Re: [tied] *h3 (More deja-vu)

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002 14:32:46 +0200, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

>On Mon, 30 Sep 2002 14:01:18 +0200 (MET DST), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
><jer@...> wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>>>
>>> [...]  But I still think that does not exclude that *some* h1's were
>>> in fact
>>> not /h/ but /?/.  It would really surprise me if *all* roots
>>> pre-laryngeally
>>> reconstructed as vowel-initial (*es-, *ed- etc.) had been pronounced with
>>> h-.
>>> We know for a fact they had *h1 (witness Hitt. zero grade as-, at-,
>>> etc.), but
>>> we cannot tell which *h1's were /h/ and which were /?/ (except in those
>>> etyma
>>> where /h1/ has an aspirating effect, where we can posit /h/ with some
>>> confidence).
>>
>>So you would like to have two sources for PIE *H1 - why only two? Surely
>>you are not being guided by the principle of not inventing entities you do
>>not need, so why stop here?
>
>I'm being guided by the observation that the vast majority of languages have
>words beginning with V- (with or without automatic glottal stop ?V-) as well as
>hV-, if they have /h/ at all. A matter of common sense. In practice, since the
>matter is mostly unknowable (barring considerations of a Nostratic nature), I'm
>perfectly happy to adopt an algebraic position and use the symbol *h1.

Put differently: Hittite zero-grade forms like as-, ad- (*&1s-, *&1d-) force me
to accept that PIE had no words starting with a vowel, but they do not force me
to accept something as unnatural as that the initial phoneme in all such cases
was /h-/.

I accept that PIE had a /h/ (since it had /bh/, /dh/ etc.), and I accept that in
cases like *h1t > *th, *h1 must have been /h/. On the other hand, in a form
like *h1wih1k^m.tih1, I'm willing to bet that the first two *h1's were surely
[?], not [h], and I suspect the last one was [ç] (that's three, and I'll stop
here).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...