Talk:Laryngeal theory

message: It's a pity that this article with its rather fascinating (for language freaks) content should be so hard to understand in parts, especially starting from "Whatever caused a short vowel to disappear". This may be because it's late in the evening and I'm too tired for reading that kind of stuff, but still, I feel this is too hard to understand even for someone who, having an M.A. in (English and French) language and literature, has done some linguistics before. I would be very grateful if you could rephrase / explicate your ideas to make them more easily understandable. Robin.r (talk) 22:06, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Pretty hard to understand

message: I would appreciate it if there were a more detailed discussion of specific reflexes. How does and Indo-Europeanist know when to reconstruct a laryngeal. Tibetologist (talk)
:There are a number of reasons for inferring a laryngeal: Roots are believed to contain one ablauted vowel preceded and followed by at least one consonant. So a laryngeal is reconstructed for a root that begins with a vowel like *es- (<*h1es- 'be'), *ag- (<*h2eg- 'lead'), *orn- (<*h3ern- 'eagle'); or ends with a vowel like *dʰē- (<*dʰeh1- put), *stā- (<*steh2- stand), *dō- (<*deh3- give); or for roots with a prosthetic vowel in Greek like *(e)rewdʰ- (<*h1reudʰ- 'red'), *(a)ster- (<*h2ster- 'star') or for a disyllabic root like  (< 'mix').
:A laryngeal is also reconstructed for a long vowel where lengthened-grade is not expected like *bʰū- (*bʰuh2- 'become'); or for an *a or an *o where o-grade is not expected (examples above)
:I have heard that laryngeals can also be inferred from metric anomalies in Vedic text. —teb728 t c 23:33, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: That's true. There are places in the Rig Veda where ā seems to want to be two syllables; in these places, people infer that that it was earlier *aHa < *eH{e/o} or *āHa < *oH{e/o}. Another place you can infer a laryngeal is where Sanskrit has i corresponding to Greek e, a, or o, such as pitā(r) "father" = Greek patēr < *ph2tēr. But I suspect Tibetologist meant we should add this discussion (with sources) to the text, rather than inform him here on the talk page. +Angr 05:11, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Another type of evidence from Vedic are compounds with an unexpected long vowel preceding an element starting in a consonant, which suggests that the element originally started with a laryngeal before the initial consonant that is directly attested (schematically: -Vː+C- < -V+HC-), but perhaps that's a bit too advanced for an introduction to the subject. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:44, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion of reflexes

message: Given the subject, the fact that this article is "written like an essay" with "no sufficient inline citations" is perhaps more a quality that a defect.
: The article is fine the way it is, I thoroughly enjoyed the detail! William Vroman 04:23, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Encyclopedic style? 

message: The section "Explanation of Ablaut ..." includes a lot of text simply describing the normal ablaut phenomenon in PIE.  I'm aware that Saussure's discovery was crucially based on examining ablaut patterns and figuring out how to fit the non-standard patterns into the standard pattern, but still, there is way too much text here.  It would be better to move some of the text here to Indo-European ablaut and link to that article, rather than describing ablaut in detail.  In other words, just mention the fact that ablaut is usually of the e/o/nothing variety, with a link to the appropriate article, and then discuss how to fit the exceptional patterns into this variety. Benwing (talk) 01:46, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too much info on ablaut 

message: --77.37.199.19 (talk) 17:08, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: If you have any reliable sources that criticise the laryngeal theory you're free to add them. I'm sorry I don't though. CodeCat (talk) 17:12, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: German-speaking scholars have tended to resist the laryngeal theory for a long time, but nowadays (also thanks to the appearance of Evidence for Laryngeals in 1965) it's the consensus and all the younger scholars work with it as a matter of course. The current handbooks (i. e., those which are younger than Szemerényi's introduction, whose first edition was in 1970) present the laryngeal theory as established lore. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:13, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

text: Note that the two sceptical scholars named in the article belong to the older generation, too. Bonfante was born in 1904 – and is no longer with us, as he died in 2005 (sic!) – and Mańczak was born in 1924. Which makes me wonder if we should only name living sceptics, and note year of birth. Seriously, I can't think of any Indo-Europeanist born after (say) WWII who doesn't work with laryngeals. It's the classic case of a theory gaining acceptance because its critics are either converted or disappear. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:33, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I just went ahead and rid the article of Bonfante. The Moscow School does seem to treat laryngeals as an afterthought, but I don't know if any of its members has ever explicitly argued against the idea – Illich-Svitych accepted them and proposed they were [xʲ x xʷ], possibly for the first time. David Marjanović (talk) 14:35, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: If you're interested in fresher criticism, we have in Helsinki one J. Pyysalo who in his PhD thesis argues for only a single laryngeal /h ~ ɦ/, as well as all sorts of other wacky reinterpretations (there was no laryngeal lengthening, voiced aspirates come from voiced stop + /ɦ/, there was only one series of velars, etc.) I'd wait though until he manages to distill his criticism into a couple of peer-reviewed articles… condensing 500 pages into a couple paragraphs of coherent key points of criticism sounds difficult. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 17:05, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

text: I've seen a lot of criticism sections on Wikipedia and they mostly turn out to be cesspits. I think it's better to weigh the pros and contras in the main text as you encounter them.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.82.82 (talk) 16:29, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  There is no criticism section 

