Laryngeal theory
Encyclopedia
The laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics
which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three (or more), consonant
sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language
(PIE). These sounds have disappeared in all present-day Indo-European languages, but some laryngeals are believed to have existed in Hittite
and other Anatolian languages
. The laryngeals are so called because they were once hypothesized (by Müller and Cuny) to have had a pharyngeal
, epiglottal
, or glottal
place of articulation
involving a constriction near the larynx
.
The evidence for their existence is mostly indirect, as will be shown below. But the theory serves as an elegant explanation for a number of properties of the Proto-Indo-European vowel system that, prior to the postulation of laryngeals, were unanalyzable, such as "independent" schwas (as in *pəter- 'father'); and the hypothesis that PIE schwa *ə was actually a consonant, not a vowel, provided an elegant explanation for some apparent exceptions to Brugmann's law
in Indic.
The original phonetic values of the laryngeal sounds remain controversial (see below).
in 1879, in an article chiefly devoted to something else altogether (demonstrating that *a and *o were separate phonemes in PIE). In the course of his analysis, Saussure proposed that what had been reconstructed as *ā and *ō, alternating with *ǝ, were actually an ordinary type of PIE ablaut, i.e., between e-grade and zero grade (further explanations below), but followed by a previously unidentified element which accounted for both (1) the changed vowel color and (2) the lengthening; that is, rather than *ā, ō and *ǝ, as traditionally, Saussure proposed something like *eA ~ *A and *eO and *O. These consonants Saussure called simply coefficients sonantiques, the terms for what now are in English more usually called the PIE resonants, i.e., the six elements which are either consonants or vowels (syllabic) depending on the sounds they're adjacent to: *y w r l m n.
These views were accepted by a few scholars, in particular Hermann Möller
, who added important elements to the theory.
was discovered and deciphered in the early 20th century. Hittite had a sound or sounds written with symbols from the Akkadian
syllabary
conventionally transcribed as , as in "I put, am putting". Various more or less obviously unsatisfactory proposals were made to connect these (or this) to the PIE consonant system as then reconstructed. It remained for Jerzy Kuryłowicz (Études indoeuropéennes I, 1935) to propose that these sounds lined up with Saussure's conjectures and, as will be shown below, explained some other matters as well. Since then, the laryngeal theory (in one or another form) has been accepted by most Indo-Europeanists.
The lateness of the discovery of these sounds by Indo-Europeanists is largely due to the fact that Hittite
and the other Anatolian languages
are the only Indo-European languages where at least some of them are attested directly and consistently as consonantal sounds. Otherwise, their presence is to be seen mostly through the effects they have on neighboring sounds, and on patterns of alternation that they participate in; when a laryngeal is attested directly, it is usually as a vowel (as in the Greek examples below).
Most Indo-Europeanists accept at least some version of laryngeal theory because their existence simplifies some otherwise hard-to-explain sound changes and patterns of alternation that appear in the Indo-European languages, and solves some minor mysteries, such as why verb roots containing only a consonant and a vowel have only long vowels e.g. *dō- "give"; re-reconstructing *deh3- instead not only accounts for the patterns of alternation more economically than before, but brings the segmental structure of these roots into line with the basic IE pattern, consonant - vowel - consonant.
, reconstruct just one. Some follow Jaan Puhvel
's reconstruction of eight or more (in his contribution to Evidence for Laryngeals, ed. Werner Winter). Most scholars work with a basic three:
Many scholars, however, either insist on or allow for a fourth consonant, *h₄, which differs from *h₂ only in not being reflected as Anatolian . Accordingly, except when discussing Hittite evidence, the theoretical existence of an *h₄ contributes little. Another such theory, but much less generally accepted, is Winfred P. Lehmann
's view, on the basis of inconsistent reflexes in Hittite, that *h₁ was actually two separate sounds. (He assumed that one was a glottal stop and the other a glottal fricative.)
Some direct evidence for laryngeal consonants comes from Anatolian:
PIE *a is a fairly rare sound, and in an uncommonly large number of good etymologies it is word-initial. Thus PIE (traditional) *anti "in front of and facing" > Greek antí "against"; Latin ante "in front of, before"; (Sanskrit ánti "near; in the presence of"). But in Hittite there is a noun "front, face", with various derivatives (ḫantezzi "first", and so on), pointing to a PIE root-noun *h₂ent- "face" (of which *h₂enti would be the locative singular). (It does not necessarily follow that all reconstructed forms with initial *a should automatically be rewritten *h₂/e.)
Similarly, the traditional PIE reconstruction for 'sheep' is *owi- (a y-stem, not an i-stem) whence Sanskrit ávi-, Latin ovis, Greek óïs. But Luwian
has ḫawi-, indicating instead a reconstruction *h₃ewi-.
But if laryngeals as consonants were first spotted in Hittite only in 1935, what was the basis for Saussure's conjectures some 55 years earlier? They sprang from a reanalysis of how the patterns of vowel alternation in Proto-Indo-European roots of different structure aligned with one another.
