Talk:Proto-Indo-European phonology

message: After comprehensive searching and comparing, I finally discovered that:
*Italian PIE phonology article has highest ever number of paradigms, as compared to Wikipedias in other languages.
*Italian PIE phonology article has single PIE reconstruction, without contradictions between various theories of Buck, Beekes ans Ramat.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Wikinger (talk • contribs) 21:27, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Italian PIE

message: It would be nice to know what book Mayrhofer (1986: 170 ff.) refers to. Tibetologist 23:38, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Have you tried Arial Unicode?  That's what I've got and it works.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 05:35, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Mayrhofer (1986: 170 ff.)

message: I suggest that this article focus maninly on the "standard" theory (aspirated voiced stops, laryngeals, etc.) as presented e.g. in Meier-Brugger, Indo-European linguistics.  Competing theories, such as the glotallic theory, should then be presented in a later section.  Cheers.  Grover cleveland (talk) 21:52, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: "Standard" theory

message: I suggest that either
* this article should systematically describe how each phoneme was treated in the descendant languages, or
* it should not do any such description, and leave such material to another article.
I don't mind either way, but right now we are in some kind of half-way house.  Grimm's law, Grassman's law, etc. are described.  But other, equally important developments (e.g. e,o -> a in Indo-Iranian) are not.  Cheers.   Grover cleveland (talk) 21:58, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This article should be on phonological laws that already operated in PIE proper (Szemerenyi lengthening, Siebs' law, Stang's law, Bartholomae's law and all those unnamed ones like "TK > Kþ in post-Anatolian-Tocharian"). Indo-European sound laws should cover reflexes in daughter languages. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:08, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Grimm's law, Grassman's law, etc.

message: Should the consonants really be given between phoneme slashes / / ? The usual representation is just *ḱ etc. On the other hand, the phoneme would use the IPA symbol: /c/ (or probably */c/ because it's a reconstruction). As it is, the table seems to be a strange mixture of API and PIE conventions. - And even if it is correct now, the vowels should be written in the same way. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 14:31, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There's no law that says only strict IPA characters are allowed between slashes. If you read the linguistic literature about Native American languages, you'll see things like "/y/" in reference to the palatal glide and "/š/" in reference to the voiceless postalveolar fricative. Nevertheless, it certainly isn't usual to use slashes in discussions of PIE, and I wouldn't be averse to their being removed. —Angr 14:39, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

text: I think that it's important to emphasize that it's the phonemes that are being reconstructed. Yes, the vowels should use the same notation, but the section on vowels should be a bit longer, explaining the traditional view that there were only 2 real PIE vowel phonemes: */e/ and */o/, the *i and *u being just the syllabic allophones of the glides (i.e. phonetically vowels, phonologically sonorants), with no real evidence for PIE phoneme */a/ (it was highly-marginal, at best). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:00, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the fact that these are phonemes should be stressed, but couldn't we do that in a more... traditional way? The PIE introductions I know mention the phoneme issue, but none of them uses the syntax of this article. People who don't know much about PIE might get the impression that this is the standard way of writing PIE sounds. I think you are right with the vowels; the section could need some cleaning up. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 18:00, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not usual to use slashes unless a phonemic-phonetic contrast is being made. The phonemicity of the palatals is debated, so using either slashes or brackets would be taking sides in the debate, which is sidestepped by using neither. The same is true of *h1, which some have suggested might have been two phonemes. kwami (talk) 20:33, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: If you look through the contents of Template:Language phonologies, you'll find that most articles on the phonologies of attested languages do not use slashes in the phoneme charts. I think it's sufficient for us to say in prose at the top of the chart that what follows is phonemes. —Angr 20:45, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

text: I wasn't aware that the phonemicity of palatovelars is disputable?! Didn't Melchert settled the issue on three series 20 years ago? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 22:16, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sure you know more about this than I do. But your link claims Melchert proposed the three velar series, when they're simply centum-satem reflexes. kwami (talk) 23:40, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

text: I've told him I will block him if he continues edit warring and personal attacks. kwami (talk) 20:33, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I see you already did block. I was just about to do so myself. —Angr 20:39, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: As nasty and uninformed as he was, there is a valid question of whether we should be using slashes when it is not uniformly agreed that all of these distinctions were phonemic. It's also common to omit slashes in inventory tables of living languages, even when they're used in the text. kwami (talk) 20:47, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes; see my comments above. Just because the anon was rude, arrogant, and mistaken about the reason we shouldn't be using the slashes, that doesn't mean we should keep them. —Angr 20:55, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

