Attention has been paid of late to syllable structure in ancient Indo-European languages, e.g. Sanskrit (Kobayashi, 2004), Latin (Marotta, 1999), Greek (Zukoff, 2012), Anatolian (Kavitskaya, 2001), and general Indo-European (Byrd, 2010; Keydana, 2012). There is little agreement in the field about some of the more difficult cases, most of which involve both word-initial and medial clusters that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), particularly sibilant-stop clusters. Because sibilants are more sonorous than stops, [STV-] σ onsets to roots such as *steh2- require special consideration. I will argue that there are three types of evidence we can and should employ in attempting to diagnose syllable structure in ancient languages: metrical, phonological, and morphological. I will apply all three to Latin forms, showing that in Pre-Literary Latin, sibilant-stop clusters formed true onsets, as Byrd (2010) has argued for Proto-Indo-European, but that by the Classical period these SSP-violating clusters were no longer licensed as onsets. In such sequences, Classical Latin allowed only [t] in the onset, while the [s] formed a coda in medial position and was housed extraprosodically in word-initial position. The various treatments of ST-sequences in Latin and other Indo-European languages, especially PIE, Sanskrit, and Gothic, will be modeled in Optimality Theory using constraints on phonotactics and extraprosodicity.

Inscriptional material and descriptions by grammarians from the classical period indicate that vowels were regularly lengthened before -ns-and -nf-sequences in Latin, e.g., c onsul andīnfēlīx. Additionally, nasals were often lost in this environment. The nasal deletion was driven by articulatory mechanisms, namely the difficulty of articulating a nasal directly before an anterior fricative. Diverting air to the nasal cavity reduces oral air pressure; however, the articulation of fricatives requires high air pressure at the point of constriction in order for frication of the air stream to occur. Speakers of Latin reduced the articulatory burden of these sequences by reducing nasal air flow, and over time the nasals were deleted. Preceding vowels were then lengthened to compensate for the lost mora associated with the deleted nasal. The articulatory explanation for the development of nasal-fricative sequences will be supported by the facts of sociolinguistics: the reintroduction of nasals in -ns-and -nf-sequences is associated with elite speech and formal contexts, where the coarticulation between these two segments can be closely monitored by speakers.

This paper reexamines the correspondence of Classical Armenian -rk- with Proto-Indo-European *du̯ and attempts to explain the change in a phonologically plausible way without recourse to illicit clusters or ad hoc rules not otherwise operational in the language. Instead, the change of *du̯ to -rk- is analyzed in Optimality framework as an instantiation of the Armenian sonority-based metathesis. Instead of the expected segment metathesis, however, I argue that this cluster underwent metathesis only of the feature [±continuant]. The need for feature metathesis rather than segment metathesis for this sequence was motivated by a TETU effect (The Emergence of The Unmarked) due to the markedness of the segment [w] in Classical Armenian. The markedness of [w] in Classical Armenian is supported by the later glide fortition seen in forms such as gini “wine”, from PIE *u̯oinii̯o-.

This paper examines the relationship between typology and historical linguistics through a case study from the history of Armenian, where two different stress systems are found in the modern language. The first is a penult system with no associated secondary stress ([… σ́σ]ω). The other, the so-called hammock pattern, has primary stress on the final syllable and secondary stress on the initial syllable of the prosodic word ([σ̀ … σ́]ω). Although penult stress patterns are by far more typologically common than the hammock pattern in the world’s languages, I will argue that the hammock pattern must be reconstructed for the period of shared innovation, the Proto-Armenian period.