From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 20282
Date: 2003-03-24
----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2003 3:37 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Germanic Scythians?
> T: You realize of course that the same argument might be used against the occurence of laryngeals in PIE?
>
No, because there is a lot of comparative evidence for the laryngeals (from the direct attestation of some of them in Anatolian to branch-specific "special effects" caused by them especially in Greek, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic), and that overrules other considerations. One has to respect the evidence in the first place, but there is none of it for the conjectured ejectives.
Even if the independent loss of the laryngeals in several branches was unusual (and I'd claim that the loss of dorsal fricatives of glottal glides is far more likely than the change of [t'] > [d]), we have independent evidence that it _must_ have occurred.
Piotr