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Celtic, Italic, Greek and several other IE languages have a P- and a Q-variety (from kw > p and gw > b). The P-variety usually also has h for ancient s. What would be the best linguistic term for describing this combined phenomenon? Labialization? Develarization? Lenition?

Sir Cornflakes
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Eduard Selleslagh-Suykens
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    I assume you mean "in Indo-European", since terminological practices outside of IE historical studies are not necessarily the same. – user6726 May 27 '19 at 15:17
  • Not including s>h, the changes are assimilations (of place). Isn't that obvious? The consonants become labial before labial w. – Greg Lee May 27 '19 at 16:33
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    The two processes are unrelated. Some languages have a labiovelar > labial change, some languages have debuccalization of s, some languages have both but that doesn't mean they're one phenomenon. – TKR May 27 '19 at 17:23
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    @GregLee In the traditional view, the ancestors of all these languages had a truly labiovelar phoneme /kʷ/ rather than a sequence /kw/. – Draconis May 27 '19 at 19:09
  • @Draconis, So? Are you saying the k can't assimilate to the w if k and w are part of a single phoneme? If so, why? – Greg Lee May 27 '19 at 19:59
  • I guess maybe it should be a separate question, but could the reconstructed /kʷ/ plausibly have been pronounced as a sound that's a (near-)simultaneous combination of a labial stop and a velar stop? At least I think I can produce such a sound and it sounds distinct from both /p/ and /k/ (unless I'm pronouncing something else without realizing). – LjL May 27 '19 at 20:04
  • Has it been excluded that the p reading started out as misreading of a q symbol? Perhaps a mismatch between Etruscan P and Greek/Hebrew Qof? – vectory May 27 '19 at 20:26
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    @LjL What you're describing is a labial-velar stop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labial–velar_consonant). There's no particular reason to reconstruct these for Proto-Indo-European, especially as /kʷ/ is actually attested in daughter languages. – TKR May 27 '19 at 21:06
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    @vectory It isn't a reading, but a sound change. [p] is still the modern reflex in some of the languages in question. – TKR May 27 '19 at 21:20
  • @TKR the characters weren't read, really? It seems that a regular transcription-error is hard to imagine. Celtic isn't even known to have had a writing system until relatively late. What looks like a P in etruscan--I had that wrong--was actually a rhotic. But check this: "In Archaic and Classical Greek, it [Phi] represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive ([pʰ]) […] It may be that phi originated as the letter qoppa and initially represented the sound /kʷʰ/" [wiki/Phi]. While we know mostly chiseled inscriptions, but they surely had hand-scripts that differed wildly. /kʷ/ is rare, too – vectory May 28 '19 at 05:24
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    @vectory Unless a language loses its speaking community and is reconstructed from written archives, written forms generally lag behind spoken ones, not lead them, so the change itself being based on a misreading seems very unlikely. Nor is the reconstruction of ancestral languages based on modern reading of ancient written texts, because mostly there are none; it's largely based on comparison of live spoken languages. How the alphabets of the world evolved to represent different sounds is fascinating, but almost completely separate from how the spoken words evolved from one another. – IMSoP May 28 '19 at 13:31
  • @IMSoP Of course it's unlikely, that's why I find it unlikely that it has been given an in-depth look. I'm not here to say how it happened, just that as a foreign language learner I know first hand how deceptive writing can be. E.g. the Western pronounciation of Sowjet is completely off, and that may have a little to do with the writing, where we would otherwise not even hear a j, just sovet (though on second thought, the corresponding ell.se thread did imply this pronounciation might have come from Bulgaria with a stronger j sound, but that was inconclusive) – vectory May 28 '19 at 19:05
  • @IMSoP written forms may precede oral forms where ever the language (or the couple of words in question) is not inherited indigineously, by the way. And it helps if the sounds are similar, so it doesn't have to be either or. – vectory May 28 '19 at 19:18

2 Answers2

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The change from /s/ to /h/ is called debuccalization, from Latin bucca, "mouth". The name is generally applied to any change that turns a non-glottal sound glottal, since it's moving the articulation "out of the mouth"; another example is English /t/ → [ʔ].

The change from /kʷ/ to /p/ doesn't have a universally-accepted name in my experience; I've seen it called both labialization and develarization (since the labiovelar consonant is losing its velar closure and becoming purely labial).

I'm not aware of any real correlation between the two sound changes; I know they both happened in some varieties of Greek, but initial /s/ → /h/ was universal in Hellenic, and /kʷ/ → /p/ was less consistent; /s/ → /h/ didn't happen word-internally or finally, either. Similarly, Romanian had develarization, but not /s/ → /h/: consider Latin socium → Romanian soț, with the original /s/ intact.

Draconis
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I am totally aware of all that has been replied, but my question was one of terminology, as there doesn't seem to be a generally agreed term. So, I was asking around. Until now, I have been using the term 'labialization', but that seems ambiguous because it is also used to describe adding a labial feature to velars.

The transition s > is not limited to Hellenic: it also happens in P-Celtic (sal > hal) and P-Italic. It is a frequent companion of the labialization/develarization (or whatever would be a better term). I just don't know why because they seem unrelated at first sight.

Both phenomena happened almost simultaneously in the three branches of IE in the period 1,200-800 BCE. My guess is that it happened in a presumed northern Balkan Sprachbund stretching from Hallstatt to Epirus or thereabout. Note that P-Italic clearly 'invaded' Italy from Dalmatia, leaving only a small area around Rome/Italian west coast with the older Q-Italic.(BTW. there is a present-day trans-branch Balkan Sprachbund, with Bulgarian/Macedonian (Slavic), Romanian (Italic)and Greek (Hellenic), so it is not unthinkable something similar existed in Antiquity).Research paper: https://www.academia.edu/9796216/Celtic_and_the_Adriatic_-_A_completely_reconsidered_view_of_Celtic_linguistic_prehistory_-_Updated_18.12.2018

Eduard Selleslagh-Suykens
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    Hi, if you are indeed the person that originally asked the question, please see here to get your accounts merged, you seem to have created two. – Mat May 28 '19 at 12:43