Re: dhuga:ter

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 55566
Date: 2008-03-20

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:23:17 +0100, "fournet.arnaud"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:

>Martinet was (in my opinion)
>a very impressive phonologist
>with very sharp insights.
>But he was not a real comparatist
>like Meillet was.
>
>He attempts to reconstruct
>the PIE laryngeal system
>on the sole basis of what features
>and scars are been left on laryngeal
>environments.
>
>Out of senex < *sene-k-s
>and sena:tus < *sene-H2-tu
>And comparing adjectives like
>audâ-k-s and saga-k-s
>with nouns like agricol-eH2
>He infers there was a velar H2
>which can solidify into -k-
>when followed by s
>
>As not all H2 do that
>there was another H2 in system :
>Hence two H2
>a velar one and a pharyngeal one.
>the pharyngeal one does not
>solidify into -k-.
>
>Now, out of the fact that H3
>sometimes voices phonemes like
>in well-known pipH3 > bib-
>he infers that there were at least two H3 :
>a voiced one contrasting with a voiceless one.
>Because voice-neutral consonants like -l- and -r-
>do not cause voiceness, precisely because they
>are neutral, they ajust to other consonants,
>H3 was not voice-neutral, there was a Voiced H3
>and the voiceness of H3.1 was contrasting with
>another H3.2 itself voiceless.
>H3 is not voiced per se, it is voiced because
>it contrasts with a non voiced H3.
>This is what phonology is about.
>
>Martinet repeatedly stated that
>from 1955 (!!) onward
>and it's a pity half a century later,
>orthodox PIE still hasn't understood a word of that.
>
>Personally, I have just looked out of PIE
>to check if these inferences were right,
>and that's the reason I consider there were
>many H1 H2 and H3
>because PIE internal data prove it
>and macro-comparative data just confirm it.
>
>The set of 3 phonemes assumed in
>orthodox PIE is *retarded*.
>Just read Martinet
>and you will know.

99% percent of the time, *h1, *h2 and *h3 are sufficient to
work on PIE, just like you can do Germanistics just fine
without ever having to distinguish between *k and *k^, or
Romanistics without distinguishing between *a and *a:.

*h1 is what gives /e/ end /e:/ before and after */e/,
respectively, *h2 is what gives /a/ and /a:/, *h3 /o. and
/o:/.

Here's what I wrote 8 years ago:

>Jens wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>
>>> [...] but the resulting fricative series /s, x', x,
>>> x^w/ is, as a fricative series, bizarre. I looked through
>>> Hockett's Manual of Phonology and couldn't find anything even
>>> close. Why no labial?
>
>>If you call /H1/ a simple /h/ which it must have been, at least some (or
>>most? or all?) of the time, and take the voicing of /H3/ as reason to call
>>it /gh/ (gamma, voiced velar spirant), but keep /s/ and /x/, you get VERY
>>close to Dutch.
>
>But not *that* close. In the north, we have /s/, /x/ and /h/, but no
>/G/. In the south, they have /z/, /s/, /G/, /x/ and /h/.
>Additionally, there's either /f/ or /v/ and /f/. [I'm not counting
>written <w> as a fricative: it's a bilabial, labiodental or labialized
>labiodental approximant or stop, depending on dialect].
>
>Interesting that you say "at least some (or most? or all?) of the
>time". I've been thinking along those lines myself. We distinguish
>the laryngeals by their vowel colouring and vocalic reflexes in Greek,
>mainly, but that doesn't mean that every laryngeal that gave /e/ in
>Greek must have come from the same unitary PIE laryngeal phoneme. In
>the case of *h1, I agree that some, or most of the time, we're dealing
>with /h/: (some) *h1('s) aspirate(s) a following or preceding stop,
>some *h1's give /h-/ in Armenian and Albanian. On the other hand, *h1
>must sometimes have been a simple glottal stop /?/: I believe a root
>like *h1es- "to be" is more likely to have been /?es-/ than /hes-/ (I
>mean, maybe it was */hes-/, but I don't think it's likely that *all*
>roots beginning with *h1V- had /h/).
>
>As to *h3, I don't think /G/ is very likely. At least in late PIE, I
>think there were no voiced fricatives. Earlier voiced *z, as in the
>nom.sg. which lengthens the thematic vowel, later merged with *s, so
>it's very unlikely that *G, if it ever existed, did not merge with *x
>(*G is usually the first voiced fricative to go, cf. Dutch). Also, a
>voiced velar fricative does not explain the o-colouring, so we should
>at least have /Gw/, and that would be strange indeed, to have /Gw/
>without /G/.
>
>My own proposal would be to split up *h3 into /xw/ (labialized *h2,
>aspirating, Hittite h-), /?w/ and /hw/ (labialized *h1, partially
>aspirating, Hittite 0-) [allowing Jens to withdraw his "vote for
>chaos"]. "Voicing" *h3 can then be from *Gw > *xw, if the traditional
>reconstruction of the stops holds, or from *?w if the glottalic theory
>is correct. A possible confirmation of either thesis might come if we
>could discover cases of voicing *h2 (< *G) or of voicing *h1 (< *?).
>
>Now if we have labialized laryngeals (*h3), we probably have
>palatalized ones too (*?y, *hy, *xy). The first two surely give *h1,
>the last one too (as phonetic [g]), judging by the *h3 ~ *h1
>alternations in the dual endings, which I trace back to auslautend
>nominative *-(a)ku > *-xw > *-h3 and oblique *-(a)ki > *-xy > *-h1.
>

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
miguelc@...