# Reflexes of PIE labialized and aspirated stops



## Triginta Septem

Having not really looked at Greek until just recently, I had seen no problem with English "four" and "five" being related to Latin "quattuor" and "quinque" through something as simple as Grimm's Law (k > x (h) > f (I had assumed this wasn't impossible, h and f being similar sounds)), but now I see that the Greek is "tetra" and "penta"... So what were the original consonants, and how did "t" and "p" happen? There seems to be a lot of that in Greek...

Also, simpler questions: why (how) do some letters just disappear, as in *?TWR > feower (missing t), and why is there an m in "mono" (cf. one, unus, etc.)?


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## berndf

The /f/ in _four_ is "not fully explained" as we read in etymonline. The expected initial consonant would be /wh/. The Classical Greek _tettares _is fully regular as PIE /kʷ/ in syllable onset became /t/ some time between Mycenaean and Classical Greek. In the case of _five_, Latin seems to be the irregularity here. The reconstructed PIE form is with initial /p/ (_penkʷe_).


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## eamp

For (Attic) Greek the rule is (roughly) that initial /kʷ/ becomes /t/ before front vowels and /p/ before back vowels, so it is regular, as bernd said already.
Latin has a rule, apparently shared with Celtic, that /p/ is assimilated to a following /kʷ/ so:
_quinque _< *kʷenkʷe < *penkʷe, likewise: _coquo _< *kʷekʷō < *pekʷō and _quercus _< *perkʷus. So this is also a regular correspondence.

I am not sure what caused the loss of Germanic /d/ < PIE /t/ in the word for _four_ in NorthWest-Germanic, but it's still there in Gothic _fidwor_. Probably it's irregular, I can't think of another word right now where a sequence /dw/ becomes /w/ at least. 
Another numeral, _seven_ is missing a /t/ also, this time however in all Germanic languages and the loss must be early since it shows a Verner's law shift of /f/ > /b/ in *sibun < *sefún < *sept'm. The retention of final /n/ in the words _seven_, _nine_ and _ten_ is not strictly regular either, but one can easily imagine it being restored from the corresponding ordinals. Still, for Germanic, one simply has to accept a certain amount of irregular development in the numerals, I guess.

"mono" simply is unrelated to Latin _unus_, English _one_ etc.


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## entangledbank

Gothic preserves a reflex of the PIE _*t_, as "four" is _fidwor_, but it disappeared in both West Germanic (_four, vier_) and Norse (_fjórir_). I'm not sure why: it's not what I recognize as a regular development, but I'm no expert.

I don't know what _mono-_ relates to in IE, but the common IE for "one" was preserved on Greek dice as _oinos_. Otherwise it was replaced by forms like _hen_ which are from an IE root _*sem-_. (Cf. Latin _semel_ "once".)

_Cross-posted_ with eamp, so I must have been camped here for 20 minutes thinking about it (or working, heaven forbid).


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## Triginta Septem

So kw to t is normal in Greek? I suppose it's sorta like the opposite of Hawaiian t > k > glottal stop, though. I had figured mono was related, being it shares the VnV pattern. That's interesting. As for the disappearing t, it's weird that it does exist in fidwor. So it's just an explainable change that happened before most Germanic languages got it, but after Gothic?

EDIT: Just found on Wiktionary: "From pre-Grimm _*petwṓr, with an irregular consonant change from *kʷetwṓr, the neuter form of Proto-Indo-European *kʷetwóres. The consonant change was probably caused by the influence of the p- in "five"._" So, it's simply analogy, like the m in novem?


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## berndf

We careful, PIE /kʷ/ is ONE phoneme and not the sequence /k/+/w/.


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## berndf

Triginta Septem said:


> So it's just an explainable change that happened before most Germanic languages got it, but after Gothic?


... that it it happened after East-Germanic split from other Germanic languages but before North- and West-Germanic separated.


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## Triginta Septem

Yeah, I'm just to lazy to copy/paste the superscript w... Anyways, I know that through Grimm's Law, plosives become unaspirated, devoiced, and then became fricatives, but where do aspirated Germanic plosives come from, and what would their equivalents be in other languages (specifically Latin)?


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## berndf

Triginta Septem said:


> Yeah, I'm just to lazy to copy/paste the superscript w...


It is not that. You wrote it was kind of a reverse /t/>/k/ but in Greek there never was a /k/>/t/ shift; there was a /kʷ/>/t/ shift and that is something completely and utterly different.


Triginta Septem said:


> Anyways, I know that through Grimm's Law, plosives become unaspirated, voiced, and then fricatives, but where do aspirated Germanic plosives come from, and what would their equivalents be in other languages (specifically Latin)?


No, not _plosives_ became fricatives but _voiceless_ stops became fricatives. But PIE had two additional series of stops: the voiced/ejective (depending on whether or not you follow the glottalic theory) and the aspirated series. They became, according to Grimm's law, the voiceless and the voiced series, respectively (aspiration does not constitute a separate series in Germanic; aspiration is a secondary characteristic of voicelessness).

Classical Greek maintained all three series while in Latin the voiced/ejective and aspirated series merged and created the voiced series.


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## Triginta Septem

Okay, I see your point.. ^^' Aside from the mention of the "reverse", though, I was kinda just saying they both don't really seem to make sense, yet they happened. 

And oh my.. I just realized what I had wrong. There are no aspirated voiced plosives any more... I had the chain mixed up, sorry. ^^''' I get it now..


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## Triginta Septem

Okay, I guess what I was thinking of was the opposite. PIE *bʰew became English "be" and Spanish "fui"... But shouldn't that be "be" and "bui"? How did /b/ become /f/ in Italic (and Hellenic, cf. φύω)?

EDIT: Maybe I'm asking a stupid question. I assume that's a constant rule? Is there a name for it?


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## berndf

It is not /b/ that became /f/ in Latin but /bʰ/. As you said, there is a similar process in Greek: PIE /bʰ/ > Classical Greek /pʰ/ > Modern Greek /f/.


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## Triginta Septem

So what happened with *gʷḗn in Greek? It became gunē, but I thought that *gʷ only became g if followed by u _in PIE_​. Does that mean that the u appeared before the consonant shifted?


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## Gavril

Triginta Septem said:


> So what happened with *gʷḗn in Greek? It became gunē, but I thought that *gʷ only became g if followed by u _in PIE_​. Does that mean that the u appeared before the consonant shifted?



It seems to me that Greek _gunḗ_ could reflect the zero-grade form *_gʷnā_, since many cognates of this word show an alternation between e-grade *_gʷen-_ in some case forms and zero-grade *_gʷn- _in others: cf. Old Irish *ben *"woman", genitive sg. _*mná*_ (with_ mn_- < *_bn-_). I'm not an expert in the development from IE to Greek, so there may be problems with this hypothesis that I'm not aware of.

Some Greek dialects have an alternate form *banā *(accented on the final vowel*) that shows the expected initial consonant, but the vowel in the first syllable still doesn't seem completely straightforward.

*For some reason, I can't get the accented _ā _character to display in the WR text field, though I don't have this problem with _ṓ_ or _ḗ_.


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## Triginta Septem

Huh.. Well that seems to make sense. I've been hearing "zero grade" and "e grade" a lot, too. What exactly does that mean? Obviously some change in vowels, but what?


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## CapnPrep

Triginta Septem said:


> I've been hearing "zero grade" and "e grade" a lot, too. What exactly does that mean? Obviously some change in vowels, but what?


This is a fundamental question that is probably off-topic here (as you deduced, it has to do with vowels, and your original question is about consonants). This Wikipedia article will get you started.


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