Re: [tied] Origins of Indo-European, and naturalness of laryngeals

On 2006-10-18 19:31, Andrew Jarrette wrote:

> I have often been struck by the oddity, to an English speaker, of
> the laryngeal theory. It posits the former frequent occurrence of
> various phonemes articulated at the back of the mouth, often fricative
> or otherwise articulated with constriction of the throat. If these are
> what Proto-Indo-European had in abundance, then this would suggest that
> PIE probably sounded most similar, of all modern languages, to Arabic.
> Which would make me inclined to say that Indo-European arose close to
> Arabic-speaking territory, perhaps Anatolia on the northern fringes of
> Mesopotamia.

Aren't you jumping to conclusions? If there were just three laryngeals,
and if *h1 was glottal [h], we are left with just two back fricatives,
probably [x] (or something similar) and [G]. Why should the impressions
of a Modern English speaker suffice for this inventory to qualify as
odd? Speakers of OLD English had all these sounds in their language (in
some positions they were eventually vocalised or lost with the
compensatory lengthening of vowels, not unlike the PIE laryngeals).

Piotr