Re: Questions on Proto-Indo-European

From: "Quentin Read" <quonton79@...>
> I have recently gotten a book on PIE Roots (The Roots
> of English, by David Claiborne) serendipitously from a
> used bookstore - very interesting.  But anyway, I have
> a few questions about it.
>
> First of all, how where the consonants bh, dh, and gh
> actually pronounced?  I can't really visualize it (or
> audio-lize it).
Pronounced as in Sanskrit, presumably.  >_<

The glottalic theory which is popular now has them as plain voiced stops, [b]
[d] [g], with traditional *b *d *g being [p'] [t'] [k'].  Even so generally (as
far as I've seen online anyway) the traditional system is used, even by
glotalicists, for backwards compatibility.

> Second, where can I find a complete list of PIE roots,
> not just those that English has taken a word from?  I
> am trying to make some new branches of the IE family
> and it would be biased toward English to only use
> those roots.  So far any source I have found including
> the section in the back of the American HEritage
> Dictionary have only English roots.  I've spent the
> last few English classes using the list of roots to
> create a new language, Quaroeth.
Well, English is a very wide-ranging language, and considering that it's pretty
much half French and has a wide technical vocabulary from Latin and Greek, you
have three major branches of PIE (Germanic, Italic, Hellenic) in a comprehensive
English-based IE list such as the AHD4's.

As for otherwise, both the iiasnt website and the files section of Cybalist have
good resources, at least last I checked.

And don't forget that with the big focus on IE lexicon and phonology, there's a
lot of grammatical things to look at as well, if you want to make a really
convincing IElang...

> And finally has anyone made a .lex file of PIE roots
> yet?  If not I will have to myself.
What kind of .lex?

> -Penkwe Reudh
> (the roots upon which my name is based)
*penkw-to-nos ... or so I'm guessing.. hmmm... the Latin vowel reduction rules
are so fascinating it could get away with stuff like that :x)


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

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