("alternate sound") by early German scholars and still generally known by that term (except in French, where the term apophonie is preferred). Several different such patterns have been discerned, but the commonest one, by a wide margin, is e/o/zero alternation found in a majority of roots, in many verb and noun stems, and even in some affixes (the genitive singular ending, for example, is attested as *-es, *-os, and *-s). The different states are called ablaut grades; e-grade and o-grade are together "full grades", and the total absence of any vowel is "zero grade".
Now, in addition to the commonplace roots of consonant + vowel + consonant structure there are also well-attested roots like *dhē- "put, place" and *dō- "give" (mentioned above): these end in a vowel, which is always long in the categories where roots like *sed- have full grades; and in those forms where zero grade would be expected, if before an affix
beginning with a consonant, we find a short vowel, reconstructed as *ə, or schwa
(more formally, schwa primum indogermanicum). An "independent schwa", like the one in PIE *pǝter- "father", can be identified by the distinctive cross-language correspondences of this vowel that are different from the other five short vowels. (Before an affix beginning with a vowel, there is no trace of a vowel in the root, as shown below.)
Whatever caused a short vowel to disappear entirely in roots like *sed-/*sod-/*sd-, it was a reasonable inference that a long vowel under the same conditions would not quite disappear, but would leave a sort of residue. This residue is reflected as i in Indic while dropping in Iranian; it gives variously e, a, o in Greek; it mostly falls together with the reflexes of PIE *a in the other languages (always bearing in mind that short vowels in non-initial syllables undergo various developments in Italic, Celtic, and Germanic):
Conventional wisdom lined up roots of the *sed- and *dō- types as follows:
But there are other patterns of "normal" roots, such as those ending with one of the six resonants (*y w r l m n), a class of sounds whose peculiarity in Proto-Indo-European is that they are both syllabic (vowels, in effect) and consonants, depending on what sounds are adjacent:
Saussure's insight was to align the long-vowel roots like *dō-, *stā- with roots like *bher-, rather than with roots of the *sed- sort. That is, treating "schwa" not as a residue of a long vowel but, like the *r of *bher-/*bhor-/*bhṛ-, an element that was present in the root in all grades, but which in full grade forms coalesced with an ordinary e/o root vowel to make a long vowel, with "coloring" (changed phonetics) of the e-grade into the bargain; the mystery element was seen by itself only in zero grade forms:
( = syllabic form of the mystery element)
Saussure treated only two of these elements, corresponding to our *h₂ and *h₃. Later it was noticed that the explanatory power of the theory, as well as its elegance, were enhanced if a third element were added, our *h₁, which has the same lengthening and syllabifying properties as the other two but has no effect on the color of adjacent vowels. Saussure offered no suggestion as to the phonetics of these elements; his term for them, "coefficients sonantiques", was not however a fudge, but merely the term in general use for glides, nasals, and liquids (i.e., the PIE resonants) as in roots like *bher-.
As mentioned above, in forms like *dwi-bhr-o- (etymon of Greek diphrós, above), the new "coefficients sonantiques" (unlike the six resonants) have no reflexes at all in any daughter language. Thus the compound *- "to 'fix thought', be devout, become rapt" forms a noun *- seen in Proto-Indo-Iranian *mazdha- whence Sanskrit medhá- /mēdha/ "sacrificial rite, holiness" (regular development as in sedur < *sazdur, above), Avestan mazda- "name (originally an epithet) of the greatest deity".
s flank a resonant. In the zero grade, unlike the case with roots of the *bher- type, the resonant is therefore always syllabic (being always between two consonants). An example would be *bhendh- "tie, bind":
This is all straightforward and such roots fit directly into the overall patterns. Less so are certain roots that seem sometimes to go like the *bher- type, and sometimes to be unlike anything else, with (for example) long syllabics in the zero grades while at times pointing to a two-vowel root structure. These roots are variously called "heavy bases", "dis(s)yllabic roots", and " roots" (the last being a term from grammar. It will be explained below).
The (A) forms occur when the root is followed by an affix
beginning with a vowel; the (B) forms when the affix begins with a consonant. As mentioned, the full-grade (A) forms look just like the *bher- type, but the zero grades always and only have reflexes of syllabic resonants, just like the *bhendh- type; and unlike any other type, there is a second root vowel (always and only *ə) following the second consonant:
On the term "". The term "" (that is) is literally "with an /i/". This refers to the fact that roots so designated, like jan- "be born", have an /i/ between the root and the suffix, as we've seen in Sanskrit jánitar-, jániman-, janitva (a gerund). Cf. such formations built to "" ("without an /i/") roots, such as han- "slay": hántar- "slayer", hanman- "a slaying", hantva (gerund). In Pāṇini's analysis, this /i/ is a linking vowel, not properly a part of either the root or the suffix. It is simply that some roots are in effect in the list consisting of the roots that (as we would put it) "take an -i-".
