--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:
>
> This is "proof by absentia"
> Maybe we just lack a clear example of H + CW.
That's possible, but IMO not probable. It's not just that H+CW is
rare, but the otherwise rare velars are suddenly much more common
after laryngeals. Not only are they rare, but they're restricted in
their language distribution. They always occur in Greek, yet never
occur in Hittite, Tocharian, Italic, or Celtic. I think the simplest
explanation is that they are borrowing into the language after
Hittite, Tocharian, and Italo-Celtic separated from the rest of IE
(I'm ignoring Albanian, which also has no cognates, because it's so
poorly represented and understood that I don't think it contributes
anything to the discussion). In the case of *sleh2gW we are probably
dealing with coincidence rather than common borrowing (the phonetic
correspondences are weak). Laryngeals most likely delabialized
following labiovelars, much like *s did.
> 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...
I support the existence of PIE *a so I think it's quite possible that
many examples of *eh2 could really go back to *aH. However all
laryngeals appear to delabialize following labiovelars so the actual
reconstruction of the vowel doesn't appear to matter in this
discussion. Of course I still need to look into what happens when a
laryngeal follows a consonant. Since there are examples of *a
(possibly a vocalized laryngeal) preceding labiovelars the
delabialization presumably would only occur when the laryngeal is a
consonant. This opens things up for the paradigmatic alternation of
*kW with *K due to the ablaut of *eH with *H. Indeed, this might even
explain some of the counterexamples since analogy might restore the
labiovelar.