Talk:Glottalic theory

message: I'm not a professional linguist, but doesn't Armenian have ejectives? And isn't it an indo-european language?
:Yes, it most certainly is Indoeuropean, and it might have ejectives, but if it does, they are not primary (ie, inherited directly from Indoeuropean), so it isn't of much relevance here, I believe.  Or did you have something else in mind? --Twid 17:15, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Ejectives in Armenian?

message: The text segment on noting that Germanic chain shifted all three is inaccurate.  As the above poster noted, the Germanic sound changes are less anomalous under Glottalic theory.  The text as is reads wrong, as under glottalic, PIE(G) [PIE with glotallic] b, d, g and gw are unchanged into Germanic!  So, really it should state that only two shift.  The unaspirated stops pass from p->f, t->þ, k->h and kw->hw.  (I suspect that Germanic perhaps had these stops first pass quickly through an aspiration phase that led to the further shift, and recall seeing an article somewhere on that...)  The remaining Germanic-identifying change is that the ejectives are reduced to stops with or without aspiration, i.e. t` becomes simple t.
It makes a good contrast too with Italic, Greek, etc. choosing a different series of *two* chain shifts, where Italic, et al. keep p, t, k and kw intact, instead turning b, d, g and gw into fricatives, thus allowing the ejectives to migrate into voiced stops.  --Sturmde 29 June 2005 13:48 (UTC)
:Actually the reference to chain-shifting all three sounds is accurate. But the sentence it is in is prone to misunderstanding; indeed I misread it the same way on first reading. The sentence is subject to the condition, “If the parent language had a typologically unstable system (the traditional p/b/bh system).” All of the examples (Indo-Iranian, Greek and Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Armenian) then describe the changes from the traditional reconstruction. This is a little confusing in an article on the glotalic theory, but the point is that the typological instability of the traditional reconstruction supposedly explains the many different reflexes of the voiced (aspirates?) in the daughter languages.
:The glotalic theory certainly fits Germanic very well. But if the voiced (asperates?) were really unaspirated, why did they evolve in so many different ways. Was it to make phonetic space for the evolution of ejectives into voiced stops? Then why didn’t the ejectives evolve in many ways (or just remain ejectives)? --teb728 22:40, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Chain shifted all three??

message: The Polish linguist Witold Mańczak in his book Wieża Babel (in Polish) gives the information what the example is that contradicts the assertion that no language is known which has voiced aspirates unless it also has voiceless aspirates. I have moved the observation on disputable character of this assertion into the "objections" chapter, and added the additional information taken from W. Mańczak's book, as the information is really hard to be found elsewhere. --Grzegorj 09:20, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The t-d-dh exemplification 

message: Please don't cut off quite large parts of the article without discussing it first, OK? -- Grzegorj 01:38, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry about that. It seemed to require a lot of work to save. The stuff about "typologically unstable systems", for example, needs support. Yes, you'd expect ejectives to remain in some branches (unless of course they weren't actually ejectives), but it's bizarre to state that the branches wouldn't go in different directions phonologically if they had a "stable" system. As for empirical evidence, that's precisely what the vowel lengthening laws are supposed to be. I'll try giving it another passover with a little more finesse; please let me know if I take out anything you think can be justified. kwami 02:10, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, some fragments of the article need additions but it is the attraction of Wikipedia that no subject is ultimately finished and you can put more and more additions. And, which is the most important, we should report various views here rather than force our own ones. (BTW. the "unstability" stuff is not mine but Benwing's, see "history".) Despite of what you write, the Glottalic theory does not seem to be generally accepted, at least in its original form (and even if the glottalic - not necessarily ejective - character of the D series is accepted in fact, the old t/d/dh symbols are in use in the prevailing part of publications), and, as a consequence, it seems to be very useful to inform the reader about various objections against the theory which can be found in the literature (regardless we agree with them or not). Counterarguments, i.e. arguments which shake the original arguments of the followers of the glottalic theory, are yet more interesting. I mean the statement that there are no languages which have breathy voice consonants but no voiceless aspirates. Such a statement was formulated some years ago as one of the most important arguments but now we know that it is false. That is why I changed "no" into "few" in the article, and added the fragment on Kelabit. Note that this piece of information is rather hard to find elsewhere and that is why I have protested against removing it. Of course, some of the arguments of the anti-glottalicists can also be "counterized". I would suggest you to add your objections against "typologically unstability" instead of removing the thing, as it would be more useful for the reader than presenting the problem in the light of one point of view only. --13:03, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  About "Objections" 