But historians have the advantage here: the peculiarities of alternation, the "presence of /i/", and the fact that the only vowel allowed in second place in a root happens to be *ə, are all neatly explained once *ǵenə- and the like were understood to be properly *ǵenH-. That is, the patterns of alternation, from the point of view of Indo-European, were simply those of *bhendh-, with the additional detail that *H, unlike obstruents (stops and *s) would become a syllable between two consonants, hence the *ǵenə- shape in the Type (B) formations, above.
Incidentally, redesigning the root as *ǵenH- has another consequence. Several of the Sanskrit forms cited above come from what look like o-grade root vowels in open syllables, but fail to lengthen to -ā- per Brugmann's law
. All becomes clear when it is understood that in such forms as *ǵonH- before a vowel, the *o is not in fact in an open syllable. And in turn that means that a form like jajāna "was born", which apparently does show the action of Brugmann's law, is actually a false witness: in the Sanskrit perfect tense, the whole class of seṭ roots, en masse, acquired the shape of the aniṭ 3sing. forms. (See Brugmann's law
for further discussion.)
Stray laryngeals can be found in isolated or seemingly isolated forms; here the three-way Greek reflexes of syllabic *h₁, *h₂, *h₃ are particularly helpful, as seen below. (Comments on the forms follow.)
Regarding Greek híeros, the pseudo-participle affix *-ro- is added directly to the verb root, so *- > *isero- > *ihero- > híeros (with regular throwback of the aspiration to the beginning of the word), and Sanskrit iṣirá-. There seems to be no question of the existence of a root *eysH- "vigorously move/cause to move". If the thing began with a laryngeal, and most scholars would agree that it did, it would have to be *h₁-, specifically; and that's a problem. A root of the shape *h₁eysh₁- is not possible. Indo-European had no roots of the type *mem-, *tet-, *dhredh-, i.e., with two copies of the same consonant. But Greek attests an earlier (and rather more widely attested) form of the same meaning, híaros. If we reconstruct *h₁eysh₂-, all of our problems are solved in one stroke. The explanation for the híeros/híaros business has long been discussed, without much result; laryngeal theory now provides the opportunity for an explanation which did not exist before, namely metathesis
of the two laryngeals. It is still only a guess, but it is a much simpler and more elegant guess than the guesses available before.
The syllabic * in *- "father" might not really be isolated. Certain evidence shows that the kinship affix seen in "mother, father" etc. might actually have been *-h₂ter- instead of *-ter-. The laryngeal syllabified after a consonant (thus Greek , Latin pater, Sanskrit pitár-; Greek thugátēr, Sanskrit duhitár- "daughter") but lengthened a preceding vowel (thus say Latin māter "mother", frāter "brother") — even when the "vowel" in question was a syllabic resonant, as in Sanskrit yātaras "husbands' wives" < *- < *-).
languages. While Proto-Uralic and PIE have not been demonstrated to be genetically related, some words reconstructed into Uralic 'proto-dialects' (such as Proto-Finno-Ugric, Proto-Finno-Permic etc.) have been identified as likely borrowings from very early Indo-European dialects, such as Hungarian
méz, Finnish
mesi 'honey' ← Proto-Finno-Ugric *mete-, and English mead, Greek methu 'wine', Slavic medъ and Sanskrit mádhu 'honey' etc.; and Finnish porsas, Mordvinic
purcos 'piglet' ← *porćas, and PIE *porḱ- that gives Latin porcus 'hog', Slavic porsę 'pig', OE fearh (> Engl. farrow 'young pig'), Lithuanian par̃šas 'piglet, castrated boar'. There are several criteria to date such borrowings, the most reliable ones coming from historical phonology. For example the Finno-Mordvin form *porćas (Permic
and Ugric
forms may be separate borrowings) presupposes a source for the word predating the depalatalisation of centum languages or predating the later development into the Baltic *š, which is reflected as Finn. h in borrowings.
Work particularly associated with research of the scholar Jorma Koivulehto has identified a number of additions to the list of Finnic loanwords from an Indo-European source or sources whose particular interest is the apparent correlation of PIE laryngeals with three post-alveolar phonemes (or their later reflexes) in the Finnic forms. If so, this would point to a great antiquity for the borrowings, since no attested Indo-European language neighbouring Uralic has consonants as reflexes of laryngeals. And it would bolster the idea that laryngeals were phonetically distinctly consonantal.
Three Uralic phonemes have been posited to reflect PIE laryngeals. In post-vocalic positions both the post-alveolar fricatives that ever existed in Uralic are represented: firstly a possibly velar one, theoretically reconstructed much as the PIE laryngeals (conventionally marked *x), in the very oldest borrowings and secondly a grooved one (*š as in shoe becoming modern Finnic h) in some younger ones. The velar plosive k is the third reflex and the only one found word-initially. In intervocalic position the reflex k is probably younger than either of the two former ones. The fact that Finno-Ugric may have plosive reflexes for PIE laryngeals is to be expected under well documented Finnic phonological behaviour and does not mean much for tracing the phonetic value of PIE laryngeals (cf. Finnish kansa 'people' ← PGmc *xansā 'company, troupe, party, crowd' (cf. German Hansa), Finnish kärsiä 'suffer, endure' ← PGmc *xarđia- 'endure' (cf. E. hard), Finnish pyrkiä ← PGmc. *wurk(i)ja- 'work, work for' etc).
