Re: [tied] Re: Indo-European /a/

On Mon, 11 Apr 2005 04:06:07 +0000, etherman23
<etherman23@...> wrote:

>> and *HC-. Words like *h2ner- "man", *h3nobh- "navel",
>> to name just two, require a laryngeal which has nothing to
>> do with a long vowel.
>
>I'll grant that support is a bit stronger here. We have testimony
>from Greek and Armenian for three coefficients shall we say. In
>Hittite we also have no words beginning with /r/. There are also some
>languages which have initial vowels that don't appear in other
>languages. Yet I can't help but wonder if these vowels were
>unstressed and so were lost in some languages, reduced to /a/ in
>others, but retained in Greek and Armenian.

Initial clusters HC- do not generally show up as a-
(Indo-Iranian i-) except in Armenian (and as e-, a-, o- in
Greek). It seems a bit strange that original _long_ vowels
would show such a behaviour.

>Incidentally, I just learned today that H2 and H3 are supposed to be
>reflected differently in Hittite and Lycian. I need to look into it
>further but if it pans out I'll have to accept the existence of two
>laryngeals.

There is some controversy over the issue. Initial *h3(V)-
may be reflected as h- in Hittite (although other
etymologies would suggest 0-). We would have:

Hitt. Lyc.
*h2- h- x-
*h3- h- (0- ?) 0-,

which e.g. Melchert derives from Proto-Anatolian (*h2- >)
*x- vs. (*h3- >) *h-.

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