Re: PIE *H?
- From: "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 18:18:17 GMT
Neeraj Mathur wrote:
>
> "Robert Rittenhouse" <rittenhouse456@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:f7t5b1pprgndj6i5ed9ioubgeg4j8rhu80@xxxxxxxxxx
> >I was just wondering what basis was used to conclude that PIE did not
> > have *h, given that the five earliest recorded tongues, namely
> > Sanskrit, Greek, Avestan, Latvian and Gothic, all employ *h from
> > moderate to considerable degrees, and *h is present in Slavic
> > languages, other than Russian and Bulgarian.
>
> Hi Rob,
>
> You've got your question the wrong way around I'd say. Not many people sit
> down and decide what not to reconstruct for IE; rather, they look at the
> attested languages and see what sounds occur in regular correspondences.
Well, the "glottalic theory" was based in typological likelihood. Cooler
heads have prevailed, and it hasn't been accepted.
> As Peter's post shows, the various [h] sounds in the daughter languages are
> not connected to each other; they occur in regular correspondences to
> different sounds in the other languages.
> At this point it should be mentioned that there are those who think that
> some of the so-called laryngeals were pronounced as [h]. Szemerenyi, for
> instance, held the view that there was only one laryngeal in IE, and that
> its value was more or less equivalent to [h]. This is certainly not an
> orthodox view, however; most people hold that there were at least three
> laryngeals, and that their values are not really recoverable at all. (This
> is the view I've been 'raised' on, so to speak.)
Someone (I'm visualizing mid-century typesetting, so could it perhaps be
Louis H. Gray?) simply uses x, G, and h (vl. and vd. velar fricative,
and h) for the three laryngeals, which makes them conveniently
pronounceable and look less forbidding than all those subscripts, and
also fit with the phonological effects they have on neighboring sounds.
> Have a look at Szemerenyi's 'Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics' -
> his chapters on phonology are really quite good, and he gives a fair and
> detailed analysis of laryngeal theory and voiceless aspirates (as well as a
> brief look at glottalic theory); nevertheless, his conclusions on these two
> are not generally accepted (he thinks that a voiceless aspirate series
> existed, giving four oral stops at each point of articulation, and he thinks
> that there was only one laryngeal). Another good source is Sihler's 'New
> Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin', which is actually, despite its
> title, a sort of text on IE linguistics approached with a view to explaining
> Greek and Latin. His reconstructed phonological system is more orthodox,
> although he's not always accurate in certain details or conclusions about
> the development of the Classical languages.
Do _you_ like the new Forston(?) Blackwell textbook of IE? [Szem. isn't
accessible to beginners, and Beekes gives too much general historical
linguistics to have enough room for IE.] I only glanced at it once in
the store. (Too new for libraries, it seems.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.
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