Tropylium wrote:Etherman wrote:Typologically any language with aspirated stops has /h/. So this implies that PIE had /h/ as one of its phonemes. My bet is that it was *h1.
That only follos if PIE actually
had aspirates. It seems plausible it's a later development from original mediae, and in the branches that clearly have or had them, there either also develops a /h/ (Greek, IA), or the aspirates swiftly become something else (Italic, Iranian).
Are you speaking of the standard model's
voiced aspirates, or of the Brugmannian
voiceless aspirates? The former certainly were a distinct set of stops in PIE, whatever their articulation (not necessarily breathy-voiced, which is found actually only in Indic); the latter have successfully been explained away, mostly by means of laryngeals.
Tropylium wrote:(As for what the traditional mediae were then, my money's on voiced preglottalized.)
Perhaps.
Tropylium wrote:BTW, for a minor thredjack, how much of the laryngeals' fate is pre-PIE and how much post-PIE? Similarly, how much of it would be common post-exo-Anatolian? I never see this explained clearly, with an implication that it's
all branch-specific, but yet changes like h2e
h2a, or eh1
e: appear to be shared by everything.
The three laryngeals certainly were still there after the break-off of Anatolian, as the details of their loss are different in the various branches; and they could not have merged into one either, as they yield different vowels in syllabic position in Greek.
The loss of laryngeals probably happened at a stage when the branches had already begun to differentiate, but were still close enough together that such innovation could spread from one branch to another (i.e, IE was a differentiated dialect continuum at that stage, in which the later branches were already visible but still to a large degree mutually intelligible). This could have happened about 2500-2000 BC.
Tropylium wrote:One reason I ask is that there are posited loanwords in Uralic that reflect initial laryngeals as *k, but these are, interestingly enuff, not supposedly from PIE (too limited in distribution for that; some exist only in Finnish), but some separate and otherwise unattested arcaic northwestern branch. Yet it seems to me initial laryngeals were lost alreddy at the exo-Anatolian stage, so that sounds quite fishy.
These loanwords are a difficult matter. There seem to have been borrowings at various stages - from PIE to Proto-Uralic, from Indo-Iranian to Finno-Permic, etc. - and some of the "loanwords" may actually be cognates inherited from Proto-Indo-Uralic, Nostratic or whatever (provided, of course, such a relationship was real).