[tied] Re: PIE laringeals

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 47690
Date: 2007-03-05

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <miguelc@...>
wrote:

> Well, the use as a glottal stop symbol is late, and the sign
> had been in use for /ax/ (or /Vx/ in general) since Sumerian
> times. Sumerian has only one back fricative (so probably an
> unvoiced velar or uvular [x] ~ [X]). Akkadian uses Sumerian
> <x>-signs to write Semitic /x/ (while Semitic /?/, /h/, /H/,
> /¿/ and /G/ were not written until the "glottal stop"-signs
> were introduced).

How were they not represented? Syllable initially, were they
represented by vowel initials? I've read that the Akkadian Vx symbol
was once used as the 'glottal stop' sign - Jerrold Cooper's
contribution to the World's Writing Systems says on p47, converting
his symbols to Latin-1: "AX = any vowel + /x/, and in earlier periods
' + any vowel; in later periods a separate sign derived from AX is
used for ' + any vowel, or any vowel + '".

The glottal stop symbol seems to be older in Babylonian than Assyrian
- Labat has the symbol for old Babylonian but not old Assyrian.

> There's little relevance, I think, for the question of the
> PIE laryngeals: the sign <Vh> is used in Hittite for writing
> PIE *h2 _and_ *h3.

Old Babylonian is earlier than Hittite, so the Hittite <Vh> sign could
derive from the Old Babylonian 'glottal stop' as one Hittite font
implies by its encoding, and I'd like you to check that the Akkadian
use of AX for 'glottal stop' sounds is too late to have been copied by
Hittite.

It seems to me that the spelling evidence that Hittite <Vh>
represented /x/ or similar is not as strong as it loooked. It might
be possible to appeal to a typological argument to re-instate a
spelling-based argument. Doesn't a word-initial pre-vocalic contrast
of glottal stop v. zero tend to have a very low functional yield?

Richard.