It's very simple. PIE (and all its
daughters) have plenty of instances of /e/ and /o/ that have nothing to do with
laryngeals. For example, Greek ne(w)os < PIE *newos and Greek genos < PIE
*g^enh1os (the second vowel in this word stands next to *h1, but is not coloured
by it. Now if there was a time when Greek A stood for *h2, E for *h1 and O for
*h3 (there are serious problems with such an assignment, pointed out by Miguel,
but let's ignore them for the sake of the present argument), we should expect
the above words to be written NWS (<nu> <digamma> <sigma>) and
GNES (<gamma> <nu> <epsilon> <sigma>), rather than
NEWOS, GENOS. There is no trace of such conventions in the oldest alphabetic
Greek inscriptions.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 11:29 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Greek laryngeals
--- In cybalist@......, "Piotr
Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote:
>
Just show us those archaic Greek inscriptions in which A, E, O
stand for
laryngeals while vowels are not marked.
>
> Piotr
>
How
could you possibly tell one way or the other? That was my
point.
Torsten