Adjarian's law

Adjarian's law is a sound law for Armenian language, according to which in certain dialects, initial-syllable vowels are fronted after consonants, reflecting the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiced aspirates.^[1] It was named after Hrachia Adjarian.

Compare:^[2]

• post-PIE *bʰan- "speech" > Karčevan ben, Karabagh pen; compare Classical Armenian ban without the fronting
• post-PIE *dʰal- "green" > Karabagh telar; compare Classical Armenian dalar without the fronting

as opposed to absence of vowel fronting after the non-aspirated voiced stops:

• PIE *dom- "house" > Karčevan ton, Karabagh ton (Classical Armenian tun)
• PIE *gʷow- "cow" > Karabagh kov, kav, Karčevan kav (Classical Armenian kov)

In such cases the vowels first received the [+ATR] feature in certain contexts, and the [+ATR] back vowels were then fronted.^[3] This conditioning is not a synchronic process, but rather reflects the quality of the original prevocalic consonant.^[4]

Adjarian's law demonstrates that Proto-Armenian retained the PIE aspirated stops and has not undergone a Germanic-style consonant shift.^[5] The result is important evidence against certain arguments in favor of the glottalic theory of Proto-Indo-European stop system since such vowel fronting makes no sense if the protolanguage voiced aspirates had been simple voiced stops. It does, however, if they were breathy-voiced. Since voiced aspirates then have to be reconstructed for Proto-Armenian, only Germanic can be claimed to be "archaic" for PIE consonantism in the glottalic theory framework.

Notes

References

• Byrd, Andrew Miles (2015), "The Phonology of Proto-Indo-European", in Klein, Jared S.; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. An International Handbook of Language Comparison and the Reconstruction of Indo-European (PDF), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 
• Garrett, Andrew (1998), "Adjarian’s Law, the glottalic theory, and the position of Armenian", in Bergen, Benjamin K.; Plauché, Madelaine C.; Bailey, Ashlee C., Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 14-16,1998: Special Session on Indo-European Subgrouping and Internal Relations (PDF), Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 12–23