----- Original Message -----
From: "Muke Tever" <muke@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 8:15 PM
Subject: Re: Evidence for Nostratic? (was Re: Proto-Uralic?)
> From: "Joe" <joe@...>
> > As far as I know, the laryngeals are transcribed |h)| in Hittite. So,
take
> > Latin 'ante'. This, in Hittite, was 'h)ante', and is reconstructed as
> > *H2enti.
>
> h)anz [= h)a-an-za]. *2enti is the loc.sg. (I'm not sure whether h)anz is
from
> *2ent or *2ents though.)
>
> > Laryngeals were introduced as a way to compensate for the
> > differences between vowels in Greek and all the Rest...sometimes latin
'a' =
> > Greek 'a','e', or 'o'.
>
> No, because laryngeals affected vowels in Greek and Latin the same way,
for the
> most part (AFAIK). What you're thinking of seems to be how some initial
a-, e-,
> o- in Greek are thought to be reflexes of laryngeals; these vowels
generally
> dont show up in other branches, and certainly not as /a/ in Latin.
So, um, why were laryngeals introduced? Was it the inconsistencies in
Ablaut, or what?