On 04-10-07 19:37, Sean Whalen wrote:
> I've only increased the number of consonants by 5
> (if you count b) and put the laryngeals within the
> structure instead of deciding their nature by fiat.
Well, their nature should be decided from the available comparative
evidence, not from structural expectations. E.g. the articulation of *h2
is likely to have involved a uvular component, since otherwise its
A-colouring effect would be difficult to account for. The fact that *h3
seems to have had a voicing effect on any preceding stop suggests that
it was voiced itself... etc. You seem to have assumed a priori that the
PIE sound system _must_ have been neatly symmetrical. It's an arbitrary
assumption -- phonological systems with gaps or skewed subsystems are
common enough.
> Also, vowels reduced by two and all short.
But there is some extra machinery to compensate for that ;-). You
introduce two marked tones to pre-encode the expected vocalism. It looks
just like a trick of notation, i.e. a pseudo-explanation.
> I don't
> think h1 was always non-coloring, either (yi-yoh1-h2e
> with o>e (Greek he:ka), dhi-dhoh1-h2e (Latin fe:ci:)).
If this non-self-evident analysis is correct. For familiar
counterexamples, see Germanic *do:- and Gk. tHo:mos 'heap' (cf.
tHe:mo:n, both from *dHeh1-).
>
>> What's wrong
>> with *str- being just *str-?
>
>
> Nothing's wrong with it, but it seems it wasn't so.
I suppose it seems so to you, but why? PIE had *spr- and *skr- as well,
so why insist on *str- being a special case?
Piotr