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.

> I think they were orignally assumed to be
> vowels(someone put me right here).  But when Hittite showed up, they were
> changed to be consonants, I think.
Well, the laryngeals act like the *y *w *m *n *l *r in that they can act as
syllabic consonants, as in *p2ter- "father" with syllabic *2=.  All the known
reflexes of _that_ were vowels, reconstructed as schwa.  But from the beginning,
even to Saussure who proposed the "coefficients sonantiques" they were the same
kind of consonant as the *y *w *m *n *l *r.

    *Muke!
--
http://frath.net/

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