Re: [tied] Re: Laryngeals in IE

On Fri, 02 Apr 2004 13:02:16 +0000, tgpedersen
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>>
>> Which means Möller found laryngeals in Hittite text in 1911.
>> Presumably the reason this didn't have much impact was that that
>> observation was meant to be seen in the context of his conviction
>> that IE and Semitic are (closely) related.
>>
>
>Come to think of it, no he didn't. It seems he thinks the word in
>which the laryngeal occurs was Indo-Iranian, whether because that was
>the language of the text, or because he saw the word as loaned into
>Hittite from II. Anyway, it was a first for the observation of a
>laryngeal in the written representation of an IE language.

What Möller says actually is that the word Aryan in Aryan
must have started with /h.-/ (pharyngeal/epiglottal
fricative), which was rendered in the Assyrian documents of
Boghazköy as /x-/ (velar/uvular fricative), as are the NW
Semitic h.êt's. He's talking about Assyrian texts from
Boghazköy, he isn't talking about Hittite at all here...

He couldn't have, because Hittite wasn't discovered until
1915/1916 by Bedr^ich Hrozný.

Hrozný was obviously the first to discover laryngeals in an
Indo-European language. Kuryl/owicz was the first (or at
any rate the most persuasive) to connect that discovery with
de Saussure's coefficients.

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