Re: [tied] How many laryngeals?

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000 23:19:40 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

Very interesting.

Some remarks:

>at any rate, neither the postulated instances of *h1 > Hittite h

Is that referring to such forms as mehur, sehur?

>nor the hotly debated evidence for the early loss of *h3 in Anatolian look very convincing.

I find Rasmussen's analysis of Hitt. utne "land, country" <
*h3ud(r/n)- ~ Grk. ou~das (*h3ud-) "ground, floor" ~ Arm. getin
"ground" (*h3wed-) rather convincing. Maybe *h3u- was lost early in
Hittite.

[On h1 = /h/: I have trouble seeing all forms with Brugmannian initial
*e- as originally [he-] instead of at least sometimes [?e-] (with
"automatic" glottal stop). However, they all seem to give *@- in the
zero grade (e.g. Hitt. as-, ap-, ad- for the verbs "to be", "to take",
"to eat"), so I can't resist splitting up *h1 into original /h/ and
/?/ (or at least [?]).]

>Even if we accept that any initial *a- (in Brugmannian terms) should be reconstructed as *h2a- < **h2e-,

There's also syllabic H- (*@-).

>Greek prothetic vowels, triple schwa reflexes and different vowel colours in *RH (Ro: vs. Ra:) are subject to so much dialectal variation and analogical levelling that even a careful analysis does not extract convincing evidence for *h3 as different from *h2. Beekes (1969) was more optimistic than I am here, but the "triple representation" has since been reanalysed e.g. by Lindemann (1982) and the view that it is a Greek innovation has gained much support.

But an innovation based on what? Greek quite consistently shows /e/
from *h1, /a/ from *h2 and /o/ from *h3 even in cases where there are
no full grade forms /e:/, /a:/ or /o:/ to relate the zero grade to.
Of course there are problems (is "name" *h3nom- or *h1nom- based on
Grk. onoma/enuma? etc.), but I wouldn't take the backwards step of
considering triple schwa a Greek innovation.

>Martinet's "laryngeal fission" *-eh3-o- > *-eh2wo- > *-a:wo- looks good on paper, but it can be shown that intrusive *w may appear in hiatus after *o: of any origin, e.g. *sto:h2-eje- > *stavi- 'to place' in Slavic (the causative of *stah2- 'stand').

I don't understand the o: here. Wouldn't the causative of *steh2- be
*stoh2-eje- (> *sta:ï:-), not sto:h2-eje-? Slavic a: merged with o:
and may have been [O:] in PBS (giving rise to the glide then), before
being fronted again in Slavic.

>If *do: is not *doh3- /deh3-/, what else could it be? The "o" timbre occurs in the present tense (Gk. di-do:-mi, arch. Lith. duo-mi) and deverbal nouns (Gk. do:ron, Slavic darU, Latin do:num 'gift'), and in the Greek and Indo-Iranian aorist as well (Gk. edo:ka, Skt. ada:t). One must remember, however, that verbs with persistent o-grade occur quite frequently; some of them probably formed a separate class in PIE, formally similar to the IE perfect and reflected in Hittite as the "-hi" presents (cf. Hittite mallai : Lith málti, Gothic malan, Latin molo:, etc.).

The origin of the Hitt. hi-conjugation is a whole other can of worms,
but surely there are many hi-verbs with e-vocalism throughout, or with
the most common hi-conjugation ablaut, i.e. -a- in the sg. and -e- in
the plural. For the root *mel-, I gave my explanation here recently
(*mwel- > *mel- or *mol-, zero grade *mul- as in Greek etc.).

>We also have residual ablauting formations elsewhere (most notably, Tocharian subjunctives and Indo-Iranian aorist passives in -i like apa:di 'he fell') to demonstrate that the pattern associated with the perfect was once applied more widely, and that in fact there is nothing specifically "perfect" about it. A possible original paradigm would have looked like this:
>
>*doh1-h2a(i)
>*doh1-th2a(i)
>*doh1-e(i)
>
>These forms match the conjugation of Hittite da:- 'take' (usually assumed to be cognate to non-Anatolian *do: despite the semantic difference; note the absence of h in the Hittite root):
>
>dahhi
>datti
>da:i
>
>After the falling together of conjugational types in non-Anatolian IE new present and aorist formations appeared, based on underlying *do:- < *doh1-, e.g. preterite *doh1-e > *do: remodelled as *(e)do:-t.

The case for *doh1- looks convincing. I'll check the data on this and
the other verbs tomorrow.

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