Fosse and the date of Rigveda

[Griffin, William]

>
>>Personally, I root for 'Two thousand' date. This is because the word 'Two'
>>shows retroflexion and 'three' does not.
>
>Now I really doubt about you.
>Try to bend back your tongue in "two" (as British/American speaker, I
>mean).  Well, to a native Indian speaker, t-wo and th-ree are retroflexes.
>Do you not know what retroflexion is? Or does your particular Bengali
>dialect/idiolect have retroflexion in pronouncing "two" but not in "three"
>(due to dissilimiation because of following -r-??? -- narmaartham eva)
>

Actually, the native Indian speaker does *not* have retroflexion in 'three' -- this word is pronounced with a dental stop and dental stops are pretty consistently distinguished from retroflex stops in all the Indian languages that I've heard! The word 'two' has retroflexion, but retroflex stops tend to show variation with alveolar stops in Indian English -- for some speakers, at least.

Gail Coelho

William Earl Griffin
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Linguistics
Ph. D. Program in Linguistics