[Re: [Re: [Re: [Re: Roll Your Own IE language]]]]

Bryan Maloney <bjm10@...> wrote:
> Has anybody noticed that some of the speculation on PIE phonology bears=
 a
> striking resemblence to "grunt talk" stereotypic of "barbarians"?
> =
> No real vowels, lots of pharyngeal/laryngeal stuff, etc.
Well, it's the end result of a long scholarly process.  At first reconstr=
ucted
PIE was virtually identical to Sanskrit, or rather, people tended to mere=
ly
set up correspondences between daughter languages, of which Sanskrit was
considered the oldest and most perfect, rather than reconstructing anythi=
ng at
all.

When the difficult problem of vowels began to be solved, people realized =
that
a given root tended to appear in a variety of different "grades," with vo=
wel
alternations between them.  ("Sing/sang/sung" is a remnant of this proces=
s in
English.)  The ultimate result of this was the theory that vowels simply
weren't part of the roots, at least at an early stage; the roots consiste=
d of
consonant clusters and vowel patterns were applied to them, first accordi=
ng to
phonological and then according to morphological considerations.  (This
resembles the situation in Semitic langs in vague outline but not at all =
in
detail.)

That's where the "no vowels in early PIE" idea comes from.  And it doesn'=
t
mean that it was pronounced without vowels; if you listened to it it'd so=
und
more or less like any other modern natlang.  It's that vowels weren't par=
ts of
roots the way they are in most modern languages, at least at an early sta=
ge.

As for the laryngeals, they were first reconstructed by De Saussure as
"coefficients sonantiques," theoretical consonants which disappeared and =
whose
only effect was lengthening or coloring neighboring vowels.

They were not called "laryngeals" or even taken very seriously until Hitt=
ite
was deciphered and it turned out that it preserved some of them as "h"!

The name "laryngeals" comes from the early theory that they were analogou=
s to
the Semitic laryngeal consonants.  All that we know about them is that so=
me of
them became h in one daughter language, they made consonants in other
languages aspirated, they turned into short vowels when left alone in
word-initial position in Greek (e, o, or a), and that in many languages w=
hen
they were after a vowel they disappeared and that vowel underwent compens=
atory
lengthening.

So any resemblances to stereotypes are fairly coincidental. :)

Ed


---------------------------------------------------------
Edward Heil .......................... edwardheil@usa.net
---------------------------------------------------------

____________________________________________________________________
Get free e-mail and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=3D=
1