text: I have no problem with that, but only after the allophony and the disputed phonemic status of some of them is discussed. I'm about to rewrite the section on three dorsals series dispute and on the vowels, could you please wait an hour or so..  --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:02, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Take your time! --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 13:13, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

text: By the way, I'm sorry for the hubbub I obviously raised by starting this section. I had no idea my simple question would cause some IP to insult you and start an edit war. Cheers --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 13:16, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The IP started causing trouble before you started this section, though. —Angr 13:56, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

text:  I've finished with what I had in mind writing, now it's up to you guys to fix bad English and possible NPOV.. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:36, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonemes? 

message: For someone like me - who is not a linguist - it is difficult to know exactly how these consonants and vowels are pronounced. E.g. what is the difference between h1, h2 and h3? Is it possible to add audio - perhaps mp3 files? Or could you, if these already exist somewhere else, provide a link?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gabelsberger (talk • contribs) 22:01, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Even linguists don't know how h1, h2, and h3 were pronounced. Just think of them as algebraic variables like x, y, and z. —Angr 22:32, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Include audio?

message: Unless I've missed something, I don't see any discussion of the pitch accent of PIE (although the acute-accent notation is used in some places, it is not explained).  It seems as if this ought to belong in the article. Grover cleveland (talk) 02:57, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, Proto-Indo-European accent is a separate article, but you're right, it should be briefly summarized here. —Angr 07:35, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion of accent? 

message: Are there any minimal pairs for *kʷ vs. *kw, *gʷ vs. *gw or *gʷʰ vs. *gʰw?  If not, what is the justification for seeing the labiovelars as separate phonemes, rather than sequences of two phonemes?  After all, English has words like "queen" and "what", deriving directly from the PIE *labiovelars via Grimm's Law, yet no one suggests that English has unit phonemes *kʷ or *hʷ. Grover cleveland (talk) 16:36, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There's certainly a difference between *kʷ and *ḱw, because they developed differently in the satem languages. I don't know if there are literal minimal pairs, though. I'm not sure if it can be shown that there's a difference between *kʷ and *kw, but there are several reasons for interpreting *kʷ and its brothers as being single phonemes. For example, they can occur before consonants without developing syllabic [u]: the zero grade of a root like *twer- would be *tur- because *w between two consonants syllabifies to *u, but the zero grade of a root like *kʷer- would be *kʷr-, not **kur-, showing that *kʷer- doesn't have the *w phoneme in it. +Angr 17:27, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah -- that's a good argument -- thanks.  Btw, are there any PIE words containing a velar followed by *w (let alone minimal pairs?).  I haven't come across any.  Another interesting possibility would be the existence of any undisputed roots containing both velars and labiovelars (since PIE roots cannot contain two stops from the same place of articulation).  Ringe mentions one dubious one as possibily post-PIE, but I can't remember what it is.  I think all other possible pairs of places of articulation are attested -- am I right?  Grover cleveland (talk) 21:48, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know of any words with a true velar + w cluster. I guess the first place to look would be Sanskrit words containing kv. I think the root you're thinking of is *kʷek- 'sleep', but I'm not 100% sure. You seem to be questioning the validity of the labiovelars, but if anything is in doubt, it's the distinction between the palatals and the true velars; those are the two series that may well have started out as a single series before getting differentiated in a way that's no longer easy to figure out. In other words, there is not much chance that pre-PIE didn't have *kʷ, but there is a fair chance that it didn't have both *ḱ and *k. +Angr 13:44, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Labiovelars vs. velar-labial sequence

message: : All of the reconstructed roots with */b/ inside are usually confined to a few Indo-European branches ...
"inside"?  Is this an ESL attempt to say "roots containing */b/", or what? — And does "All ... usually" mean all, or most? —Tamfang (talk) 03:58, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "inside" 

message: How many roots with PIE initial /*b/ are known?? This question is important because it relates to a mention of it at the P article in the Usage section. Georgia guy (talk) 15:15, 28 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Very few indeed. Only a handful of the roots listed at wikt:Index:Proto-Indo-European/b start with regular b rather than bʰ (sometimes spelled bh on that page, but it's the same thing), and many of the roots listed on the page that do start with regular b are kind of questionable since they're not attested in very many languages and may not really be Proto-Indo-European at all. It's true that p was extremely rare word-initially in Proto-Germanic; the words listed at wikt:Index:Proto-Germanic/p are mostly loanwords or of obscure origin. I don't know if any of them has an impeccable PIE pedigree. But p isn't that rare in Germanic outside word-initial position; modern English words like sheep, ship, sleep, lip, harp, help, slip, keep, hope, etc., all had noninitial p in Proto-Germanic. Angr (talk) 18:51, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

