Grzegorz Jagodzinski wrote:
> Instead, Arabic has a bunch of phonemes which ARE a-colorizing but they are
> not uvulars at all. They are pharyngeals instead: h. (bottom-dotted h) and $
> (inversed apostrophe). Moreover, (bottom-dotted) t., s., d. and z. are
> a-colorizing as well but they are "glottalized" sounds (in fact, velarized
> and pharyngealized). Notice also the well-known God's name ?Allah (? =
> glottal stop) spoken with a and with velarized and glottalized l. I repeat:
> velarized or/and pharyngealized, NOT "uvularized". Btw. - velarization seems
> to be enough for a-colorizing for the reason discussed above ("k" and "a"
> has the same place of articulation).
Actually, as I said in our private exchange just before you joined
Cybalist, I imagine that the (pre-)PIE articulation of the *k series was
as pharyngealised dorsal stops rather than true uvulars. Whatever the
phonetic details, they probably patterned with *h2 as members of the
same natural class. (Incidentally, I don't know what you mean by saying
that [a] has the same place of articulation as [k]. Low vowels hardly
have _any_ place of articulation -- that's what being "low" or "open" is
all about.)
The a-colouring effect of *k, *g and *gH was not as strong as in the
case of *h2, and the resulting vowel was not always phonemicised as
different from fundamental *e. However, the high incidence of *a in
roots with "plain velars" is quite striking, and many of such cases are
excellently attested items rather than figments of risky root
comparison: *kap- 'take', *kan- 'sing', *bHag- 'divide', *magH- 'be
able', etc. The fact that we have what looks like surviving traces of
normal qualitative and quantitative apophony in several such roots
(*kap-/*ke:p-/*ko:p-, *kan-/*kon-, etc.) suggests that the root vowel
should indeed be derived from *e, coloured by the phonetic environment.
I also believe that PIE had an *a phoneme of other origin, but that's a
topic for a whole new thread (if necessary; the evidence has already
been reviewed here).
Piotr