Peter:

>Well actually, h3 (your hW) appears to be lost or assimilated medially.
>Hitt lahu "pour" must continue *leh2w not *leh3w. Its
>reflex in initial position is disputed. Craig Melchert suggests
>it is lost in Lycian, but appears as h in Hittite, Palaic and Luwian. He
>offers as evidence PIE *h3ep "work" ?> Hitt
>happar "sale, Lyc epirije "sell".

Thanks for the info, but is Proto-Anatolian reconstructed with
one laryngeal or two? Or is that a debate as well?


Jens:

>Now, languages can be very different and have very different rules.

Yes, I'm aware of this and so my new viewpoint is based simply
on Indo-European and its surrounding phonology. We see the
*k/*q/*kW series and it seems logical that the laryngeal series
should have been along similar lines. Not only that, but since it
appears that tradional *k must be "marked", that *q fits the bill
nicely, and that this phoneme appears to be associated with vowel
*a-colouring as well, then uvularity must be what lowers vowels in
our Proto-Indo-European, not mere velar spirants or retroflex
sounds that might do the trick in other languages.

It suffices to say that *h1 was simply *[h], at least mediofinally.
Claiming that it must have been a palatal is counterevidential
since it should be now clear that *k^ had to have been "plain"
not palatal due to arguements concerning markedness. Palatal
consonants only appear in satem languages at a post-IE date. So
we can be quite sure that *h1 is unlikely to have been palatal
when no other palatals exist in IE.

We can take stock of the pattern seen in *k/*q/*kW in order to be
reasonably confident of the uvular character of *h2. So when you
say "For the prestage of PIE in which laryngeal coloration took
place I do not think we can really know whether /H2/ was a velar
or a post-velar fricative, but it was almost certainly one of the
two.", I feel that you are ignoring all the facts that we know of
about the IE sound inventory and allowing the seemingly conflicting
evidence concerning vowel colouring in various world languages to
take hold of your focus on IE itself.

>As for /H3/, we know it was voiced at one point[...]

This remains an assumption that continues to be unconvincingly
proven. We've talked about the difficulties of the "drink" word
before. As for the word *gWih3w�s becoming Germanic *gwigwos,
there are two many lurking variables to take into account
(Verner, assimilation, etc) to be ever sure that this is merely
because of a truely "voiced" *h3. Further, if you can admit that
*h3 was rounded, your insistance on a voiced rounded laryngeal
makes for an awkward sound system... Where on earth is the
unvoiced rounded variant then???



- gLeN


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