On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 22:21:54 -0000, "Richard Wordingham"
<
richard@...> wrote:
>So, Etherman23 was wrong and possibly right. Akkadian cuneiform does
>have a glottal stop symbol, and it's exactly what was used for what is
>transliterated as -ah- in Hittite!
Well, the use as a glottal stop symbol is late, and the sign
had been in use for /ax/ (or /Vx/ in general) since Sumerian
times. Sumerian has only one back fricative (so probably an
unvoiced velar or uvular [x] ~ [X]). Akkadian uses Sumerian
<x>-signs to write Semitic /x/ (while Semitic /?/, /h/, /H/,
/¿/ and /G/ were not written until the "glottal stop"-signs
were introduced).
There's little relevance, I think, for the question of the
PIE laryngeals: the sign <Vh> is used in Hittite for writing
PIE *h2 _and_ *h3. The pronunciation will have been a velar
or uvular fricative ([x] or [X]), although a voiced
pronunciation ([G] or [R]) cannot be excluded (remember that
Hittite also uses Akkadian <p,t,k,q> and <b,d,g>-signs
indistinctively). Spellings with <hh> versus <h> may also
be relevant here (Sturtevant's law).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
miguelc@...