko and Talskubilos? (But it would do injustice to Talskubilos to attribute something to him he has never said.)

Something I've noticed when checking Anatolian reflexes of Indo-European roots is that sometimes, mostly in body parts, h₂ is prefixed with *s. Why is that?

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 9:17 am Something I've noticed when checking Anatolian reflexes of Indo-European roots is that sometimes, mostly in body parts, h₂ is prefixed with *s. Why is that?

Possibly a particular set of instances of s-mobile?

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 9:17 am Something I've noticed when checking Anatolian reflexes of Indo-European roots is that sometimes, mostly in body parts, h₂ is prefixed with *s. Why is that?

Are you referring to išḫaḫru "tear"? I can't find any other words where (pre-)Hittite *sh₂- would correspond to IE *h₂-. And, in this case, the etymology connecting it to *h₂eḱru- isn't as strong as you'd like.

KamareKitsune wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 2:43 pm

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 9:17 am Something I've noticed when checking Anatolian reflexes of Indo-European roots is that sometimes, mostly in body parts, h₂ is prefixed with *s. Why is that?

Are you referring to išḫaḫru "tear"? I can't find any other words where (pre-)Hittite *sh₂- would correspond to IE *h₂-. And, in this case, the etymology connecting it to *h₂eḱru- isn't as strong as you'd like.

like "eye" and "fingernail" (the only examples i could find on swadesh)

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 4:43 am The "cat" word is a known wanderwort, so the rendering of the stop as voiced or unvoiced may reflect something in the (unknown) source language. But the other examples hint at least at a sporadic sound change in Romance. Are there any known Romance varieties that have consistent voicing of initial stops?

What about Spanish "gritar", which is from Vulgar Latin "critare", which is from Classical Latin "quiritare"?

I remember investigating this before and that Spanish has a bunch of examples, but I can't remember any others.

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 5:24 pm

KamareKitsune wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 2:43 pm

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 9:17 am Something I've noticed when checking Anatolian reflexes of Indo-European roots is that sometimes, mostly in body parts, h₂ is prefixed with *s. Why is that?

Are you referring to išḫaḫru "tear"? I can't find any other words where (pre-)Hittite *sh₂- would correspond to IE *h₂-. And, in this case, the etymology connecting it to *h₂eḱru- isn't as strong as you'd like.

like "eye" and "fingernail" (the only examples i could find on swadesh)

Those cases present their own issues, namely the rare correspondence of Hittite š- with Luwic t-, which is wholly unexplained, and laryngeal explanations are quite unconvincing.

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 5:24 pm

KamareKitsune wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 2:43 pm

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2026 9:17 am Something I've noticed when checking Anatolian reflexes of Indo-European roots is that sometimes, mostly in body parts, h₂ is prefixed with *s. Why is that?

Are you referring to išḫaḫru "tear"? I can't find any other words where (pre-)Hittite *sh₂- would correspond to IE *h₂-. And, in this case, the etymology connecting it to *h₂eḱru- isn't as strong as you'd like.

like "eye" and "fingernail" (the only examples i could find on swadesh)

But these suggest *sh₃ rather than *sh₂, and ša-ku-u̯a and ša-an-ku-wa-i show different treatments of the putative cluster.

KamareKitsune wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2026 12:52 am Those cases present their own issues, namely the rare correspondence of Hittite š- with Luwic t-, which is wholly unexplained, and laryngeal explanations are quite unconvincing.

Presumably a laryngeal explanation would be /sh₃/ > /ʃ‌/ > /tʃ/ > /t/. My thought is inspired by Dutch <sch> and the deaffrication seen in a few languages, such as the development of Egyptian <t̲>.