The correspondences do not differentiate between , and . Thus
This list is not exhaustive, especially when one also considers a number of etymologies with laryngeal reflexes in Finno-Ugric languages other than Finnish. For most cases no other plausible etymology exists. While some single etymologies may be challenged, the case for this oldest stratum itself seems conclusive from the Uralic point of view, and corresponds well with all that is known about the dating of the other most ancient borrowings and about contacts with Indo-European populations. Yet acceptance for this evidence is far from unanimous among Indo-European linguists, some even regard the hypothesis controversial.
The following is a rundown of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European morphology.
[ʔ] and the other may have been the h sound [h] of English "hat".
Jens Elmegård Rasmussen
suggests a consonantal realization for *h₁ as a voiceless glottal fricative
, [h], with a syllabic allophone [ə], i.e. a mid central unrounded vowel. This is supported by the closeness of [ə] to [e] (with which it coalesces in Greek), its failure (unlike *h₂ and *h₃) to create an auxiliary vowel in Greek and Tocharian when it occurs between a semivowel and a consonant, and the typological likelihood of a [h] given the presence of aspirated consonants in PIE.
or epiglottal
fricative such as [ħ], [ʕ], [ʜ], or [ʢ]. Pharyngeal/epiglottal consonants (like the Arabic
letter ح (ħ) as in Muħammad) often cause a-coloring in the Semitic languages. Uvular fricatives however may also colour vowels, thus [χ] is also a noteworthy candidate.
Rasmussen suggests a consonantal realization for *h₂ as a voiceless velar fricative
[x], with a syllabic allophone [ɐ], i.e. a near-open central vowel.
, as in Arabic muʕallim = "teacher") perhaps plus labialization, although the assumption that it was velar [ɣʷ] is probably more common. (The reflexes in Uralic languages could be the same whether the original phonemes were velar or pharyngeal.)
However, since the defining effect of this phoneme is vowel-rounding rather than vowel-lowering, a pharyngeal value is unnecessary. Thus, a velar value of voiceless [xʷ] or voiced [ɣʷ] is also quite possible given the evidence. A voiced realisation also matches more neatly when seen in the context of Cowgill's law
and Grimm's law
in Germanic. Along this vein, Rasmussen has chosen a consonantal realization for *h₃ as a voiced labialized velar fricative [ɣʷ], with a syllabic allophone [ɵ], i.e. a close-mid central rounded vowel.
The same is shown by some IE-Semitic correspondences, whether these are due to prehistoric borrowing or to a common ancestor (see Nostratic theory):
In any event, if PIE is regarded as somehow in the same series as the plain velar stops as usually reconstructed, some may adduce that its existence is considerably better founded than the existence of the plain velar stops. However, we must also note that in the traditional account, there is an overabundance of marked velar stops versus plain ones . This suggests that indeed what has been labeled "palatal" is rather "plain" while "plain" is something else, such as a uvular plosive (nb. a 3-way contrast of pharyngeal plosives are typologically very unlikely). This then may add to the evidence in favor of being uvular χ, thus also solving the source of its vowel-colouring tendencies.
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three (or more), consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
(PIE). These sounds have disappeared in all present-day Indo-European languages, but some laryngeals are believed to have existed in Hittite
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
and other Anatolian languages
Anatolian languages
The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
. The laryngeals are so called because they were once hypothesized (by Müller and Cuny) to have had a pharyngeal
Pharyngeal consonant
A pharyngeal consonant is a type of consonant which is articulated with the root of the tongue against the pharynx.-Pharyngeal consonants in the IPA:Pharyngeal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet :...
, epiglottal
Epiglottal consonant
An epiglottal consonant is a consonant that is articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis. They are occasionally called aryepiglottal consonants.-Epiglottal consonants in the IPA:...
, or glottal
Glottal consonant
Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
place of articulation
Place of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location...
involving a constriction near the larynx
Larynx
The larynx , commonly called the voice box, is an organ in the neck of amphibians, reptiles and mammals involved in breathing, sound production, and protecting the trachea against food aspiration. It manipulates pitch and volume...
.
The evidence for their existence is mostly indirect, as will be shown below. But the theory serves as an elegant explanation for a number of properties of the Proto-Indo-European vowel system that, prior to the postulation of laryngeals, were unanalyzable, such as "independent" schwas (as in *pəter- 'father'); and the hypothesis that PIE schwa *ə was actually a consonant, not a vowel, provided an elegant explanation for some apparent exceptions to Brugmann's law
Brugmann's law
Brugmann's law, named for Karl Brugmann, states that Proto-Indo-European in non-final syllables became *ā in open syllables in Indo-Iranian. Everywhere else the outcome was *ǎ, the same as the reflexes of PIE *e and *a...
in Indic.
