Ежелгі Үнді-Еуропа тілдерінде дауыстық тоқылдар туралы гипотеза

Proposal in Proto Indo European phonology
The glottalic theory is that Proto Indo European had ejective or otherwise non pulmonic stops, , instead of the plain voiced ones, as hypothesized by the usual Proto Indo European phonological reconstructions. A forerunner of the theory was proposed by the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen in 1951, but he did not involve glottalized sounds. While early 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 proposal remained speculative until it was fully fleshed out simultaneously but independently in theories in 1973 by Paul Hopper of the United States and by Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov of the Soviet Union in the journal Phonetica in 1973. The glottalic theory "enjoyed a not insignificant following for a time, but it has been rejected by most Indo Europeanists." The most recent publication supporting it is Allan R. Bomhard (2008 and 2011) in a discussion of the controversial Nostratic hypothesis, and its most vocal proponents today are historical linguists at the University of Leiden. An earlier supporter, Theo Vennemann, has abandoned the glottalic theory because of incompatibilities between it and his theory of a Semitic substrate and loanwords in Germanic and Celtic languages (Vennemann 2006). However, Martin Kümmel (2012), although rejecting the ejective hypothesis as implausible, argues for a re interpretation of these stops as implosive, comparable to the Leiden interpretation as pre glottalized stops.

While the glottalic theory was originally motivated by typological argument, several proponents, in particular Frederik Kortlandt, have argued for traces of glottalization being found in a number of attested Indo European languages or the assumption of glottalization explaining previously known phenomena, which lends the theory empirical support. (Similarly, the laryngeal theory was proposed before direct evidence in Anatolian was discovered.) Among the Indo Iranian languages, Sindhi reflects the non aspirated voiced series unconditionally as implosives. Kortlandt also points out the distribution of voiced aspirates within Indo Iranian: they are lacking from the Iranian languages and the Nuristani languages, two of the three accepted main branches of Indo Aryan, and within the third, Indo Aryan, also lacking from Kashmiri, which he suggests points to voiced aspirates being an innovation rather than a retention. In Germanic, some Danish dialects have clusters of a glottal stop followed by a voiceless stop (vestjysk stød) which correspond with the Proto Germanic voiceless stops, deriving from the allegedly glottalized PIE series. Kortlandt also proposes word final glottalization in English to be a retention and derives features such as preaspiration in Icelandic and Faroese and sporadically in Norwegian and certain instances of gemination in Swedish and High German from preglottalization as well. In both Latin (Lachmann's law) and Balto Slavic (Winter's law), vowels are lengthened before a "voiced" consonant. It is the same behaviour that vowels exhibit before Proto Indo European laryngeals, which are assumed to have included a glottal stop. It may be that the glottalic consonants were preglottalized or that they were ejectives that became preglottalized in Italic and Balto Slavic before losing their glottalization and becoming voiced. It is very common in the world's languages for glottal stops to drop and lengthen preceding vowels. In Quileute, for example, the sequences , , and , as found in ak’a ~ a’k’a ~ āk’a, are allophones in free variation. In Balto Slavic, glottalization is also directly attested, in the broken tone of Latvian and Žemaitian. Dialects of Armenian also show glottalization. It has been argued to be influence from the other Caucasian languages, but Kortlandt argues glottalization cannot be considered a modern innovation and must be reconstructed with a wider dialectal distribution for older stages of Armenian.

