On 2006-07-24 12:19, aquila_grande wrote:
> Well,
>
> A couple of the "laryngeals" probaly were fricatives (Velar, uvular,
> pharyngeal)
I was going to make the same point. PIE had at least one phonemic
sibilant, */s/, and internal reconstruction suggests that at various
points in the prehistory of the protolanguage there may have been more
of them, including voiced */z/ and affricate */c/. Coronal affricates
certainly existed at least as allophones of coronal stops in PIE proper,
and I have myself toyed with the idea that they had the status of
marginal phonemes. At least some of the laryngeals were dorsal or
radical fricatives. PIE *h1 seems to have been a glottal approximant
[h], which, though arguably not a true fricative, often patterns with
fricatives in phonemic inventories and is treated as a fricative in the
most recent IPA chart.
Piotr