1774: Grassman's Law pt. 2 Oct 23, 2019

Continuing on about Grassman's Law, this principle that an aspirated consonant will become unaspirated when it precedes another aspirated consonant in the next syllable, only applies to Greek and Sanskrit, and not other Indo-European [IE] languages. This suggests it occured after many other major sound changes in IE languages. Also this shift may have occurred when the Middle East was a large Graeco-Aryan speaking area, explaining why these two languages in particular would be affected. The two are similar in other ways though; both Greek and Sanskrit use reduplication to form the perfect, such as

φύω --> πέφυκα (pʰu-ɔː --> pe-pʰuː-ka). This means 'I grow' --> 'I have grown', but notice that π would normally be aspirated—represented with the superscript: ʰ—but isn't here.