message: "Although controversial at first, some variant of the glottalic theory is generally accepted today." Well, I can't pretend to know enough of the literature to be sure, but it seems to me that "generally accepted" is a considerable overstatment. Vennemann, for example, has changed his mind and no longer accepts the theory - see the article in the 2006 Transactions of the Philological Society. In the most recent handbook (2004), Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture, it says "The glottalic theory enjoyed a not insignificant following for a time, and still has adherents; but it has been rejected by most Indo-Europeanists."
At best, one might say "still controversial", it would seem. --Pfold 11:29, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The article itself seems to present a controversy.  I wouldn't say that it's "generally accepted" enough to use that wording in an encyclopedia. --Puellanivis 21:10, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Generally accepted?

message: I puzzled as to why this should be considered a puzzling phenomenon - it is common enough in English!
:It's puzzling because only occurs before voiced consonants that were originally glottalic in Balto-Slavic and Latin (when they are made to be voiceless.)  So a root like wegh would become weg in   Proto-Balto-Slavic but one with weg would become we:g, inexplicably.  In Latin, this only happens if the final consonant was devoiced:  wegh-to- would become vectu- but weg-to- would become ve:ctu-.  Someone should definitely flesh this section out with real world examples!  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.172.35.143 (talk) 09:36, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "Inexplicably"? Doesn't the aspiration take a bit of time, too, so that [wegʰ] and [weːg] have the same length? That wouldn't surprise me at all. In my native southern German, a stressed syllable can either have a long vowel or a lengthened consonant (or a consonant cluster), so that in all cases it has a similar length. Lenes can't be lengthened, and that means that the few words like Ebbe, Egge, Bagger – at least some of which are imported from Low German – sound overly hasty. David Marjanović (talk) 18:47, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Lengthening before consonant clusters consisting of voiced stop + (voiceless) stop is also found in Dutch dialects. Phonetically, this is really trivial. If Lachmann's law really has a phonetic basis, which is controversial, I doubt it has anything to do with the glottalic theory, even if it is correct in some form (especially the implosive or preglottalised variant; for Winter's law, this is more plausible). That this lengthening does not happen in front of old aspirates is unsurprising if you keep in mind that the Proto-Italic reflexes are probably voiceless fricatives, which then go back to voiceless aspirates as in Greek as an intermediate step from breathy-voiced stops. I think Lachmann's law is probably irrelevant and one of the weakest arguments considering that its interpretation is so uncertain. In fact, the common Italic/Celtic (Proto-Italo-Celtic?) rule that inserts /a/ after the first consonant in CDC clusters just like in CCCC clusters (for the /a/-epenthesis in clusters of four consonants, see Schrijver 1991: 416, 488ff.), which suggests the reinterpretation of CDC as CʔDC, is far more suggestive, and it is clearly different from and precedes Lachmann's law: frāctus < *frāgtos < Proto-Italic *fragtos < Pre-Proto-Italic *bʰra(ʔ)gtos < PIE *bʰr(ʔ)gtos was affected by both. It is exactly this example which I find striking and which makes me find the idea of a pre-glottalised or implosive realisation of the PIE voiced stops attractive. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:00, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Vocalic lengthening before voiced stop