The original phonetic values of the laryngeal sounds remain controversial (see below).
Discovery
The beginnings of the theory were proposed by Ferdinand de SaussureFerdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
in 1879, in an article chiefly devoted to something else altogether (demonstrating that *a and *o were separate phonemes in PIE). In the course of his analysis, Saussure proposed that what had been reconstructed as *ā and *ō, alternating with *ǝ, were actually an ordinary type of PIE ablaut, i.e., between e-grade and zero grade (further explanations below), but followed by a previously unidentified element which accounted for both (1) the changed vowel color and (2) the lengthening; that is, rather than *ā, ō and *ǝ, as traditionally, Saussure proposed something like *eA ~ *A and *eO and *O. These consonants Saussure called simply coefficients sonantiques, the terms for what now are in English more usually called the PIE resonants, i.e., the six elements which are either consonants or vowels (syllabic) depending on the sounds they're adjacent to: *y w r l m n.
These views were accepted by a few scholars, in particular Hermann Möller
Hermann Möller
Hermann Möller was a Danish linguist noted for his work in favor of a genetic relationship between the Indo-European and Semitic language families and his version of the laryngeal theory....
, who added important elements to the theory.
Corroboration by Hittite texts
Saussure's observations, however, did not achieve any general currency until after HittiteHittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
was discovered and deciphered in the early 20th century. Hittite had a sound or sounds written with symbols from the Akkadian
Akkadian language
Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...
syllabary
Syllabary
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...
conventionally transcribed as , as in "I put, am putting". Various more or less obviously unsatisfactory proposals were made to connect these (or this) to the PIE consonant system as then reconstructed. It remained for Jerzy Kuryłowicz (Études indoeuropéennes I, 1935) to propose that these sounds lined up with Saussure's conjectures and, as will be shown below, explained some other matters as well. Since then, the laryngeal theory (in one or another form) has been accepted by most Indo-Europeanists.
The lateness of the discovery of these sounds by Indo-Europeanists is largely due to the fact that Hittite
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
and the other Anatolian languages
Anatolian languages
The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
are the only Indo-European languages where at least some of them are attested directly and consistently as consonantal sounds. Otherwise, their presence is to be seen mostly through the effects they have on neighboring sounds, and on patterns of alternation that they participate in; when a laryngeal is attested directly, it is usually as a vowel (as in the Greek examples below).
Most Indo-Europeanists accept at least some version of laryngeal theory because their existence simplifies some otherwise hard-to-explain sound changes and patterns of alternation that appear in the Indo-European languages, and solves some minor mysteries, such as why verb roots containing only a consonant and a vowel have only long vowels e.g. *dō- "give"; re-reconstructing *deh3- instead not only accounts for the patterns of alternation more economically than before, but brings the segmental structure of these roots into line with the basic IE pattern, consonant - vowel - consonant.
Varieties of laryngeals
There are many variations of the laryngeal theory. Some scholars, such as Oswald SzemerényiOswald Szemerényi
Oswald John Louis Szemerényi was a Hungarian Indo-Europeanist with strong interests in comparative linguistics in general....
, reconstruct just one. Some follow Jaan Puhvel
Jaan Puhvel
Jaan Puhvel is an Estonian-American Indo-Europeanist. As a student of Georges Dumezil, he also specializes in comparative mythology....
's reconstruction of eight or more (in his contribution to Evidence for Laryngeals, ed. Werner Winter). Most scholars work with a basic three:
- *h₁, the "neutral" laryngeal
- *h₂, the "a-colouring" laryngeal
- *h₃, the "o-colouring" laryngeal
Many scholars, however, either insist on or allow for a fourth consonant, *h₄, which differs from *h₂ only in not being reflected as Anatolian . Accordingly, except when discussing Hittite evidence, the theoretical existence of an *h₄ contributes little. Another such theory, but much less generally accepted, is Winfred P. Lehmann
Winfred P. Lehmann
Winfred P. Lehmann was an American linguist noted for his work in historical linguistics, particularly Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic, as well as for pioneering work in machine translation.-Biography:After receiving B.A. in Humanities at the Northwestern College in Watertown in 1936, he...
's view, on the basis of inconsistent reflexes in Hittite, that *h₁ was actually two separate sounds. (He assumed that one was a glottal stop and the other a glottal fricative.)
Some direct evidence for laryngeal consonants comes from Anatolian:
PIE *a is a fairly rare sound, and in an uncommonly large number of good etymologies it is word-initial. Thus PIE (traditional) *anti "in front of and facing" > Greek antí "against"; Latin ante "in front of, before"; (Sanskrit ánti "near; in the presence of"). But in Hittite there is a noun "front, face", with various derivatives (ḫantezzi "first", and so on), pointing to a PIE root-noun *h₂ent- "face" (of which *h₂enti would be the locative singular). (It does not necessarily follow that all reconstructed forms with initial *a should automatically be rewritten *h₂/e.)
