Was proto-Indo-European the same proto-Germanic?

Ygorcs said:
Cyrus, please understand this once and for all: people do add new sounds and forsake former sounds regardless of contacts with people who speak other languages. That's the internal development of languages. There's no need to "learn" new sounds from foreign nations when the gradual but continuous development of phonetics in a language already leads slowly to the creation or disappearance of phonemes, initially, generally, as allophones, but gradually spreading to replace others. You don't even have to have a degree in linguistics to that, even amateurs can notice that that can happen observing the recent development of their own language in an era with much more long distance contact and language standardisation as our own. Sounds change step by step into others because they already show the potential for that, all that it has to happen is a slight change in the articulation and the trick is done after some generations.

In almost all languages there were certainly some internal sound changes too, otherwise modern languages should be almost the same as ancient ones, but this process of simplification (like rd>l in Middle Persian or sk>sh in Old English) differs from the process of sound shifts between substrate and superstrate languages, it can't be denied that ancient Indo-Europeans migrated from a land to another land and sound changes in their languages mostly relate to substrate languages, for example it can't be said that native Brazilian languages had no role in nasal sounds in the Brazilian Portuguese.
 
it can't be denied that ancient Indo-Europeans migrated from a land to another land and sound changes in their languages mostly relate to substrate languages, for example it can't be said that native Brazilian languages had no role in nasal sounds in the Brazilian Portuguese.

Substrate influences happen, but they are not (in all cases, at least) the main drivers of phonetic evolution of most languages.

But how is that that the nasal sounds of BP were decisively influenced by native Brazilian languages? The nasal vowels of BP are exactly the same that already existed in the Portuguese language of Portugal when the colonization started, and they are still exactly the same sounds found in European Portuguese, too.
 
Spanish didn't lose its /f/, it in fact palatalized some consonant clusters like /fl/ and /cl/ into the ll palatal consonant, just like Portuguese did turning them into ch, and similar palatalizations of consonant clusters also happened in other Romance languages. The loss of /f/ was just a consequence of the consonant cluster slowly evolving into a palatalized cluster and finally into a palatal or an affricate.

Here I disagree (the first time!).
'f-' was weakened and spired into 'h-' in Castillan, latin dialect formed near the Basque country (this phenomenon concerns Gascon dialect too, and surely is based upon a basque substratum)
- this sound, almost guttural in some remote dialects today (or better said, yesterday), faded out after some centuries in the most of the regions become castillan speaker (before that, the most of Iberia conserved the 'f-'). Only in some words the 'f-' was restablished for euphonia or loaned to other romance iberian dialect (?) or latin, see hogar >< fuego - hierro >< ferrocarril - hijo >< filiaciôn - horca ...
 
I think we shouldn't imagine that there were strange sound changes in the ancient times, I believe it just related to the phonology of native languages, when you can't pronounce θ, the most possible thing is that you pronounce it as t, the same thing can be said about x > k, q > g, ...

fdna_soundchanges.jpg


Of course it is possible that the voiced stops (b,d,g) were originally aspirated stops (bʰ,dʰ,gʰ), otherwise it is diffcult to explain how b,d,g were changed to pʰ,tʰ,kʰ in the ancient Greek, unless Anatolian had important role because we know b,d,g didn't exist in Anatolian phonology, like Tocharian.

The most logical alternative to the mainstream is that the so called 'voiced stops' were simple stops, slightly longer (p:, t:, k:) or 'aspirated' and the so called 'voiced aspirated' stops were simple stops (p, t, k).

*bʰ,*dʰ,*gʰ = p, t, k (changed to b,d,g in Baltic, f,θ,x ultimately in Greek (also early Italic). But we have p,t,k in Anatolian and 'Tocharian')
*p, *t, *k = p:, t:, k: (changed to p, t, k in Baltic and Greek. In Anatolian we often have p:, t:, k: written as pp,tt,kk).
 
Hmm, that's interesting that the original Indo-European F sound is deleted in Celtic...that's a Vasconic trait. Spanish has an influence of Basque with the alternate form of Fernando (Hernando) and the word for a flame, llama, losing its original Latin F (French: Flamme)
the problem is that Celtic languages lost *P, not *F, according to serious linguists - ATW this new reconstruction of PIE by Cyrus seems very confused and counter-intuitive- all these IE languages which cannot pronounce /F/ and makes /P/ in its place !-
 
IMO when languages try one of the following things then they begin to diverge from parent language;
-Simplification: like bh>b, dh>d, th>t, sh>s, kh>k, ...
-Softening: when pronunciations become softer like b>p , d>t , sh>s , h>kh , ...
-Influence: when surrounding languages begin to influence the language.
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