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It has often been speculated that the IE words for 4 (*kʷetwores) and 8 (*Hoḱtṓw) are related. If that is true, they should come from an earlier form like **kʷoktw. In the word for 4 the 't' was elided, and a suffix was added.  In the word for 8 the inital kʷ was lenited to a laryngeal. This is the...

The short answer is the accent. A major weakness of the earlier version of my model is that I wanted to derive accent secondarily. But this caused everything to be too complex and I could not get the rules to work cleanly. I am now looking more into how PU corresponds with PIE. And it is like explor...

One important later sound change in my model is that sequences of o-o were transformed into e-o sequences. This sound change is one of the reasons that the o-grade in modern PIE looks so much like a secondary development. You see this in the declension of the noun genos (latin genus, generis): gono...

That PIE went through a stage with just one non-high vowel is something many if not most Indo-Europeanists agree upon; the evidence looks quite compelling. And the high frequency of this vowel seems to indicate that a number of different vowels have collapsed into it; this in turn gives a plausible...

I do not wish to repeat the argument for Indo-Uralic or the Mitian hypothesis. What I am looking at is the vowel systems of Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic and Mongolian. The vowel systems of the last three are remarkably similar. They have 8~10 vowels in the first (root) syllable. But they also have ...

There are similar reasons to doubt an Indo-Uralic relationship, though the morphological resemblances are more favourable. But if you look at these sound correspondences , it is quite clear that we are dealing with a loanword layer here, as they look exactly like the sound substitutions one would e...

Depends on the reconstruction, for which there are two: *gʷow- ~ *gʷew-, or *gʷeh₃u-. In the former, the length in the Sanskrit nominative is generalised out of the accusative, where *gʷowm > *gʷōm by Stang's law (necessary to explain the long vowel in Skt. dyauḥ < *dyew- "sky") while the oblique i...

Three laryngeals is the simplest explanation for the Greek triple reflex. Then the ancestors of the Greeks used the appropriate e-grade vowel when they just needed a schwa-like vowel next to a laryngeal. Of course, as was pointed out to me by a helpful Twitter account, Lycian has a word 'χawa-' (is ...

Both e > a / _h₂_ and e > o₂ / _h₃_ can be considered pre-PIE changes, since they can be only recovered by internal reconstruction. (There is some evidence that *o₂ was distinct from basic *o, but it's still reflected as a back vowel everywhere. We could reconstruct e.g. *o = [ɔ] versus *o₂ = [o], ...

Thanks, I was actually thinking of https://www.academia.edu/4199002/PIE_a, but the centum-satem paper gives more detail. Just perusing the list of *k- roots at Wiktionary, the idea of a-coloring does appear sporadic at best. Actually *g- has a higher proportion of *a vocalism. Carrasquer Vidal argu...

linguoboy wrote: Is there a generally accepted terminus ante quem for the fortition of voiced fricative allophones in Dutch?

Dutch did not have dental fricatives after the 12th century.

I can't give a full account of MCV's theory, I have googled Vidal's theory. It's at: http://www.academia.edu/4169949/Centum_and_satem Basically he suggests that this 'qa' -> 'ka' (and thus the Centum/Satem split) happened in pre-PIE at the time of the 'Great Vowel Collapse'. And he also suggests a ...

I would suggest the bilabial fricative (ɸ) for reconstructing h₃. It is not in the velar region, but why does it have to be? It is less marked than the uvular fricative (X) proposed for h₂, which explains why h₂ has more direct reflexes (the 'h' in Hittite). And it would definitely cause rounding. ...

OTOH the dissimilation may be something other than voiced stop to a voiced fricative. Your thoughts? In this model, what causes the different vowel coloring of h₂ vs. h₃? Note that Carrasquer Vidal has suggested that *k (i.e. not *kʷ or *ḱ) had the same vowel coloring effect as h₂ does. So, this is...