Similarly, the traditional PIE reconstruction for 'sheep' is *owi- (a y-stem, not an i-stem) whence Sanskrit ávi-, Latin ovis, Greek óïs. But Luwian
Luwian language
Luwian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Luwian is closely related to Hittite, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria...
has ḫawi-, indicating instead a reconstruction *h₃ewi-.
But if laryngeals as consonants were first spotted in Hittite only in 1935, what was the basis for Saussure's conjectures some 55 years earlier? They sprang from a reanalysis of how the patterns of vowel alternation in Proto-Indo-European roots of different structure aligned with one another.
Explanation of ablaut and other vowel changes
A feature of Proto-Indo-European morpheme structure was a system of vowel alternations termed ablautIndo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
("alternate sound") by early German scholars and still generally known by that term (except in French, where the term apophonie is preferred). Several different such patterns have been discerned, but the commonest one, by a wide margin, is e/o/zero alternation found in a majority of roots, in many verb and noun stems, and even in some affixes (the genitive singular ending, for example, is attested as *-es, *-os, and *-s). The different states are called ablaut grades; e-grade and o-grade are together "full grades", and the total absence of any vowel is "zero grade".
Root *sed
Thus the root *sed- "to sit (down)" (roots are traditionally cited in the e-grade, if they have one) has three different shapes: *sed-, *sod-, and *sd-. This kind of patterning is found throughout the PIE root inventory and is transparent:- "sed"-: (vedic), **sed-: in Latin sedeō "am sitting", Old English sittan "to sit" < *set-ja- (with umlautGermanic umlautIn linguistics, umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages...
) < *sed-; Slavic sěděti 'to sit'; Greek hédrā "seat, chair" < *sed- (Greek systemically turns word-initial prevocalic s to h, i.e. rough breathingSpiritus asperIn the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing , is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an sound before a vowel, diphthong, or rho. It remained in the polytonic orthography even after the Hellenistic period, when the sound disappeared from the Greek language...
).
-
- sod-: in Latin solium "throne" (Latin l sporadically replaces d between vowels, said by Roman grammarians to be a Sabine trait) = Old Irish suideⁿ /suðʲe/ "a sitting" (all details regular from PIE *sod-yo-m); Gothic satjan = Old English settan "to set" (causative) < *sat-ja- (umlaut again) < PIE *sod-eye-. PIE *se-sod-e "sat" (perfect) > Sanskrit sa-sād-a per Brugmann's lawBrugmann's lawBrugmann's law, named for Karl Brugmann, states that Proto-Indo-European in non-final syllables became *ā in open syllables in Indo-Iranian. Everywhere else the outcome was *ǎ, the same as the reflexes of PIE *e and *a...
.
- sod-: in Latin solium "throne" (Latin l sporadically replaces d between vowels, said by Roman grammarians to be a Sabine trait) = Old Irish suideⁿ /suðʲe/ "a sitting" (all details regular from PIE *sod-yo-m); Gothic satjan = Old English settan "to set" (causative) < *sat-ja- (umlaut again) < PIE *sod-eye-. PIE *se-sod-e "sat" (perfect) > Sanskrit sa-sād-a per Brugmann's law
-
- sd-: in compounds, as *ni- "down" + *sd- = *nisdos "nest": English nest < Proto-Germanic *nistaz, Latin nīdus < *nizdos (all regular developments); Slavic gnězdo < *g-ně-sd-os. The 3pl (third person plural) of the perfect would have been *se-sd-ṛ whence Indo-Iranian *sazdṛ, which gives (by regular developments) Sanskrit sedur /sēdur/.
Now, in addition to the commonplace roots of consonant + vowel + consonant structure there are also well-attested roots like *dhē- "put, place" and *dō- "give" (mentioned above): these end in a vowel, which is always long in the categories where roots like *sed- have full grades; and in those forms where zero grade would be expected, if before an affix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
beginning with a consonant, we find a short vowel, reconstructed as *ə, or schwa
Schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
(more formally, schwa primum indogermanicum). An "independent schwa", like the one in PIE *pǝter- "father", can be identified by the distinctive cross-language correspondences of this vowel that are different from the other five short vowels. (Before an affix beginning with a vowel, there is no trace of a vowel in the root, as shown below.)
Whatever caused a short vowel to disappear entirely in roots like *sed-/*sod-/*sd-, it was a reasonable inference that a long vowel under the same conditions would not quite disappear, but would leave a sort of residue. This residue is reflected as i in Indic while dropping in Iranian; it gives variously e, a, o in Greek; it mostly falls together with the reflexes of PIE *a in the other languages (always bearing in mind that short vowels in non-initial syllables undergo various developments in Italic, Celtic, and Germanic):
Roots *dō and *stā
-
- dō- "give": in Latin dōnum "gift" = Old Irish dán /daːn/ and Sanskrit dâna- (â = ā with tonic accent); Greek dí-dō-mi (reduplicated present) "I give" = Sanskrit dádāmi; Slavic damъ 'I give'. But in the participles, Greek dotós "given" = Sanskrit ditá-, Latin datus all < *də-tó-.
