zompist bboard

You could make them voiceless nasals.

I meant that more as in since the "plain velars" would have to have been further back than velar, there's no room for the "pre-laryngeal" uvular stops as well.

Taking the laryngeals as former uvular stops, while ingenious, only works in a two-tectal model, which at present I don't accept. The so-called evidence against a series of plain velars is IMO unconvincing, as AFAICT it amounts to "well the other two series neutralise to plain velars in a few places...

Soap wrote:the bottom four having 0% occurrence in the Nigerian population and 100% in the Swedish.

I think these are the wrong way round.

[shooting dead] [black man] vs. [shooting] [dead black man]

It just occurred to me that it's relevant that there is another language with a "triple-reflex"... Latin. Specifically, in the environment *HN̥C- > *e/a/oNC- (cf. endo, indo "in, on, to" < *h₁n̥do, ambi "around" < *h₂n̥tbʰi, unguis "finger-nail, claw" < *h₃n̥gʰu-). Except this sound change happened ...

Another issue with macro-families is that they tell us nothing about the internal branching, which is always far more informative. Sure, it's reasonable that all these languages are related, but in what way?

Salmoneus wrote:This is clear from population genetics

I thought this doesn't prove anything about language.

I'm very definitely not a lumper. My opinion on Indo-Uralic is that it's intriguing, worth investigating, but probably won't amount to anything provable.

It may well be parsimonious, but imo parsimony isn't a good enough reason to reject other scenarios, especially when there's other evidence to consider, such as the (imo conclusive) argument that *h₃ cannot have been rounded. Yes, the laryngeals are absolutely misreconstructed in many cases. For exa...

in Lycian, *h2 is reflected by a stop, "variously spelled k , q , and χ " Kloekhorst shows that Lycian q < *h₂w, not *h₂. It's instructive that *h₂ when lenited gives g , which is a fricative (according to Kloekhorst , underlyingly voiceless but voiced intervocalically), so it seems likely that the...

Nortaneous wrote:an earlier rounded value for *æ

Improbable, as *æ also comes from post-PIE *ē of any origin. u-umlaut in Tocharian proves nothing, since u-umlaut can easily induce labialisation. The mutual rounding in *ā...æ is interesting, but probably not significant.

Still, a POA shift from velar to somewhere further back is possible on the way from PIE2 to PIE3. Certainly - imo merger into [h] is the final step, but it could take almost any route on the way. I see. So the vowel colouring effects of the laryngeals are pre-Anatolian. Well, the vowels don't behav...

Then again, the Hittite evidence only applies to 2, doesn't it? [the laryngeals don't have to form a natural set!]. Nope! ḫāraš, -an- "eagle" < *h₃éron- This would also allow the 'laryngeals' and the voiced (i.e. ejective) stops to share a quality, explaining lengthening in Latin and Balto-Slavic, ...

Regarding PIE: is there actually any reason why people assume that "laryngeals" must be dorsal fricatives of any sort, let alone why they need to "fill the gaps" to match the stop series? I've just been looking again at a romlang idea, and at actual romance languages. And they have lots of elements...

But isn't the only "evidence" for a rounded *h₃ the roundedness of *o? If you accept that *o need not even have been rounded at the time of laryngeal colouring, continuing to insist on a rounded *h₃ is nonsensical without new evidence, which I note you haven't offered. I agree about *h₁ (though IMO ...

Ah, I didn't know it was one he uses with his dad.

I'll admit that *h₂ʷ lacks any real corroboration, but it's also not an integral part of my theory. It was more just a "huh, there's a hole here, what if *h₂w were originally *h₂ʷ to fill it" (full disclosure, I first saw this idea elsewhere, though I don't recall off the top of my head who it was -...

Vijay wrote:Me (in Mountain Lion)

English has lost /x/ and preserved /h/ Imo this isn't a good parallel. [x] (not /x/) was a mere allophone of /h/ in coda position (after back vowels), whereas your putative laryngeals would have been contrastive in all positions. That [x] only existed in the coda makes its loss, against the retenti...

PIE2 *xʲ > PIE3 *ʕʲ = *h1, Hittite zero PIE2 *x > PIE3 *ʕ = *h2, Hittite zero PIE2 *xʷ > PIE3 *ʕʷ = *h3, Hittite zero PIE2 *h > PIE3 *ʕ = *h2, Hittite h PIE2 *hʷ > PIE3 *ʕʷ = *h3, Hittite h I find it implausible that Anatolian *ḫ, which was clearly a velar/uvular fricative, should reflect glottal f...

But that just begs the question of where the three stop series came from. Ablaut's easy to see as an innovation, given how closely tied to the accent it must have originally been, but the stops are less so.

Interesting. I wonder if other scholars will pick up on this, and it turns out to be correct. That'd be really cool.

Right, although more specifically a zero-grade suffix. De Vaan thinks the f- is due to influence from some semantically related word with f-, but not having a reasonably complete lexicon for Oscan makes it hard to know what.

Howl wrote:And the d in dn̥ǵʰu 'tongue' is only attested in Germanic.

Not so! Old Latin attests dingua with an initial that can only reflect *d. The l- is adopted from lingere "to lick", and it's similar for the other words seemingly showing *l- (Lith. liežuvìs ~ liẽžti, Arm. lezow ~ lizanem).