Talk:Grassmann's law

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"The linguist Ivan Sag has pointed out an advantage of the ancient Indian theory, namely that it explains why there are no patterns like hypothetical "[trik-s] ~ [trikʰ-es]". The underlying-diaspirate theory incorrectly predicts that these should occur."

I rejiggered the section on the discussion of diaspirates to reflect the current consensus among current historical linguists, where ATB is commonly regarded as a generativist kludge. (It's worth noting that the only defence of ATB cited is from a paper more than 20 years old) I do not have any citations at hand, but I will endeavor to run some down. Mrgah 18:12, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A cobbler should stick to his last

Before I tackle Grassmann's Law in detail in the main entry, I might merely mention here that (pace Ivan Sag, whose many accomplishments do not include a knowledge of Greek) G's Law "predicts" nothing and ATB "explains" nothing. G's Law merely allows alternations in Greek of the type t...p- ~ t...ph-; the explanation for why such alternations don't occur has nothing to do with Greek; it is because for whatever reason there were no roots of the shape *t...gh- in Proto-Indo-European.

But there are even more serious problems with Sag's position. As it happens, such patterns do in fact occur in Greek. Abundantly. Thus forms like pakhús "thick", pássōn "thicker" (cognate forms like Sanskrit bahú- "abundant" establishing the etymon *bhṇġh- since *bh is the only point of intersection between Greek p and Sanskrit b). Similarly seen in futures like peúsomai (to peúthomai/punthánomai "come to know", etymon *bhewdh-). (Contrariwise, only th dissimilates before aspirated affixes like the aorist passive in -thē- and the imperative in -thi but not ph and kh, thus pháthi "speak!"). That is, thanks to leveling analogies (of a somewhat mysterious character) dissimilation of aspirates in Greek works as designed, so to say, only in reduplicating syllables. Elsewhere, for unfathomable reasons, it's been totally lost for ph and kh, surviving in reasonably good shape only for th (as in the word for "hair"), and also (in contrast to pakhús, above), note such paradigms as takhús "fast", thássôn (long a) "faster"). It makes no difference whether the Greek th in question continues PIE *dh or *gwh.

In any case, a system of dissimilation, however formulated, is indispensable for reduplication in both Greek and Indic; having bought it and paid for it, it makes sense to use it for all other cases where (thanks to comparative evidence) we know that it is operating on a root had two aspirated consonants in it. (Parenthetically, the Sanskrit root guh- "hide" does continue *gheuġh-, if its Baltic and Slavic cognatese mean anything.) But there are problems, and interesting ones -- real language problems, not the metatheoretical issues that briefly fascinated the generativists in the 60's and 70's.

70.226.143.216 18:35, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Format request

On my computer, tʰ is almost unreadable, and absolutely uneditable; the superscript h is a little square box in edit mode, and barely visible in display mode. Can we please substitute th (t<sup>h</sup>), if th is unacceptable as representing two phonemes instead of one? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:51, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Most computers display IPA correctly with the IPA template. If you're editing and not sure what a box means, you can preview it. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 00:20, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm not arguing that tʰ is incorrect; I assert that it is illegible. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:52, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citation

The argument that GL is not PIE because it occurred after division of devoiced aspirates is novel to me; it's not in Buck. This requires both a source, and (for the existing phrasing) evidence that this is the present consensus of scholarship. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:55, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

I added a citation (although I am not the original poster of this claim, and that person may have a better citation).
However, while I think that adding a citation like
<ref>Collinge, N.E. (1985). The Laws of Indoeuropean. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 47-61. ISBN 0915027755. </ref>
is supposed to automagically create a superscripted link to the citation in the list of references at the bottom of the page, I was unable to make that work. So I hard-coded the citation in both places. Would someone who better understands how this wikipedia citation stuff works mind making that edit?
Also, there were three other hard-coded citations in the list of references, but they don't seem to be referred to in the text. I'm guessing they are left-overs from an older version of the article, but I did not feel I could just remove them. Mcswell (talk) 18:04, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
It's quite common (though increasingly frowned upon) for Wikipedia pages to have a list of sources at the end but no inline citation. If we feel it's a significant enough problem, we can put a special tag requesting inline citations. — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 21:44, 17 April 2008 (UTC)