From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 46467
Date: 2006-10-24
----- Original Message -----From: P&GSent: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 4:19 AMSubject: Re: [tied] Origins of Indo-European, and naturalness of laryngealsPat Ryan> I am simply at a complete loss to understand the "logic" of this
argument (there follows a restatement of laryngeals and vowels)
Peter: The logic is this:
You said Arabic shows laryngeals before -a-, -i- and -u-, therefore "vowel
colouring" was less likely in PIE.
I said so does PIE, so your "therefore" does not follow.
What is the problem?***
The problem is that you are not conveying what I said.
What I said was that Arabic has gutturals. I will now add that they fall into laryngeal and pharyngeal classes.
While I do not doubt that any consonant in any language has some small allophonic effect on any vowel with which it comes into contact, as Brian concisely stated, the question here is whether an allophone of an existing phoneme can achieve new phonemic status; and maintain that status even after the elimination of the conditioning consonant.
***
Secondly, Pat Ryan said:
>If there is any "evidence" that "compels" us to reconstruct velar
>fricatives, I would certainly like to hear it.
No problem - sensible question. But that isn't what you originally said.
You claimed that they couldn't be velar fricatives because they were
"laryngeals" and velars are not laryngeal.
My response was to remind you of what you already clearly know. The word
"laryngeal" here is not a phonetic description.***
I did not claim that at all.
I was trying to express that the original formulators of the coloring theory proposed gutturals, which _they_ called "laryngeals", since they were under the misapprehension that _gutturals_ could 'color' vowels.
Patrick
***