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. In such sequences, Classical Latin allowed only in the onset, while the formed a coda in medial position and was housed extraprosodically in word-initial position. I will apply all three to Latin forms, showing that in Pre-Literary Latin, sibilantstop 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. 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. Because sibilants are more sonorous than stops, CT onsets to roots such as *steh2- require special consideration. 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.

Sanskrit (Kobayashi, 2004), Latin (Marotta, 1999), Greek (Zukoff, 2012), Anatolian (Kavitskaya, 2001), and general Indo-European (Byrd, 2010 Keydana, 2012).

Jessica DeLisi Program in Indo-European Studies University of California, Los Angeles, ca, has been paid of late to syllable structure in ancient Indo-European languages, e.g. Sonority Sequencing Violations and Prosodic Structure in Latin and Other Indo-European Languages

Sonority linguistics