Re: Questions on Proto-Indo-European

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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