Major and minor sound shifts in Indo-European Martin Joachim Kümmel There has been much discussion about the famous “sound shifts” that apparently happened in Germanic and High German (and elsewhere, cf. Goblirsch 2005) as well as in Proto-Armenian and later Armenian (cf. Pisowicz 1976; Vaux 1998). Especially for Germanic, various accounts are available, the traditional scenario was challenged by the radically different reconstructions of the PIE stop system connected with the “glottalic theory”. In addition, the connection of Verner’s Law to the sound shift (Grimm’s Law) has been reconsidered in various ways: In contrast to the traditional view, it is today sometimes dated before the sound shift (Kortlandt 1988) or interpreted as a part of it (Noske 2012). As a modified version of the glottalic theory has gained more acceptance in recent years (Weiss 2009; Kümmel 2012a), and additional evidence has been presented (Kümmel 2012b), it seems worthwile to discuss the issue again from different perspectives. In this context, it is rarely acknowledged that sound shifts are also attested elsewhere in IndoEuropean, though not in protolanguages of individual branches. E.g., there was a quite radical sound shift in Hellenistic Greek, turning original aspirated and voiced stops into fricatives, leaving only voiceless stops intact, except after nasals, where they were voiced and fell together with the original voiced stops which were preserved in this position only. Similar changes occurred in neighbouring Anatolian languages and around the same time in Eastern Iranian. The „Greek sound shift“ might be compared with some of the processes that have been assumed for Germanic and Armenian, and it is historically attested, not involving purely reconstructed prestages. Therefore it may provide an interesting perspective on these other sound shifts. Much more often we do not find unconditioned shifts but conditioned changes belonging to the complex of lenition and fortition (for a typological overview, cf. Kümmel 2007) ‒ as in the case of Verner’s Law and the stop/fricative allophony of the Germanic „mediae“, or in Armenian, where the reflexes of just the same stop classes are heavily lenited in internal positions. Thus there seems to be a connection of such changes to sound shifts, and this could perhaps be further explored. In my contribution I wish to address the problem of major sound shifts, and to what extent minor and less often studied shifts may help us to understand them better, and what phonological theory, phonetic research and typological investigations could contribute to the question.
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