Re: [tied] PIE laringeals

In many european languages, an uvular spirant (uvular r, unvoised
uvular spirant) colours the e into a. I therefor tink h2 likly was
an uvular spirant. A rounded uvular spirant would likely produce an
o-colouring and hence be h3.

But also a rounded voiced pharyngeal spirant is likely to give an o-
colouring.

Then h1 would likely be a h-sound. (A glottal or pharyngeal
approximant/spirant)


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

>
> On 2006-04-19 22:23, David Mandic wrote:
>
> > What theories are there about the phonetic value of the PIE

laryngeals?

> > I've read somewhere they might have been pronounced as x', x and

xw

> > respectively (to fit into the pattern set by k', k and kw etc.).
> > However, it doesn't seem plausible to me - if xw turned e into

o, why

> > didn't kw or gw?
>
> This objection has often been raised and is certainly valid.
>
> > According to me, h1 could have been a glottal stop,
> > since it didn't affect a flanking e (excluding the lengthening),

and

> > disappeared early, even in Anatolian.
>
> It's probably the majority view at present that *h1 was some kind

of

> glottal sound. When not vocalised, it seems to have had an

aspirating

> effect on a following (sic) stop in PIE, though the details of the
> process are not entirely clear yet, which would favour a glottal
> approximant/fricative [h] over a glottal stop [?]. However, it's

hard to

> rule out the possibility that the reconstruction *h1 covers two
> different but hard-to-distinguish PIE phonemes, */h/ and */?/.
>
> > H2 on the other hand might have
> > been a sort of pharyngeal.
>
> Yes, a back fricative, at any rate. Its main allophone was

voiceless,

> but the voicelessness doesn't seem to have been distinctive, as

*h2 did

> not participate in voice assimilation processes. Like *h1, it

could

> exert pre-aspirating influence on PIE stops. Its Indo-Iranian

reflex

> aspirated a _preceding_ stop (which indicates an /h/-like

pronunciation

> at that stage).
>
> > As for h3, I've got no idea. Are there any
> > sounds which display similar effects on vowels in other

languages of the

> > world?
>
> You mean retraction and/or rounding? There is no shortage of

phonetic

> environments that might produce such coarticulatory effects. The
> influence of *h3 on _consonants_ is perhaps more enlightening,

since

> there is some decent evidence of voicing assimilation produced by

*h3,

> as in reduplicated *pí-[b]h3-e/o- and in some "Hoffmann compounds"

with

> final *-h3on-, such as *h2ap-h3on- > Celt. *abon-. It would be
> interesting to see if *s > *z before *h3. Unfortunately, PIE

basically

> excluded -es-stems as first members of compounds, so we would need

a

> root noun with final *-s before the Hoffmann element as a test

case, and

> I can't think of a good example at the moment.
>
> > And what about the reflexes of the laryngeals in Slavic and
> > Baltic - they also yielded prosodic (tonal) features.
>
> Yes, but these features don't distinguish the laryngeals, so they

are of

> little use in reconstructing the phonetic details you're

interested in.

>
> Piotr
>