Re: dhuga:ter ('LARYNGEALS')

From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 55553
Date: 2008-03-20

Thank you, Richard.

I knew if anyone would know, it would be you.

I think what you have told us has a great bearing on the whole area of
present-day 'laryngeal theory'.

As you know, the rationale for the proposal of *H1 was that


1) it was consonantal;

2) that would _not_ 'color' vowels because of its phonological
characteristics; and

3) that did not show up in Hittite as <h>.


The likeliest candidate for such a phone was <?>; and, so I believe most
IEists, whatever they believed the phonological nature of proposed *H2 and
*H3 (not to mention defunct *H4) be (could not resist; I love the
subjunctive), provisionally, at least, assigned this value to *H1.

My proposal, however, is that in non-Anatolian PIE, three gutturals
(laryngals and pharyngals: <?, h, H>) had fallen, _including_ <?> together;
and that the _sole_ effect this phoneme had on adjacent vowels was to
lengthen them. No coloring whatsoever! The differing long vowels qualities
are attributable to the earlier vowel qualities (*e, *a, *o) being
_preserved_ by being lengthened to *e:, *a:, and *o:.

Pre-PIE <¿> became PIE *y.

All earlier short vowels (*e, *a, *o) became *A(blautvokal), which had the
following manifestations in PIE: *é, **è (formerly accented *é) -> *ò; and,
at a slightly later stage, *° (nod to Meillet), and *Ø, dependent on the
stress-accent and its placement and subsequent syllable position shifts
within the word.

Lest you all dismiss this out of hand, I discussed by telephone, email, and
correspondence this idea with the late Winfred Lehmann, who sincerely
encouraged me to develop it further. I am certain he was not humoring me
because our friendly relationship had a 25-year span.

A brilliant man! When comes such another?

Now I would like to investigate <senex> a little further with a eye to
critiquing current 'laryngeal' theory.

Without attempting to specify the earlier pre-PIE vowel qualities, let us
start with *sAnA, which I believe was a transitional form along the way to
*sen-, 'complete (Pokorny: "vollenden")'. It is a *CVC root.

PIE accentuation provided for an acute stress-accent of the root syllable;
and in a bisyllable, *Ø for the final vowel: *sÁnØ, or *sÁn-.

But another PIE accentuation rule calls for shifting the stress-accent to
the right with the addition of a formant.

In this case, the natural suspect is what I would call simply *H but
'l-theorists' would call *H1.

But Miguel reconstructs *senaH2-.

While I believe that the stative actually had the pre-PIE form *Ha and so
might correspond to *H2 on some level, the *a can be maintained in PIE only
if it is lengthened.

This brings up the question of chronological timing. If *HA were added to
*sÁnA before the rule eliminating the final vowel was introduced, we would
transitionally expect *sAnÁHA; if after, *sÁnHA, the form we seem to find in
Hittite <shnh->, 'look through'.

By the 'l-theory', Miguel rightly projected *senáH2- for the result of the
first form. By my method, we would expect *s°néH- -> *sene:-.

Which is more likely to fund the actual forms seen in <senex>?

But Miguel's problem is not false methodology but rather GIGO: the
'l-theory'.

My method can account for the stem *sena:-, the source of *H2 for Miguel,
but simply assuming that this stem was formed _after_ the deletion of finals
vowel: pre-PIE *sVnHá- -> early PIE *sAnHa(:)- and PIE *sena:- (as in
<sena:tus>).

I think this is a more elegant solution to the actual data attested.

What do you think, Miguel and others?

An argument consisting of "the largyngeal theory has been tried and tested,
is accepted by most" will be met by the silence deserved for a logical
fallacy.


Patrick








----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 10:29 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: dhuga:ter


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

> My last objection, or really observation, is that I am not aware of
this
> 'hardening outside of PIE-derived languages though my best is that
Richard
> does.

Depends what you want. The velar fricatives are not difficult, as you
later said - Thai has syllable-initial *x and *G becoming kh-, making
to the letters kho khuat and kho khon becoming redundant. Of course
we have modern examples in IE languages - there is (or was) an island
dialect of Gaelic in which <dh> and <gh> were pronounced /g/, and we
have standard English <hough> homophonous with <hock> and deriving
from OE _hoh_, though perhaps via the compound _hohsinu_ 'hamstring',
and dialect 'hekfore' for standard 'heifer', deriving from OE
_heahfore_ and similar forms.

For glottal stops, examples are more difficult. Final glottal and
velar stops merge in many languages, but finding one where the merged
form becomes a velar stop is more difficult. The best I can do is
note MW16 at http://seasrc.th.net/indic/indoref.htm , which implies
hardening of final glottal stops in some dialects of Malay.

A possible example of sporadic hardening is Khmer /tok/ table, whose
HK transliterations is <tu>, indicating a final glottal stop. The
corresponding form in Thai is /to?/ with the high tone, but I don't
know the history of these clearly related words, beyond the fact that
the Thai word cannot be a regularly inherited word.

Richard.