Re: [tied] Re: Laryngeals in IE

I wrote my MA thesis on this question.

Hrozny himself did not know what to do with the /h/. He tried to connect it to /gh/ and actually used this as part of his proof that Hittite is a Centum language.

The earliest occasion that I could find of someone positively connecting the Hittite /h/ with Saussure's "coefficient sonantique" was Albert Cuny, in 1924, where he realises that the long /a:/ in Latin ma:lum. "apple" is represented in Hittite maHla- as what Saussure posited as a&. (a+schwa). Whether or not this etymology is still accepted today, I've no idea, but this doesn't take away from Cuny that he was the first.

Sturtevant also had a go, with some rather hilarious etymologies which tried to connect word-initial Hittite /h/ with IE /bh/ in 1927, although he did suggest that in the middle of a word, /h/ was "an original sound that has been lost in Indo-European", correctly connecting Hittite pahhur with Grk. pur, etc. He clearly was not aware of Saussure at the time. Very soon after that he quietly abandoned these etymologies and accepted Kurylowicz's ideas.

Daniel

----- Original Message -----

From: Miguel Carrasquer

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 3:29 PM

Subject: 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@...