text: Those are words that end in P. What pattern does their etymology follow?? I know that there's the sp combination, and it is preserved in English; the p doesn't turn into f in these words. Georgia guy (talk) 18:56, 28 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Kluge's law might account for some of them. CodeCat (talk) 19:10, 28 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proto-Indo-European initial /*b/ 

message: Joseph Wright wrote grammars of ancient languages describing the sound changes they underwent in developing from PIE. His phonological system includes a series of voiceless aspirated stops (mediae aspiratae). (See the page from his Greek grammar on Google Books.) I'm curious, does anyone know what happens to this series in the modern PIE phonological system? Are they subsumed under "voiced aspirated", perhaps with the (presumably) distinct development explained by a set of environments? Perhaps this question is only interesting to those like me who read ancient language grammars, but it's relevant to describing the historical development of PIE theory. — Eru·tuon 20:44, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I think they're plain voiceless in modern theory. CodeCat (talk) 21:00, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Most or all of the voiceless aspirated stops of Indo-Iranian ( > voiceless fricatives in Iranian) come from clusters of plain voiceless stops with *h₂ or possibly *h₁. David Marjanović (talk) 23:17, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Voiceless aspirated stops 

message: Does anyone have any sources for the "citation needed" statements in the PIE phonology#Dorsals section, about alternative realizations for the palatals and palatovelars (and in fact for the whole of the argumentation that follows them)? W. P. Uzer (talk) 22:35, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Refs for claims about velars

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: What nonsense is this, /a/ is the most common sound on this earth. There is no way that PIE did not have some variety of it, whether that was ə, ɐ, æ, ɑ, or ʌ. To say otherwise can only be foolish. Why is a notion like this one even included in this atricle, which is suppose to be using scholarly sources from well trained linguists, not pseudo scientific hogwash. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Idielive (talk • contribs) 23:18, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Ignorant. The sound [a] existed as an allophone of /e/, so for all purposes they are treated as the same phoneme. And it's believed by scholars that before laryngeal colouration, [a] was the unique phonation of /e/. Read a little bit more before insulting the most respectable experts in a field of science you know nothing about. –Tom 144 (talk) 14:36, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  No PIE /a/ phoneme? 

message: The *l and *r are given as “Liquids” on the chart. Is the *r known to be a tap, approximant, or a trill? 66.87.125.206 (talk) 17:55, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: My guess is that it was an alveolar trill, with possible tap (which is a trill with one contact) and approximant (which is an *undershoot* tap, so it's unlike English  in that it's alveolar rather than postalveolar and lacks labialization) allophones. The syllabic  (transcribed with  in the article) was likely a trill. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 11:32, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Liquids?

message: We say,   Is it just literally this one word?  I have never seen any other word used as an example. I dont think we should be calling it regular if it's only known to have happened once. —Soap— 22:53, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  /pibh/ 

message: In this article, there is a vowel chart with four vowels, long and short, as reconstructed by the Leiden school. There follows a paragraph about how the number of vowels is disputed. I propose that we either a) add vowel charts for the other common reconstructions or b) remove the vowel chart that is currently there; as it stands, this is highly misleading for people not reading very carefully, because it would seem to favor a two-vowel reconstruction. It might even be a borderline case of violating WP:NPOV. 
JeanLackE (talk) 20:48, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vowel chart 

message: Bruh where is the vowel chart and why are you guys using the weird unofficial pseudo-IPA EWW use the frekin IPA  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.215.54.107 (talk) 00:55, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: In historical linguistics, we customarily do not solely use IPA, but rather a blend of IPA and transcription conventions.  There are several vowel charts in this article—see my post above taking issue with one of them. JeanLackE (talk) 15:31, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Bruh

message: Hey everyone, I'm updating MOS:SUPERSCRIPT to more correctly document best practices for superscripts and subscripts. In most cases (mostly science and math notations), the Manual of Style prefers HTML markup like 1, but for the International Phonetic Alphabet we prefer Unicode characters. It looks like for Proto-Indo-European we prefer Unicode? So for example, we would want to write  and , not  or ? -- Beland (talk) 16:29, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Superscripts and subscripts 