-
- stā- "stand": in Greek hístēmi (reduplicated present, regular from *si-stā-), Sanskrit a-sthā-t aorist "stood", Latin testāmentum "testimony" < *ter-stā- < *tri-stā- ("third party" or the like), Slavic sta-ti 'to stand'. But Sanskrit sthitá-"stood", Greek stasís "a standing", Latin supine infinitive statum "to stand".
Conventional wisdom lined up roots of the *sed- and *dō- types as follows:
| Full Grades | Weak Grades | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| sed-, sod- | sd- | "sit" |
| dō- | də-, d- | "give" |
But there are other patterns of "normal" roots, such as those ending with one of the six resonants (*y w r l m n), a class of sounds whose peculiarity in Proto-Indo-European is that they are both syllabic (vowels, in effect) and consonants, depending on what sounds are adjacent:
Root *bher-/bhor-/bhṛ- ~ bhr
-
- bher-: in Latin ferō = Greek phérō, Avestan barā, Sanskrit bharāmi, Old Irish biur, Old Norse ber, Old English bere all "I carry"; Slavic berǫ 'I take'; Latin ferculum "bier, litter" < *bher-tlo- "implement for carrying".
- bhor-: in Gothic and Scandinavian barn "child" (= English dial. bairn), Greek phoréō "I wear [clothes]" (frequentative formation, *"carry around"); Sanskrit bhâra- "burden" (*bhor-o- via Brugmann's lawBrugmann's lawBrugmann's law, named for Karl Brugmann, states that Proto-Indo-European in non-final syllables became *ā in open syllables in Indo-Iranian. Everywhere else the outcome was *ǎ, the same as the reflexes of PIE *e and *a...
); Slavic vyborъ 'choice'.
- - before consonants: Sanskrit - "a carrying"; Gothic gabaurþs /gaˈbɔrθs/, Old English ġebyrd /jəˈbyɹd/, Old High German geburt all "birth" < *gaburdi- < *; Slavic bьrati 'to take'.
- bhr- before vowels: Ved bibhrati 3pl. "they carry" < *; Greek di-phrós "chariot footboard big enough for two men" < *dwi-bhr-o-.
Saussure's insight was to align the long-vowel roots like *dō-, *stā- with roots like *bher-, rather than with roots of the *sed- sort. That is, treating "schwa" not as a residue of a long vowel but, like the *r of *bher-/*bhor-/*bhṛ-, an element that was present in the root in all grades, but which in full grade forms coalesced with an ordinary e/o root vowel to make a long vowel, with "coloring" (changed phonetics) of the e-grade into the bargain; the mystery element was seen by itself only in zero grade forms:
| Full Grades | Zero Grade | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| bher-, bhor- | / bhr- | "carry" |
| deX, doX- | / dX- | "give" |
Saussure treated only two of these elements, corresponding to our *h₂ and *h₃. Later it was noticed that the explanatory power of the theory, as well as its elegance, were enhanced if a third element were added, our *h₁, which has the same lengthening and syllabifying properties as the other two but has no effect on the color of adjacent vowels. Saussure offered no suggestion as to the phonetics of these elements; his term for them, "coefficients sonantiques", was not however a fudge, but merely the term in general use for glides, nasals, and liquids (i.e., the PIE resonants) as in roots like *bher-.
As mentioned above, in forms like *dwi-bhr-o- (etymon of Greek diphrós, above), the new "coefficients sonantiques" (unlike the six resonants) have no reflexes at all in any daughter language. Thus the compound *- "to 'fix thought', be devout, become rapt" forms a noun *- seen in Proto-Indo-Iranian *mazdha- whence Sanskrit medhá- /mēdha/ "sacrificial rite, holiness" (regular development as in sedur < *sazdur, above), Avestan mazda- "name (originally an epithet) of the greatest deity".
Root *bhendh'
There is another kind of unproblematic root, in which obstruentObstruent
An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract, such as [k], [d͡ʒ] and [f]. In phonetics, articulation may be divided into two large classes: obstruents and sonorants....
s flank a resonant. In the zero grade, unlike the case with roots of the *bher- type, the resonant is therefore always syllabic (being always between two consonants). An example would be *bhendh- "tie, bind":
-
- bhendh-: in Germanic forms like Old English bindan "to tie, bind", Gothic bindan; Lithuanian beñdras "chum", Greek peĩsma "rope, cable" /pêːsma/ < *phenth-sma < *bhendh-smṇ.
- bhondh-: in Sanskrit bandhá- "bond, fastening" (*bhondh-o-; Grassmann's lawGrassmann's LawGrassmann's law, named after its discoverer Hermann Grassmann, is a dissimilatory phonological process in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit which states that if an aspirated consonant is followed by another aspirated consonant in the next syllable, the first one loses the aspiration...
) = Old Icelandic bant, OE bænd; Old English bænd, Gothic band "he tied" < *(bhe)bhondh-e.
