Bartholomae's law

Bartholomae's law is an early Indo-European sound law affecting the Indo-Iranian family, though thanks to the falling together of plain voiced and voiced aspirated stops in Iranian, its impact on the phonological history of that subgroup is unclear.

It states that in a cluster of two or more obstruents ("s" or a stop (plosive)), any one of which is a voiced aspirate anywhere in the sequence, the whole cluster becomes voiced and aspirated. Thus to the PIE root "PIE|*bʰewdʰ" "learn, become aware of" the participle "PIE|*bʰudʰ-to"- "enlightened" loses the aspiration of the first stop (Grassmann's Law) and with the application of Bartholomae's Law and regular vowel changes gives Sanskrit "buddha"- "enlightened".

A written form such as -ddh- (a literal rendition of the devanāgarī representation) presents problems of interpretation. The choice is between a long voiced stop with a specific release feature symbolized in transliteration by -"h"-, or else a long stop (or stop cluster) with a different phonational state, "murmur", whereby the breathy release is an artifact of the phonational state. The latter interpretation is rather favored by such phenomena as the Rigvedic form "gdha" "he swallowed" which is morphologically a middle aorist (more exactly "injunctive") to the root "ghas"- "swallow", as follows: "ghs-t-a" > *"gzdha" whence "gdha" by the regular loss of a sibilant between stops in Indic. While the idea of voicing affecting the whole cluster with the release feature conventionally called aspiration penetrating all the way to the end of the sequence is not entirely unthinkable, the alternative—the spread of a phonational state (but murmur rather than voice) through the whole sequence—involves one less step and therefore via Occam's Razor counts as the better interpretation.

Bartholomae's Law intersects with another Indic development, namely what looks like the deaspiration of aspirated stops in clusters with "s": descriptively, Proto-Indo-European "PIE|leyǵʰ-si" "you lick" becomes *"leyksi", whence Sanskrit "lekṣi". However, Grassmann's Law, whereby an aspirated stop becomes non-aspirated before another aspirated stop (as in the example of "buddha", above), suggests something else. In late Vedic and later forms of Sanskrit, all forms behave as though aspiration was simply lost in clusters with "s", so such forms to the root "dugh"- "give milk" (etymologically *"dhugh"-) show the expected devoicing and deaspiration in, say, the desiderative formation "du-dhukṣ-ati" (with the root-initial "dh"- intact, that is, undissimilated). But the earliest passages of the Rigveda show something different: desiderative "dudukṣati", aor. "dukṣata" (for later "dhukṣata") and so on. Thus it is apparent that what went into Grassmann's Law were forms like "*dhugzhata, dhudhugzha"- and so on, with aspiration in the sibilant clusters intact. The deaspiration and devoicing of the sibilant clusters were later and entirely separate phenomena (and connected with yet another suite of specifically Indic sound laws, namely a "rule conspiracy" to eliminate all voiced (and murmured) sibilants). Indeed, even the example "swallowed" given above contradicts the usual interpretation of devoicing and deaspiration: by such a sequence, *"ghs-to" would have given, first, *"ksto" (if the process was already Indo-European) or *"ksta" (if Indo-Iranian in date), whence Sanskrit *"kta", not "gdha".

There is no evidence that Bartholomae's Law predated Indo-Iranian, i.e., that it was a feature of Proto-Indo-European. The Latin form "lectus" "couch" and Greek "léktron" "bed" are differently formed but both continue the root *"legh"- "lie" (the English word being from the same root). In similar combinations arising within Greek, the pattern is for the whole cluster to become aspirated, thus *"lékhthron". It obviously does not in this formation, which for other reasons as well is likely to be very old. In the case of Latin "lectus", it is significant that the root *"legh"- does not otherwise survive in Latin at all, so that there can be no history of analogical remodeling or other disturbances. It is not completely clear what the result of a sequence *-"ghdh"- would have been in Latin, but other evidence suggests lengthening of the vowel plus simplification, so *"lēgus" (cf "co-āgulum" "rennet" < *-"ǎg-dhlo"-, "tēgula" "roofing tile" < *"tek-dhlo"-).

ee also

*sandhi

External links

* William H. Bennett [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0097-8507(196612)42%3A4%3C733%3ATGEFBL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R The Germanic Evidence for Bartholomae's Law] "Language", Vol. 42, No. 4 (Dec., 1966), pp. 733-737