[tied] Re: Germanic Scythians?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <petegray@...> wrote:

> > > T: You realize of course that the same argument might be used

against

> the occurence of laryngeals in PIE?
>
> No, because it is not the same argument. In the case of the

glottalic

> theory we are arguing about the phonetic nature of the

reconstructed phoneme

> *X. In the case of the laryngeals, we would be arguing about the

actual

> existence of the phoneme *X. That's rather different!
>

Watch me split a hair here. There has been some controversy over
whether IE glottalic stops were pre- or post-glottalicised. Thus,
glottalisation is a separate member of the sequence of phonemes that
make up a word. So it's almost a separate phoneme! Voilà!

Torsten