On Tue, 19 Aug 2003 23:00:46 +0000, etherman23 <
etherman23@...>
wrote:
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <petegray@...> wrote:
>> > There is nothing recent really comparable to Pokorny
>>
>> There is S E Mann's "An Indo-European Dictionary". It suffers from
>> the lack of an index, and is not as comprehensive as Pokorny, but
>> makes much better use of Albanian and Armenian. And it's in
>> English! Like Pokorny it fails to recognise laryngeals, but it can
>> at times give an insight lacking in Pokorny.
>
>Not entirely true. Pokorny does have a small number of roots with h.
Not any serious ones (only ha(:)! and ha ha!).
>However, it's probably best that he doesn't use laryngeals more.
>Linguists are still unsure how many laryngeals there were. IMO, three
>seems untenable given the number of Anatolian words that should have
>laryngeals but show no signs of them. If the laryngeal theory has any
>merit there needs to be at least 4.
A lot of these, perhaps all, can be explained through Ablaut. For
instance, EIEC lists Greek apó and Hitt. appa with Gmc. af- etc. and
therefore *h4épo-, when they should be listed with Balto-Slavic po- etc. as
*&pó (Greek points to *&2pó).
In the vast majority of cases, three laryngeals (*h1, *h2, *h3) suffice,
and there is little disagreement about which roots contain which laryngeal.
Some differences of opinion still exist, e.g. Piotr here is sceptical of
*h3, which is certainly the rarest of the three and may in some cases be an
illusion caused by o-grade (o- < *h2o-, not necessarily *h3e-).
There are also some unresolved issues relating to the voicing and
aspirating effects of laryngeals on neighbouring consonants, and the
reflexes of *h3- in Hittite (sometimes h-, sometimes 0-), which I think do
point to more than three laryngeals at some stage prior to PIE.
My current thinking is:
**/h/ > *h1 (aspirating, lost everywhere)
**/?/ > *h1 (voicing, lost everywhere)
For symmetry with the three series of stops [aspirated, glottalized,
voiced?], one might also postulate **/¿/ (`ayn), which should have merged
with /?/ pretty soon.
**/x/ (including fricativized **/k/ in the Auslaut and before C) > *h2
(aspirating, a-colouring, generally preserved as Hittite h [when not
vocalized]).
**/X/ (including fricativized **/q/ in the Auslaut and before C) > *h2
(aspirating, a-colouring, generally preserved as Hittite h [when not
vocalized], or alternatively, perhaps lost in Hittite [that would be your
*h4]).
As in the case of */s/, which had a variant */z/ in strong nominal
suffixes, we may also have had variants **/G/ and/or **/R/ under the same
circumstances (including Rasmussen's prefix **R-?).
A special development of palatalized **-ix^ (< **-iki) can be seen in the
inanimate dual ending *-ih1 (as opposed to the animate ending *-o-h3 <
**-a:-ixW < **-a-iku).
The labialized laryngeals **/hW/, **/?W/, **/xW/ and **/XW/ all give *h3
(o-colouring), but in Hittite we can perhaps distinguish between those that
are reflected as h- (**xW, **XW(?)) and as 0- (**hW, **?W, **XW(?)).
"Voicing *h3" would reflect earlier **/?W/ (but, alas, there seem to be no
cases of "aspirating *h3" as we would expect in the case of **/hW/, **/xW/
or **/XW/).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...