From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61436
Date: 2008-11-06
----- Original Message -----
From: "etherman23" <etherman23@...>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "etherman23" <etherman23@...> wrote:
>>
>> Pretty interesting that *h2 doesn't occur before labiovelars.
>
> So I did a little investigating about this. I don't have LIV but I do
> have Starostin's Tower of Babel resource. Aside from a couple examples
> of ambiguous roots (because they occur only in Satem languages and
> even then not well represented) there's only 2 counterexamples. The
> first one is a root represented only in Greek and Armenian, and the
> second is a root only represented in Greek and Old English (the Old
> English word looks to me like it should go back to a plain velar). I
> think we can say we a very high degree of confidence that *h2 did not
> occur before labiovelars.
>
> Just for fun I decided to check on examples of *h3 before labiovelars.
> The results were quite similar. There's one counterexample which is
> confined to Greek and Baltic.
>
> Despite the general rarity of plain velars it's not difficult to find
> examples of plain velars following *h2 and *h3. Seems kind of obvious
> to me that labiovelars delabialized after *h2 and *h3. I'm not sure
> yet if this holds for *h1 too.
>
=============
This is "proof by absentia"
Maybe we just lack a clear example of H + CW.
My conclusion from the list of words,
and this is based on my hypothesis that
H1 stands for voiceless pharyngeal and velar fricatives
while H2 stands for voiced and glottalized fricatives.
is that
something like CeH2-Voiceless is in fact a case of fundamental -a-
CeH2-k versus CeH1-k is not a minimal pair for H2/H1
but stands for CaH1-k versus CeH1-k
a versus e.
I should have realized that before...
A.