message: Hello everyone! I admit this is a bit off-topic, but it is an extremely interesting subject (to me, at least :D). Could we possible create an article devoted to these typological matters? I am especially interested in phonetics and phonology, but other subsystems of language would be useful as well, I suppose. --Pet'usek [petrdothrubisatgmaildotcom] 07:22, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Linguistic typology, Implicational hierarchy and Linguistic universal exist, but they probably could use work. --Tropylium (talk) 22:00, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Typology and universals 

message: It is relevant to point out that recent genetic studies (by Nasidze, 2000 and Underhill 2009) have finally come to support the hypothesis that Haplogroup R (and R1), and it's descendant haplotypes R1a* (R1a1), originated nearer Northwest Iran.  While the former marker, has been linked to post-glacial (and perhaps Neolithic), Caucasoid expansion, the distribution of the latter marker is widely believed to represent (at least one wave) of Indo-European expansion.
: How on earth does this support glottalic theory of PIE? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 05:02, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: And I for one distrust genetic "proofs". Some 10 years ago we had no genes whatsoever in common with the neanderthals, now we have some 4% in common. And languages aren't genetically transmitted. Rursus dixit. (mbork3!) 22:53, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Genetic evidence has come to support the Glottalic theory, in more recent years. 

message: It might be noted that the structure of the revised glottalic theory (barring some differences in location of articulation) is exactly the same as that of modern Korean: a voiceless series with allophonic, weak aspiration when word-initial, a glottalised series, and a strongly aspirated voiceless series. The first series shows weak voicing intervocalicly. Jakob37 (talk) 01:42, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The tense(d) or faucalised consonants of Korean cannot be described as glottalised at all, neither even as implosive, see Korean phonology. They're actually rather like voiceless geminates, judging from the description. Also, the series which shows weak voicing intervocalically is the unaspirated (lax(ed)) series. Can't see any resemblance here. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:26, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Korean 

message: Kortlandt's work in Slavic accent is spot-on, but the stuff I've seen in support of the glottalic theory looks like a lot of garbage. Kortlandt obviously knows his stuff when it comes to careful and complex ordered sound changes but seems out of his league with typological arguments or arguments requiring comparing lots of ancient and modern varieties to work out what's original and what's not. As a simple example, Kortlandt was quoted in this article as "pointing out" that the change bh->b is not found, hence typologically suspect. But this is utter garbage and trivially falsifiable. This exact change is found independently numerous times in the Indic languages -- the first and most obvious place to look if you want to check out the truth of this statement.  Examples are the far northwestern Dardic languages (but not all, sometimes developing into tone); Sinhala in Sri Lanka, in the far south; some dialects in Bangladesh, in the northeast; etc.
:Interesting notes, but these examples cannot really be separated from the glottalic theory itself. I have not seen anyone lay out the model in full, extended detail, but my impression is, in the glottalic view these would be treated as retentions in marginal areas rather than innovativ deaspiration, just like how groups like Iranian or Celtic would have undergone a merger B' → B rather than Bʰ → B. The claims on Sindhi imply that glottalic theory would involve reconstructing the main difference between the two voiced series as glottalication even during the disintegration of Indo-Aryan.
Romany meanwhile has bh -> ph; places in Bangladesh have bh -> β; etc. 
:Bʰ → Pʰ is obviously a lot more plausible than B → Pʰ. However, since glottalic theory asserts that B → Bʰ is a plausible change, this doesn't seem like an issue. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:59, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  potential garbage in typological claims 