message: What does the acute accent in words mean? I can't find where/if this is described.  Nixinova   T   C   04:55, 22 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: It indicates the location of the pitch accent. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:48, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Acute accent 

message: why are the syllabic consonants in the vowel section marked with the "devoiced" diacritic (r̥, l̥, etc.) and not with the "syllabic" diacritic (r̩, l̩, etc.)? 2A02:6680:110A:6DB9:D4EA:9C3F:8881:E082 (talk) 10:09, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: It is standard notation in Indo-European linguistics. Confusing, isn't it?  Tewdar  11:01, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Syllabic Consonants 

message: Currently, under the "Vowels" section, the table gives a four-vowel reconstruction of PIE, with , , , and . The following text (third paragraph) also states the following:
:Furthermore, all the daughter languages have a segment *a, and those with long vowels generally have long /aː/, /iː/, /uː/. Until the mid-20th century, PIE was reconstructed with all of those vowels. Modern versions incorporating the laryngeal theory, however, tend to view the vowels as later developments of sounds that should be reconstructed in PIE as laryngeals , , . For example, what used to be reconstructed as PIE  is now reconstructed as ; ,  are now reconstructed as , ,  representing any laryngeal; and  has various origins, among which are a "syllabic" [H̥] (any laryngeal not adjacent to a vowel) or an  next to the "a-coloring" laryngeal . (Though they may have phonetically contained the vowel [a] in spoken PIE, it would be an allophone of , not an independent phoneme.) Some researchers, however, have argued that an independent phoneme  must be reconstructed, and it cannot be traced back to any laryngeal.
Not only is this completely unsourced, it also seems to give undue weight to a non-mainstream opinion, as far as I can tell. In the Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, Byrd writes:
:While most present-day Indo-Europeanists reconstruct  as a phoneme for late PIE, some (most famously the "Leiden School" [LS]; see Beekes 2011) do not, eschewing typical reconstructions such as */sals/ 'salt' (Ved.  'salty', Gk. , Lat. , etc.) in favor of laryngealistic reconstructions:  (← //). Thus, for the LS,  was always a surface allophone of */e/, colored by an adjacent */h₂/. It is, however, very difficult to avoid the reconstruction of certain forms with  vocalism. For example, Hitt. , Gk. , and Lat.  'away, off' may only be traced back to */apó/, not */h₂epó/, and it is quite difficult to derive Skt. , OCS  'nose' from */nh₂es-/, as one would expect the syllabification ... (pp. 2057-2058)
:There are certain isolated forms which may have possessed */ī/ and */ū/:  'poison' (Av. , Lat. ) beside  (Ved. , Av. ), PIE  'mouse' (OE ) beside  (Lat.  'muscle'). Were one to reconstruct  and , the short vowel variants could not be explained. (Such instances of long high vowels are likely due to monosyllabic lengthening; see [ω] below.) Likewise, while  'nose' (Lat.  'nostrils') may be mechanically derived from */neh₂s-/, it would be difficult to connect this form with the short-vowel variant  cited above. Additional instances of  were also derived by (η): */-eh₂m/ >  (Skt.  'army'). (p. 2058)
(You can access the relevant pages in Beekes 2011 on the Internet Archive here.)
Mayrhofer 1986 also writes (DeepL Translate):
:The existence of */a/ in Indo-European (without the cases  → ah₂a, § 5.2.2) is not in doubt. Admittedly, the distribution is conspicuously weaker than */e/ and apparently also restricted: "in more than half of the cases [a] appears before and after guttural," writes J. Schindler (Wurzelnomen 5, § 2.2.2), and a related view is held by T. V. Gamkrelidze; according to him, roots of the structure C₁VC₂ tend to /V/ = /a/, "if the consonant sequence in the root is accessive or extrovert, with a velar phoneme in its initial consonant." (pp. 169-170)
:IE */ā/ was present in the proto-language but not frequent, similar to IE */a/ (§ 7.3.7.3). Cf. */mātér-/ 'mother' (Ved.  etc.), with primary */ā/ and as a 'nursery word' not to be connected with a more or less suitable verbal root */meh₂-/. (p. 172)
Based on this, I think it's clear that we should probably fix up the "Vowels" section of the article to reflect mainstream scholarship, as well as change the vowel chart. MeasureWell (talk) 03:54, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''{{PIE|*a}}'' and ''{{PIE|*ā}}'' in PIE