message: The article as it currently stands states that "h4 differs from *h2 only in not being reflected as Anatolian ḫ. Accordingly, except when discussing Hittite evidence, the theoretical existence of an *h4 contributes little." This is untrue. h2 and h4 develop differently in other stocks. H4, but not H2, appears as /h/ in Albanian when word-initial before an originally accented vowel. (E.g. PIE *h4órǵʰii̯eh2 —"testicle" and Alb. herdhe "testicle" but PIE *h₂ŕ̥tkos "bear -> Alb. ari "bear") In Armenian, h2 sometimes turns up as /h/ (e.g. *h2euh2os "grandfather" -> Arm. haw "grandfather") whereas h4 never does (incidentally  *h4órǵʰii̯eh2 "testicle" -> Arm. orjik "scrotum".) Szfski (talk) 17:46, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Update: I have edited the article appropriately. Szfski (talk) 17:46, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The idea that h- in Armenian and Albanian has any kind of etymological significance is not widely believed, at least by experts in Armenian and Albanian historical grammar. Usually, it's simply considered prosthetic, as far as I'm aware. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:09, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

text: One more possible word is h4eryós. —Soap— 19:16, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

text: Having looked at this, though, it seems the only evidence for h4 being in this word is negative ... that is, it's because it *doesnt* produce a laryngeal reflex where it should, and not because it produces /h/ in Albanian.  So I would say that the testicle word is in fact the only word and that all examples of "some" should be rephrased to use singular words.  I also dont believe there is any good reason to reconstruct a phoneme for just one word. —Soap— 04:08, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  H4 

message: Is the form *ǵṇn- correct? If yes, how is it explained?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.57.100.32 (talk) 22:24, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't really get that form either, it should be just *ǵn- (with a circle). It seems like it's based on the idea that laryngeals lengthen vowels, but they only lengthen sonorants in some languages so it's not a general PIE thing. CodeCat (talk) 23:18, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Root *ǵen, *ǵon, *ǵṇn-/*ǵṇ̄ 

message: ...just as in real life. For instance wouldn't "Müller and Cuny" actually refer to Hermann Müller and Albert Cuny?- These aren't household names like Beethoven Dante and Einstein. -Wetman (talk) 12:28, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Full names at first appearance... 

message: Are we certain that the Arabic word ھواء is of Semitic origin? Wiktionary points to this word as coming from Persian  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.125.173.118 (talk) 21:21, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arabic word for "wind" 

message: Laryngeal theory#Possible other uvulars says «It has been pointed out that PIE *a in verb roots, such as *kap- "take", …doesn't as a rule participate in ablaut, …»
Oh yeah? What about Latin capio "I take", cepi "I took", accipĕre (ad-  "to, toward" + capĕre ""to take") "to accept" ? — Tonymec (talk) 13:41, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: That vowel alternation is assumed to have arisen within Italic since it is not found in the other IE languages.  Latin regularly reduces unstressed vowels to /i/ (e.g. facere > inficio) and while I dont know the origin of the other alternation, it is missing from other branches and pssibly also missing even from the other Italic languages.  Perhaps it, too, arose from some kind of stress-based reduction at a time when the verbs still used reduplication.  We could certainly figure this out if we need to. —Soap— 01:53, 26 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: This section seems to have been lost by now, but that may not be a problem for this article, it sounds like it instead belongs in Proto-Indo-European ablaut. Any claim like this should definitely be sourced, though (and there are contrary opinions too). FWIW de Vaan thinks cēpī is analogical from faciō : fēcī, iaciō : iēcī, which have a < *h₁ : ē < *eh₁. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 12:12, 26 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  No ablaut for -kap- "take"? 

message: There is a very helpful preamble in this section about the justification for citing the Uralic evidence. I don't have time to make the new page myself (or more specifically, to argue for months with super-editors about whether such a page is justified), but if in future versions of this page someone decides to unilaterally remove this preamble, please move it to separate page (proto-Indo-Uralic? Contacts between proto-languages?) and link to it before deleting. (Thank you.) 173.48.76.154 (talk) 19:55, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Which preamble? New page about...? That's a pretty vague request. Please take your time at least to formulate a decent proposal. Thank you! –Austronesier (talk) 07:34, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

text: Might I also factor in the theory of Proto-Uralo-Siberian? Kaden Bayne Vanciel (talk) 05:31, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The Uralo-Siberian theory does not involve Indo-European, and as such does not really do anything of direct relevance to laryngeal theory. Their closest common denominator is probably Eurasiatic or Nostratic, but these are so disputed (especially in their details) that I don't think anyone considers them of having relevance for LT either. (There is the one Hyllested paper, but it basically relies on just Uralic evidence anyway.) --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 13:35, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uralic 

message: the section "Explanation of ablaut and other vowel changes" is useless and redundant with the ablaut page. If no one objects, I will remove it. Ioe bidome (talk) 19:37, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, and it's written in notation that contradicts current practice on writing the roots as *deh₃-,*steh₂-, *ǵenh₁-, *bʰendʰ-, and *bʰer---Ioe bidome (talk) 19:44, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

text: I think what you removed was important. Perhaps it could   be trimmed, but not deleted. Because of its removal, the comments section brings up the plow word with no context for the reader   as to why its important.    Lollipop (talk) (●Soap●) 00:34, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Useless section