On 2008-04-15 14:13, Patrick Ryan wrote:
> No, of course, Hittite is not PIE but do you know of any recorded language
> closer to it than Hittite.
Why should Hittite be regarded as formally close to PIE? Just because
it's old and because some PIE laryngeals survived there as consonants?
Languages don't change at a constant rate -- and Hittite, in particular,
wasn't particularly conservative. Quite the opposite. Its phonology,
morphology and lexicon were all _very_ heavily affected by substratal
and adstratal influence. I don't think it _looks_ any closer to PIE
than, say, Classical Greek or Vedic.
> Hittite developments, though not necessarily definitive, should carry
> appropriate weight.
The phonetic realisation of <h> is not one of them. In the passage from
PIE to Anatolian the whole obstruent system was radically transformed.
The Anatolian languages are of course enormously important as they
represent one of the two primary subfamilies of IE, but I wouldn't rely
on them to reconstruct PIE phonetics.
Piotr