Re: Questions on Proto-Indo-European

So would the b sound of Spanish (where the lips don't
touch) be similar to the postulated bh sound?  And if
only a small breath separated b from bh, wouldn't it
be hard to tell them apart in speech?

-QR


--- Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:
> Quentin Read wrote:
> >First of all, how where the consonants bh, dh, and
> gh
> >actually pronounced?  I can't really visualize it
> (or
> >audio-lize it).
>
>
> Well they _may_ have been pronounced as a
> breathy-voice effect on following
> vowel, as Nik Taylor said, and as they're pronounced
> in modern Indic
> languages IIRC.  But keep in mind that
> reconstructions are really just
> symbolic summaries of the set of correspondences
> found in surviving
> languages, and any idea of the actual pronunciation
> is an assumption.  The
> point is that there was a series of voiced sounds
> *b1, d1, g1 that
> contrasted with another series of voiced sounds *b2,
> d2, g2.
>
> There is also a current school of thought that
> proposes *voiceless-plain vs.
> *voiceless-glottalized/ejective vs. *voiced plain--
> but I forget offhand how
> that corresponds to the traditional *voiceless-plain
> vs. *voiced plain vs.
> *voiced-aspirate.
>
> >And finally has anyone made a .lex file of PIE
> roots
> >yet?  If not I will have to myself.
>
> Check out Cybalist (a Yahoo group) if you haven't
> already.  There may be
> such a list in their files section.. A lot of
> reconstructed forms can be
> found passim in the archive.  Or post a question,
> you'll get an answer.

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