message: In case I do not find time to go into this in the near future: the fact that Adjarian's Law is a counterargument against Glottalic Theory has nothing to do with the original value of the traditional voiced aspirate series, per se (which the GT is not even about). It is instead about how to reconstruct the Proto-Armenian unaspirated voiceless series. The problem is the existence of a dialect group (Middle Armenian) where the Old Armenian Pʰ, P, B system evolves into [Pʰ, B, P]. This development is impossible if we only allow shifts in ±voicing and ±aspiration - something should have merged into something else.
Kortlandt's proposed solution is to reconstruct a glottalized *Pʼ series, which becomes voiceless in standard East Armenian, but voiced in the problem dialects. Adjarian's law allows a different detour: the B series first develops into voiced aspirates, which then break into voiced stop + breathy voiced vowel; the P series also becomes voiced; and then, the voiced series is devoiced specifically before these breathy voiced vowels, "undoing" the merger of the two non-Pʰ series. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 12:59, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Can you add it to the article? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:45, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  This would probably take some reorganization to add a section treating Armenian in partcular. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 20:09, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, my understanding is that the B series is now thought to have been breathy-voiced in Old Armenian (like in Indo-Aryan), as it is still so realised in several dialects. This obliterates the need for the reconstruction of ejectives. Ejective realisations do exist in Eastern Armenian, but they are mostly weak (barely audible) in Armenia (own experience) and only become more noticeable as one travels north (or so I heard), and they are particularly conspicuous in Tiflis. Of course, the Armenians there are bilingual in Georgian, so the obvious explanation for the ejective realisation is that it is simply Kartvelian influence. Also, a few very old Iranian loanwords such as arcatʿ "silver" have taken part in the Armenian sound shift as well, showing that it is real and that ejectives cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Armenian (nor for Old Armenian, probably). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:51, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

text: Not really, all we have is Classification des dialectes arméniens. However, see the table at Armenian language#Consonants at the end, which confirms what I said about breathy-voiced stops. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:46, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  re Adjarian's Law 

message: Details in chapter 2 (this is in German, but probably largely understandable even for non-German-readers). Very useful rundown on the relevant facts and arguments, but it would have been nice to mention that the development from ejectives to voiced stops is actually attested in Chechen and some other Northeast Caucasian languages, see Nakh languages#The voicing of ejective consonants, even if perhaps on a global scale the change may be comparatively rare (Kümmel 2008 probably goes into this, however). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:59, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Broken link. :-( David Marjanović (talk) 23:58, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:07, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Implosives instead of ejectives 

message: New (2015) publication by Bomhard; see . Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:17, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Caucasian substrate 

message: I really don't understand this, early in article I read According to them, the non-aspirated forms occurred in roots where two non-ejectives were present because of a rule that prohibited more than one aspirate in the same root. And also, Thus, an Indo-European *DʰeDʰ (where *Dʰ represents any non-ejective stop) might be realized as *DeDʰ (attested in Indic and Greek) or as *DʰeD (attested in Latin). In contrast, traditional theory would trace a form attested as both *DeDʰ and *DʰeD to an Indo-European *DʰeDʰ.
Later however, I come across this statement, If the "plain voiced stops" were not voiced, the "voiced aspirated stops" were the only voiced stops. The second constraint can accordingly be reformulated as two nonglottalic stops must agree in voicing.
These cant both be true. If only one aspirate was tolerated in a root, then this means that PIE breathy voiced stops were not the only voiced stops. The PIE root bheydh (to trust) would have been phonetically realized as either bʱɛjd or bɛjdʱ. Is there something I'm not getting. Since Dʰ represents any non-ejective stop, that includes dʱ and tʰ.
Idielive (talk) 17:51, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the idea is that the voiced aspirate stops were the only voiced stop phonemes, and unaspirated voiced stops were merely allophones of the aspirated voiced stop phonemes. AJD (talk) 20:39, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meaning of "voiced aspirated stops" were the only voiced stops 

message: The term '*rik-' in Proto-Germanic was borrowed from Proto-Celtic '*rixs-' or '*riks-', not '*rig-'. For references see A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics (Bomhard 2023) and Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/r%C4%ABks). Pcg111 (talk) 13:18, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Nobody is saying anything, so I’m going to add the change and cite Bomhard. If you have any problems with this edit, please leave them on this page or revert the edit. Pcg111 (talk) 16:19, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Germanic borrowing argument discredited