... when the features of Sanskrit were too trustingly assumed to reflect P.I.E. more or less directly." Szemerenyi claims that the third mode of articulation is reconstructed as voiced aspirates due to fact that both Greek and Old Indic point to aspiration as a main characteristic and where they differ over voicing, the Old Indic voiced articulation is "supported by the majority of other languages". (He cites C. Peeters' A Phonemic Description of I.E. bh, dh, gh. among others for this evidence.) There are recent arguments against reconstructing the third series of stops in this way. A problem arises when considering how plain stops are traditionally defined. Experience of living language and phonetics suggests that there should not be many environments in which other types of sounds occur but voiced stops do not, apart from final position in a word and other commonplaces. However in Indo-European there are strong constraints on the ...

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