Re: Proto-Indo-European, glottalic theory and consonant inventories.

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 14:10:51 -0500, Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
wrote:

> --- Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
>> Tangentially, I also include an "x" column for the
>> syllable-intitial sound commonly notated tk, dg,
> dhgh (or tc,
>> t'c', thch in my notation), which would otherwise be
> the only
>> stop-stop onset cluster in PIE, and which has a
> variety of
>> usually complex relexes in the daughter languages,
> not all of
>> which are consistent with a TK sequence.
>
> Oh, for words like *dheghom (if I recall the root
> correctly), right? I was wondering about that, since
> /tk/ sequences in the initial position are highly
> marked (and pretty hard to articulate), unless there
> are other stop-stop sequences like /pt/ and /kp/ to
> shore them up.
There's no attested thechom variant of thchom in any daughter language
(from which thchom could be a zero-ablaut form), only thchom ~ thchem
(showing ablaut, and arguably proving the structure of the root), and many
others with initial thch/xh, some with t'c'/x' and a few with tc/x.
There's one thqh root that I'm aware of, but personally I'm willing to
ascribe that to an earlier thchu until I learn otherwise.

>> I personally pronounce the series as based on /tS)/
> in my
>> internal monolog, but I try to think in symbols
> rather than
>> sounds most of the time.
>
> Why [tS]?
It seems to me to have been some kind of affricate or other complex sound,
and /tS)/ is simply the one that comes instinctively to mind. There's no
real science behind it: like I said, I'm more about symbols than sounds.
Even the letter |x| is inspired more by algebra than phonetics.



Paul