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Amrita
of the change that becomes t after these fricatives while it remains unchanged everywhere else. The change of Germanic to d before s may be left out of consideration here. It is also clear that the absence of after these fricatives leaves no scope for contrast between 0 and t in this environment and hence it is equally possible to reconstruct the phoneme o in all the places, which will leave no occasion for a morphophonemic alternation. It is presumed that on the basis of phonetic similarity, the sound after the fricative is identified as phoneme /t/ occurring elsewhere in the language. The relative order of changes would be then:
Germanic
Gothic *to
*(a) after fricative
>(a) elsewhere But other comparative evidence shows that the actual changes were something as follows :
IE
--**a
Germanic
Gothic *0a or*da after vowels (a) *to
*ta after fricatives — +t(a) Here the split is shown as occurring between IE and Germanic. In the earlier statement, with the shift of the split to a later stage, we have to postulate a change of 0 to t after fricatives, which has obviously no basis in facts.
We may therefore conclude that a phonemic analysis, by its insistence on the system of the language alone, may in some cases obscure the relative order of phonemic changes, which is due to the fact that it takes note of changes not until they find an indication in the phonemic system of the language.
ODO
Phonetics and Phonemics in Historical Linguistics-II
Indian Linguistics 1960
