- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Cross posted from: [email protected]
lingua latina pater linguarum dimidum est 😎
I hope it’s okay for me to crosspost here.
Cross posted from: [email protected]
lingua latina pater linguarum dimidum est 😎
I hope it’s okay for me to crosspost here.
Mostly by the effect in the nearby vowels - often, a sound triggers changes in nearby sounds, before being dropped.
Here’s an example. Greek often shows an initial vowel where other IE languages show none. Like this:
Disregard for a moment the last line, focus on the first four. Why is Greek showing “random” initial vowels where Sanskrit and Latin have none? There’s no underlying pattern; it’s probably inherited then.
However, you can’t simply claim that Greek inherited the vowel and the other two lost it, without causing a problem: why didn’t Sanskrit and Latin delete the initial vowel from अज्र / ájra and ager?
The solution that a linguist called Saussure found to oddities like this was to propose that PIE had three sounds, not directly inherited by the descendants. He called them *ə₁ ə₂ ə₃; nowadays we call them *h₁ h₂ h₃. In that specific environment (word start, before a consonant):
And the initial vowel in the fifth line (that pops up in all four) is actually inherited.
(The ancestors of those five words are nowadays reconstructed as *h₁lewdʰ-, *h₁régʷos, *h₂stḗr, *h₃dónts, *h₂éǵros. Sure, the fifth one has a laryngeal… but also a vowel, that’s the vowel being inherited by Sanskrit and Latin.)
That hypothesis also helps in quite a few other situations, like:
Also, note that, when Hittite was discovered, all that “laryngeals” talk stopped being just a conjecture - because Hittite did preserve at least *h₂ and *h₃, and probably also *h₁ (it depends on how you analyse the cuneiform spelling).
That’s an awesome explanation, thank you!