The primary objection to the theory is the alleged 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 , 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 Aryan added an unvoiced aspirate series and gained an element of symmetry; Greek and Italic devoiced the murmured series to a more common aspirate series ( to ); Iranian, Celtic and Balto Slavic deaspirated the murmured series to modal voice ( to ) 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. If the system were typologically common, as proposed by the glottalic theory, it might be expected to be stable and so be preserved in at least some of the daughter languages, which is not the case: no daughter language preserves ejective sounds in places that the theory postulates them. Its proponents respond that if Proto Indo European did not have true ejectives but some less stable kind of glottalic consonant, their loss would be more understandable, but that undercuts many of the original motivations of the glottalic theory, which are based on ejectives (rather than glottalized consonants) and on the idea of a typologically natural (and so stable) system. Regardless, there are languages in which ejective consonants have voiced allophones, such as Blin and Kw'adza, which has been suggested as an "empirical precedent" for the glottalic theory. The typological underpinnings of the glottalic theory itself have also been questioned, such as in 1997 by Martínez as well as in 2002 3 by Barrack. Additionally, if traces of glottalic stops can be found in separate branches such as Italic and Indo Iranian, the change of to must have occurred independently in each branch after their separation from Proto Indo European. Taking them as identical but independent innovations would, according to traditional models of sound change, be an astonishing coincidence, which most linguists would find very hard to believe because ejectives tend to be quite stable diachronically. However, it cannot be assumed that Proto Indo European was a uniform language, and presumably, a putative shift from ejective to voiced stops was already present as variation at an early stage. Kortlandt also asserts that the change from aspirated to plain voiced stops, which is likewise required as an independent change in numerous Indo European branches under the traditional model, is not attested elsewhere and is typologically suspect.) A compromise viewpoint would be to see the original formulation of glottalic theory, with ejective stops, as representing an earlier stage in the history of Proto Indo European, which would have undergone a period of internal evolution into a stage featuring unstable voiced glottalized stops, or even into the similarly unstable traditional system, before it branched out into the daughter languages. That would explain the root restrictions in Proto Indo European, the near universal loss of glottalic consonants in the daughter languages and the lack of in the traditional system, while at the same time explaining evidence supporting the traditional system. In practical terms, it is irrelevant for the traditional reconstruction of Proto Indo European that describes only its latest stage (the so called "Late Proto Indo European"). However, Kortlandt suggests that voiced aspirate was probably not in Indo European before the division into the branches.

The oldest stratum of Iranian loanwords to Armenian demand consonant shifts from voiced to voiceless, which are not possible in a glottalic theory framework in which they were voiceless to begin with. Additional evidence from Armenian comes in the form of Adjarian's law: in certain Armenian dialects, initial syllable vowels are fronted after consonants reflecting the inherited (PIE) voiced aspirates. The conditioning is not a synchronic process but reflects the quality of the original prevocalic consonant. Andrew Garrett argues that such a sound change would be most cogently explained if the triggering consonants were, indeed, voiced aspirates (as they still are in some Armenian dialects) and not plain voiced stops. Since voiced aspirates would then have to be reconstructed for Proto Armenian, only Germanic could be claimed to be archaic with respect to the traditional voiced aspirate series in the traditional glottalic theory framework.

Arguably, the minority status of most of the languages which provide the allegedly certain direct evidence for the theory may be a rather large problem. Also, it is somewhat disputed that either Lachmann's law or Winter's law is real though this dispute is a result of assuming no glottalization in Proto Indo European. If Proto Indo European once showed glottalization, this circumvents the dispute by not requiring the assumption that we are dealing with an example of a sound law that affects deep phonological structure. Instead, we are dealing with an example of a cross linguistically common allophonic variation like the ~~ shown in Quileute. However, it still remains that allegedly certain direct evidence is absent from any majority Indo European language except Latvian and two pieces of indirect evidence; the operation of "Lachmann's law" and "Winter's law", have become obscured by subsequent phonological developments in Romance and Balto Slavic.

