Re: Laryngeals Indo-Uralic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> Given that a few people out there are postulating Indo-Uralic, how
> would Indo-Uralic layngeals look? What would they have transformed
> into in Uralic? Apologies if IU is off topic --we can move this over
> to Nostratic if the moderators wish.

There's some debate about this. My personal view is that in initial position *h1 is Uralic *0, and *h2/*h3 is *k. In non-initial position all are *k. However, there are two distinct sources for the laryngeals. IE *H also corresponds to Uralic *j. This seems pretty solid in word initial position, but I'm also coming to think that this held in non-word initial position as well (perhaps in all syllable initial positions, it's not perfectly clear yet). This second correspondence is important because examples of the first correspondence are often considered to be borrowings from IE into PU (or one of its daughters).

My working hypothesis is that the IU laryngeals were /h/ and /q/ (possibly also a voiced version of /q/ but there seems to be an effect of vowels on the reflexes of /h/ and /q/ which might render it unnecessary to postulate more than two). The second correspondence above was probably from IU *j and that IE *j was a secondary development (at least partially).