Re: [tied] PIE laryngeals?

Hear, hear! I think it is important to spread the word that Manczak has a
personal allergy. I did not know that, I had only observed that some
solutions were never used. Some may believe the man has an argument they
do not understand, as when he constantly ascribes some odd change to high
frequency. Practically all hard problems have been solved by Manczak as
due to some special development that occurred in words that were used very
frequently. Since the oddities are never the same, there is hardly any
Manczak's Law in this (as Collinge has made it into), rather it is a case
of intellectual dumping.

Jens

On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
>
> There's no _serious_ opposition to the laryngeal theory any more. Even
> Oswald Szereményi, who didn't care for them, admitted at least one
> laryngeal (*h) as a necessity. I know of some really strange pockets of
> resistance; e.g. the Polish linguist Witold Manczak (whose
> uncompromising hostility towards anything associated with late Jerzy
> Kurylowicz is widely known) has a mantra that he repeats in article
> after article; it goes, "Personally, I don't believe in the existence of
> laryngeals". (Kurylowicz's identification of Hittite <h(h)> as laryngeal
> reflexes resulted in a spectacular vindication of the laryngeal theory).
> Needless to say, such a personal credo doesn't count as an argument.