Re: more English orthography

At 04:28 13/05/00 -0400, you wrote:
>[...]
>> The other consonants are h, which result in low tone (the three laryngeals
>> h1 h2 h3 are preserved; I'm not sure how each one is to be realized), s
>> (results in high tone), r, l, v (= w or v), and j (last four result in low
>> tone).
>
>I don't understand H1 H2 H3 either.  One website gives them as /h/, /x/, and
>/xw/, respectively.  But MHO they might be "farther back" than that.  I
>don't understand either H by itself on Gwinn's site.
>
Indeed, nobody really knows how those laryngeals were really pronounced
(the name itself is confusing, the one who chose it thought of a connection
between PIE and the Semitic languages, but himself said the it could have
been "laryngeals or pharyngeals"). Indeed, the only attested IE language
that kept them is Hittite, and it's dead for a long time now. So we know
that Hittite kept the laryngeals, but as it's a dead language, we still
don't know how they were pronounced... In this case, we're stuck with
hypotheses...

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)