[tied] Re: Laryngeals in IE

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Miguel Carrasquer

> 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.
>
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Daniel Baum" <daniel@...> wrote:
> 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.


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Daniel Baum" <daniel@...> wrote:
> 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.




Yes, but <Xarri> is the self-designaton of the Indo-Iranians and is
therefore a loanword in the Assyrian text. So my money I still on
Möller to be the first to recognize a laryngeal in a written
representation of an IE gloss.

Torsten