Talk:Grassmann's law

[Untitled]
"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 " ~ ". 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)

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)


 * Re that parenthesis: how's Balto-Slavic supposed to distinguish initial *g- from *gh-? 4pq1injbok (talk) 19:51, 19 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, the facts here are fairly interesting -- I've moved them together with Sag's remark back into the main article, and de-polemicised a bit. 4pq1injbok (talk) 23:20, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

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 ( th ), 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.  Æµ§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)

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
 * &lt;ref>&lt;/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.  — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  21:44, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Upsilon
The IPA for the examples near the beginning transcribe upsilon as [u], but upsilon in fact represented [y], except in the earliest greek.
 * Is it the case that Grassmann's law was not longer in effect by the time [u] fronted to [y]? — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  03:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Examples
Perhaps this shows my lack of expertise, but can someone explain why the examples include thapsai and taphos? --Quadalpha (talk) 07:32, 27 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Ack, never mind. I was comparing thapsai with thaptein, and not the first pair with the second pair. --Quadalpha (talk) 07:34, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

That was unclear to me too. Putting taphos before thaptein would make more sense. Collin237 166.147.104.149 (talk) 06:35, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Elision in Greek
Does Grassmann's operate when aspiration is produced by elision? For example, if a verb ending in -ste is elided to -sth', would Grassmann's then operate on a possible preceding aspirated consonant? --Quadalpha (talk) 07:42, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Diachronics Errors?
I believe the article, or rather a part of it, is at fault, because: "...(established by cognate forms like Sanskrit bahú- 'abundant' since *bʰ is the only point of intersection between Greek p and Sanskrit b)" is simply untrue. PIE /*bʰ/ evolved into /pʰ/ in Ancient Greek but remained /bʰ/ in Sanskrit. I won't edit anything as I'm not 100% sure if there weren't any other mechanisms or if the quote in question relates specifically to phonemes in the enviroment where Grassman's law applied. 178.149.94.17 (talk) 12:10, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

A little credit where due?
Might be nice to credit this book by Quiles, since the discussion of ATB is pretty much copied from it. See page 460. Jobrill (talk) 22:27, 11 May 2015 (UTC)