Luc Baronian, Stanford University
Standard Western Armenian (SWA) and Standard Eastern Armenian (SEA)
show
inverse voicing of stops and affricates. Taking TH, T, D to represent
respectively voiceless aspirate, plain voiceless and plain voiced stops
and affricates, we get a SEA:SWA set of correspondences of TH:TH; T:D;
D:TH. While SEA shows the same system as Classical Armenian (CA), SWA
shows D in the same positions as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The voicing
facts of SWA raise the question of whether all modern dialects of Armenian
are descendants of CA or whether the SWA pronunciation reflects a prior
stage of Armenian, Proto-Armenian (PA), which was neither PIE nor CA.
Under this latter view, SWA's pronunciation would not be descendant
of
that of CA, but of that of a dialect contemporary with CA. Under the
other view, the SWA pronunciation facts are the result of a sound shift
that operated after the CA stage, in other words, PA=CA.
Armenologists and tenants of the Glottalic theory for the reconstruction
of PIE tend to favor the PA=CA theory. Garrett (1998) provides many
arguments based on Armenian facts against the Glottalic theory. However,
he fails to address two problems that face the PA=/=CA hypothesis:
a
problematic sound change needs to be postulated from PA to Middle Armenian
and the systematicity of voicing correspondances in borrowings is left
unexplained.
On the other hand, the PA=CA hypothesis can stand alone without the
Glottalic theory, but it then still faces two challenges, one of economy,
one of naturalness. The latter is the most problematic, as it states
that
T > D regularly in SWA, a very unnatural sound change.
The general problem is that theorists have made little effort to go
beyond
the facts that support their position, while Armenologists' concern
with
the facts has made them ignore theoretical challenges. Unsurprisingly
then, the solution to the controversy lies in a careful examination
of all
the facts, especially the status of borrowings in dialects, and an
explanation backed by a solid theory of sound change.
In this workshop, I will argue that theoretically PA=/=CA is the
preferable solution, but that careful dialectal comparaison work is
still
needed to confirm the hypothesis.