Classical Armenian is notable to this discussion because, as mentioned above in "Direct and indirect evidence", it has been argued to be influence from the other Caucasian languages that accounts for dialects of Armenian also showing glottalization, having inherited it from Classical Armenian. But if a part of the Caucasus is accepted as a part of the Proto Indo European homeland, this means the Caucasian influence was present before Proto Armenian diverged from Proto Indo European in an eastern dialect which would have been spoken near the Caucasus if not within the Caucasus itself. The evidence from comparison of attested Indo European and Caucasian languages points to a borrowing of phonemes, but few, if any, obvious roots, from Caucasian languages. The question then becomes what quality these borrowed phonemes had. The most likely candidate is the series of ejective stops that Kartvelian, Northeast Caucasian and Northwest Caucasian share because vowels are already sufficiently accounted for internally and Proto Indo European had no cross linguistically rare pulmonic consonants that it would have had to borrow, the separation of the traditional murmured series being just as likely to be an allophonic variation that became phonemic. There is direct evidence for the traditional murmured series originating as an allophonic variation in the behavior of the voiceless stops in English and German, where they emerge as aspriates except after /s/ and especially to only word initially. If, following Gamkrelidze and Ivanov and Hopper, aspiration is an allophonic variation of the stops, it makes sense to have the stops traditionially analyzed as plain voiced stops as glottalic, which they do. The series they posit is a series of ejective stops like it would be most geographically logical to assume given the aforementioned overlap between the Proto Indo European homeland and the Caucasus. Kortlandt follows this proposal, but also follows more recent versions of the theory in having no voiced consonants or treating voicing as non distinctive, proposing that the pulmonic stops had phonemic length like vowels had: Therefore, if a C'/Cʔ~C: allophonic variation is possible, Kortlandt interprets the traditional voiced series as ejectives and the traditional murmured series is just as likely to be an allophonic variation that became phonemic, Kortlandt is reversing the roles of the geminated and plain stops. Furthermore, if Kortlandt is reversing the roles of the geminated and plain stops, one gets a model fitting with his support of the Indo Uralic hypothesis, which unites Proto Indo European and Proto Uralic, which only had voiceless stops. The Indo Uralic hypothesis, if proven correct, lends support to a Caucasian part of the Proto Indo European homeland by the fact of the Uralic languages being named for their presumed homeland in the Ural Mountains. The reason for this is that the mountain dwelling Proto Uralic people who would have migrated to what is presumed to have been the Proto Indo European homeland would have found the Caucasus Mountains a comfortable place to resettle, being similar to their home. This resettlement brought the Proto Uralic people into contact with Proto Caucasian languages, from which they borrowed ejectives, as allophones of which they subsequently innovated the geminated pulmonic stops. As this allophonic variation became phonemic, * became unproductive as a phoneme and most of its original occurrences shifted to *p:, leaving the gap shown in reconstructions of Proto Indo European.

Because Kortlandt reconstructs a Proto Indo European without voiced stops, he needs an account of how the voiced stops arose in the daughter languages. For this account, he cites André Georges Haudricourt's Les mutations consonantiques (occlusives) en indo européen as a cross reference for "the typologically normal sequence of developments t > t’ > ’d > d > dʰ > tʰ, also t > d > t > tʰ". This is the same as the compromise viewpoint to see the original formulation of glottalic theory, with ejective stops, as representing an earlier stage in the history of Proto Indo European, which would have undergone a period of internal evolution into a stage featuring unstable voiced glottalized stops before it branched out into the daughter languages. However, this reveals a hidden problem with Kortlandt suggesting that "voiced aspirate was probably not in Indo European before the division into the branches" in suggesting that the absence of direct evidence for voiced aspirate losing its aspiration in "all languages except Indic, Greek and Italic" outside of Kümmel's monograph proves that it never happened because voiced aspirate probably never existed in these languages in the first place. Phonological shifts can reverse, especially after they become non productive, which Icelandic shows much direct evidence of. The argument also contradicts Kortlandt's own supposition that the t’ > ’d sound change that occurred "except in Anatolian and Tocharian" reversed in Armenian, not to mention that the voiced "stops" shifted from the traditional voiced aspirates in Proto Germanic regularly alternated with fricatives. If voiced aspirates ever existed at an ancient stage of any Indo European languages other than Indic, they could have easily become fricatives either phonemically, as in Italic and ultimately in Greek, or allophonically, as in Germanic. This direct evidence for the ease of occurrence for such a development renders Kortlandt's view that the two voiced series must have, however partially, collapsed back into one, in Albanian and Iranian something of a paradox. The paradox goes even deeper, many apparent instances of preglottalized stops in Kortlandt's view of late Proto Indo European may have been the result of a metathesis 'V/ʔV→V'/Vʔ equally to C'/Cʔ→'C/ʔC. The solution to this paradox is that the Proto Indo European glottalic series was never fully stable ejectives, first splitting into ejectives and geminates and then allophonically varying rather freely as ejectives and preglottalized stops.

