Re: ka and k^a [was: [tied] *kW- "?"]

>
> There is at least one other language that I know of (Biblical

Hebrew)

> that had phonetic schwas (indeed, the word "schwa" comes from

Hebrew)

> articulated next to laryngeals. Furthermore, Biblical Hebrew had
> three different "colors" of schwas: a-colored, e-colored, and o-
> colored. At least one descendant of IE, Greek, had the same

thing.

> My take on the matter is that "syllabic laryngeals" were never

really

> syllabic, but had a schwa(-like) vowel coarticulated with them

when

> they were in zero-grade position. For example, *pxté:r 'father'

was

> likely pronounced [p@...:r]. In every IE language, this schwa

merged

> with some other vowel phoneme -- /a/ in most descendants, /i/ in

Indo-

> Iranian, and /e/, /a/, or /o/ in Greek, depending on the laryngeal
> involved.

I proposed a long time ago that the Greeks, when they adopted the
Phoenician alphabet and supposedly invented true alphabetic writing
by letting three Phoenician signs for laryngeals (vel sim.!) stand
for vowels, in fact did not make such an epoch-making change because
the three PIE laryngeals were still pronounced then and the first
Greek alphabet was just as vowel-less as the Semitic ones, only the
dropping of the laryngeals so to speak made the "discovery" of the
vowel-signs for the Greeks, since that was how these three signs now
were read.
Miguel pointed out that not all vowels in Greek originated in
laryngeals, but once alpha, eta, vaw were read as vowels, they would
of course have been used to designate also non-laryngeal-derived
vowels.
One piece of positive evidence is that some Greek dialects use eta
to designate /h/.


Torsten