The Voiced Sibilants in Sanskrit

Marsh, Gordon H.

doi:10.2307/594343

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Probably the most disputed and still unsolved is the development of word-final *-as that yields Vedic -o before voiced consonants and -a before vowels (as opposed to e word-internally). In Avestan the outcome of *-as is -ō (and -@) (for proposals, see Bartholoae 1888, Marsh 1941, Allen 1962, Lazzeroni 1969, Malzahn 2001.…”

Section: Prior Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The development of Indo-Iranian voiced fricatives

Begus

2024

Preprint

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The development of voiced sibilants is a long-standing puzzle in Indo-Iranian historical phonology. In Vedic, all voiced sibilants are lost from the system, but the details of this loss are complex and subject to debate. The most intriguing development concerns the word-final -ah. to -o in sandhi. This paper presents a new account of the development of voiced sibilants from the Proto-Indo-Iranian period to Vedic with a special emphasis on Iranian comparative data. I propose a new explanation for the peculiar development of word-final voiced fricatives and motivate the new proposal with a phonetic explanation. I argue that *-s lenited and voiced to *-ɦ word-finally which colors the preceding short vowel a ̆ to *ɔ (o). Word-internally, no debuccalization occurs. Voiced dental fricative *z colors the preceding a-vowel to *ɛ (e). The voiced retroflex fricative *ẓ, on the other hand, causes no coloring. Voiced fricatives thus color the preceding vowels with respect to their place of articulation. Dental fricatives cause fronting, while breathiness causes backing, which is supported by typological data. This proposals explains several unusual aspects of Vedic and Avestan data.

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Section: Prior Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A problematic explanation is given in Marsh (1941), where it is assumed that word-final and wordinternal *az yields e (through *ai "…”

Section: Prior Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%