Since the traditional reconstruction of Proto Indo European includes one stress per word, generally on the root or stem of the word, and the non representation of voiced voiced and voiceless voiced aspirated stop sequences in the reconstructed roots is not a real problem; modern reconstructions including glottalic phonemes are making an unnecessarily strong assumption. If Proto Indo European words can only have one stress each and in many languages that have glottalized consonants there is a phonetic constraint against two such consonants in the same root, the Proto Indo European glottalic consonants need only have been allophones conditioned by the lexical accent. Since Proto Indo European had distinct syllable weights, a stressed short syllable nucleus may have glottalized its onset while a long one (pre)glottalized its coda, at least in polysyllabic words:
Acrostatic root nounAcrostatic lengthened root nounAmphikinetic(?) root nounHysterokinetic r stemAmphikinetic n stemHysterokinetic n stemGlossnight (f.)moon (m.)foot (m.)father (m.)lake (m.)bull (m.) (< "ox")Sing. nom. voc. acc. inst. dat. abl./gen. loc. Dualnom./voc./acc. Plur. n. v. acc. inst. dat./abl. gen. loc. Proterokinetic neuter r/n stemAmphikinetic collective neuter r/n stemAmphikinetic m stemProterokinetic ti stemProterokinetic tu stemProterokinetic neuter u stemglosswater (n.)water(s) (n.)earth (f.)thought (f.)taste (m.)tree (n.)Sing. nom. acc. voc. inst. dat. abl./gen. loc. Dualnom./voc./acc. Plur. n. v. acc. inst. dat./abl. gen. loc. Neuter s stemProterokinetic h₂ stemHysterokinetic h₂ stemeh₂ stem (ā stem)o stemNeuter o stemGlosscloud (n.)woman (f.) (> "queen")tongue (f.)grain (f.)nest (m.)work (n.)Sing. nom. voc. acc. inst. dat. abl. gen. loc. Dualnom./voc./acc.*dʰoHnʔéh₂h₁ePlur. n. v. acc. inst. dat./abl. gen. loc.

Charles M. Barrack, The Glottalic Theory revisited: a negative appraisal, Indogermanische Forschungen, 2002, pp. 76–95. Charles M. Barrack, The Glottalic Theory revisited: a negative appraisal. Part II: The typological fallacy underlying the Glottalic Theory, Indogermanische Forschungen, 2003, pp. 1–16. Robert S. P. Beekes, Comparative Indo European Linguistics. 2nd edition revised and corrected by Michiel de Vaan, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Allan R. Bomhard, Reconstructing Proto Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary. 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008. Allan R. Bomhard, The Nostratic Hypothesis in 2011: Trends and Issues. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2011. James Clackson, Indo European Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 40–49. Anthony Fox, Linguistic Reconstruction. Oxford University Press, 1995. Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, “Sprachtypologie und die Rekonstruktion der gemeinindogermanischen Verschlüsse”. Phonetica 27 (1973): 150–156. Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, Indo European and the Indo Europeans, translated by Johanna Nichols, 2 volumes. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. Paul J. Hopper, Glottalized and murmured occlusives in Indo European. Glossa 7:2:1973, 141 166. Theo Vennemann, Grimm’s Law and loanwords. Transactions of the Philological Society 104:2:2006, 129 166.