| Glottalic Theory |
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The glottalic theory was developed in the United States and in the (then) Soviet Union by the American linguist Paul Hopper and the Soviet scholars Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov . While earlier linguists, such as André Martinet and Morris Swadesh , had seen the potential of substituting glottalic sounds for the supposed plain voiced stops of Proto-Indo-European, the idea remained speculative until substantial evidence for the proposal was published simultaneously by Hopper in the journal ''Glossa'' in 1973 and by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov in the journal ''Phonetica'', also in 1973. THE INDO-EUROPEAN STOP SERIES The traditional reconstruction of Indo-European includes the following stops: is bracketed because it's at best very rare and perhaps nonexistent.
The reason this inventory was posited in the first place was accidental. In the original Proto-Indo-European proposal, there was a fourth phonation series, aspirated , assumed to exist by analogy with Sanskrit , which at the time was thought to be the most conservative Indo-European language. However, it was later realized that this series was unnecessary and was generally the result of a sequence of a Tenuis stop such as and a Laryngeal such as . The aspirate series was removed, but the breathy voiced consonants remained. The Such a system is common among the world's languages. Moreover, the revised system explains a number of phonological peculiarities in the reconstructed system. Hopper also proposed (1973:) that the aspiration that had been assumed for the voiced stops bh, dh, gh could be accounted for by a low-level phonetic feature known to phoneticians as "breathy voice". This proposal made it possible both to establish a system in which there was only one voiced stop, and at the same time to explain developments in later Indo-European dialects (Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit) that pointed to some kind of aspiration in the voiced series. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov in their 1973 article posited aspiration in both voiced and voiceless stops.
These constraints on the phonological structure of the root cannot be explained in terms of a theory of assimilation or dissimilation, since they display a radical difference in patterning between two sets of consonants--the voiced stops--that ought to behave identically. The Glottalic Theory provides a completely coherent explanation (Hopper 1973): 1. In very many languages that have glottalic consonants, there is a constraint against two such consonants in the same root. This constraint has been found in many languages of Africa, the Americas, and the Caucasus. 2. If the "plain voiced stops" were not voiced, then the "voiced aspirated stops" were the only voiced stops. The second constraint can accordingly be reformulated as: Two nonglottalic stops must agree in voicing. 3. Since the glottalic stops were outside the voiced/voiceless opposition, they were immune from the constraint on voicing agreement in 2.
One objection to this reconstruction is that the voiced consonants are frequently voiceless in the daughter languages; aspirates in Greek and voiceless fricatives in Latin, for example. While it is common for aspirates to become tenuis and then voiced, as ( Lenition ), the reverse is rare. Thus more recent versions of this hypothesis do not have voiced consonants at all, or treat voicing as non-distinctive. Such an inventory is: (Here the traditional palatalized ''vs'' plain velar dichotomy is treated as a velar-uvular contrast, as posited by Hopper 1981. This is not required for the glottalic theory, and may have been Allophonic ) at an early stage in the proto-lanuage. DECEM AND TAIHUN In 1981 Hopper proposed to divide all Indo-European languages into Decem and '''Taihun''' groups, according to the pronunciation of the numeral 10, by analogy with the Centum-Satem Isogloss , which is based on the pronunciation of the numeral 100. The Armenian, Germanic, Anatolian and Tocharian subfamilies belong to the Taihun group because the numeral 10 begins from the voiceless ''t'' there. All other Indo-European languages belong to the Decem group because the numeral 10 begins from the voiced ''d'' in them. OBJECTIONS The primary objection to the glottalic theory is the difficulty in explaining how the sound systems of the attested dialects were derived from a parent language in the above form. If the parent language had a typologically unusual system, like the traditional ''p-b-bh,'' then it might be expected to collapse into more typical systems, possibly with different solutions in the various daughter languages, which is what one finds. For example, Indo-Iranian added an unvoiced aspirate series, gaining an element of symmetry; Greek and Italic devoiced the murmured series to a more common aspirate series; Balto-Slavic deaspirated the murmured series to modal voice; and Germanic and Armenian chain-shifted all three series. In each case, the attested system represents a change that could be expected from the proposed parent. Now if the system were typologically common, as proposed by the glottalic theory, then it might be expected to be stable and therefore to have been preserved in at least some of the daughter languages, which is not the case: no daughter language preserves ejective sounds where the glottalic theory postulates them. However, if Proto-Indo-European did not have true ejectives but rather some less stable kind of glottalic consonant, their loss would be more understandable. It should be noted, however, that even "stable" systems change, and that an objection based on what "should" have happened cannot really overturn a serious and otherwise well-motivated reconstruction. In all reconstructions of phonological systems one proceeds by comparing the evidence of the daughter languages and projecting them back to a common proto-form, not by first declaring this or that change to be a priori implausible. |
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