- -: in Sanskrit baddhá- < *- (Bartholomae's lawBartholomae's lawBartholomae's law is an early Indo-European sound law affecting the Indo-Iranian family. It states that in a cluster of two or more obstruents , any one of which is a voiced aspirated stop anywhere in the sequence, the whole cluster becomes voiced and aspirated...
), Old English gebunden, Gothic bundan; German Bund "league". (English bind and bound show the effects of secondary (Middle English) vowel lengthening; the original length is preserved in bundle.)
This is all straightforward and such roots fit directly into the overall patterns. Less so are certain roots that seem sometimes to go like the *bher- type, and sometimes to be unlike anything else, with (for example) long syllabics in the zero grades while at times pointing to a two-vowel root structure. These roots are variously called "heavy bases", "dis(s)yllabic roots", and " roots" (the last being a term from grammar. It will be explained below).
Root *ǵen, *ǵon, *ǵṇn-/*ǵṇ̄
For example, the root "be born, arise" is given in the usual etymological dictionaries as follows:- (A) -
- (B) -
The (A) forms occur when the root is followed by an affix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
beginning with a vowel; the (B) forms when the affix begins with a consonant. As mentioned, the full-grade (A) forms look just like the *bher- type, but the zero grades always and only have reflexes of syllabic resonants, just like the *bhendh- type; and unlike any other type, there is a second root vowel (always and only *ə) following the second consonant:
- ǵen(ə)-
- (A) PIE *ǵenos- neut s-stem "race, clan" > Greek (Homeric) génos, -eos, Sanskrit jánas-, Avestan zanō, Latin genus, -eris.
- (B) Greek gené-tēs "begetter, father"; géne-sis < *ǵenə-ti- "origin"; Sanskrit jáni-man- "birth, lineage", jáni-tar- "progenitor, father", Latin genitus "begotten" < genatos.
- ǵon(e)-
- (A) Sanskrit janayati "beget" = Old English cennan /kennan/ < *ǵon-eye- (causative); Sanskrit jána- "race" (o-grade o-stem) = Greek gónos, -ou "offspring".
- (B) Sanskrit jajāna 3sg. "was born" < *ǵe-ǵon-e.
- ǵṇn-/*ǵṇ̄-
- (A) Gothic kuni "clan, family" = OE cynn /künn/, English kin; Rigvedic jajanúr 3pl.perfect < *- (a relic; the regular Sanskrit form in paradigms like this is jajñur, a remodeling).
- (B) Sanskrit jātá- "born" = Latin nātus (Old Latin gnātus, and cf. forms like cognātus "related by birth", Greek kasí-gnētos "brother"); Greek "belonging to the race". (The ē in these Greek forms can be shown to be original, not Attic-Ionic developments from Proto-Greek *ā.)
On the term "". The term "" (that is) is literally "with an /i/". This refers to the fact that roots so designated, like jan- "be born", have an /i/ between the root and the suffix, as we've seen in Sanskrit jánitar-, jániman-, janitva (a gerund). Cf. such formations built to "" ("without an /i/") roots, such as han- "slay": hántar- "slayer", hanman- "a slaying", hantva (gerund). In Pāṇini's analysis, this /i/ is a linking vowel, not properly a part of either the root or the suffix. It is simply that some roots are in effect in the list consisting of the roots that (as we would put it) "take an -i-".
But historians have the advantage here: the peculiarities of alternation, the "presence of /i/", and the fact that the only vowel allowed in second place in a root happens to be *ə, are all neatly explained once *ǵenə- and the like were understood to be properly *ǵenH-. That is, the patterns of alternation, from the point of view of Indo-European, were simply those of *bhendh-, with the additional detail that *H, unlike obstruents (stops and *s) would become a syllable between two consonants, hence the *ǵenə- shape in the Type (B) formations, above.
Discussion
The startling reflexes of these roots in zero grade before a consonant (in this case, Sanskrit ā, Greek nē, Latin nā, Lithuanian ìn) is explained by the lengthening of the (originally perfectly ordinary) syllabic resonant before the lost laryngeal, while the same laryngeal protects the syllabic status of the preceding resonant even before an affix beginning with a vowel: the archaic Vedic form jajanur cited above is structurally quite the same (*) as a form like * "they saw" < *.Incidentally, redesigning the root as *ǵenH- has another consequence. Several of the Sanskrit forms cited above come from what look like o-grade root vowels in open syllables, but fail to lengthen to -ā- per Brugmann's law
Brugmann's law
Brugmann's law, named for Karl Brugmann, states that Proto-Indo-European in non-final syllables became *ā in open syllables in Indo-Iranian. Everywhere else the outcome was *ǎ, the same as the reflexes of PIE *e and *a...
. All becomes clear when it is understood that in such forms as *ǵonH- before a vowel, the *o is not in fact in an open syllable. And in turn that means that a form like jajāna "was born", which apparently does show the action of Brugmann's law, is actually a false witness: in the Sanskrit perfect tense, the whole class of seṭ roots, en masse, acquired the shape of the aniṭ 3sing. forms. (See Brugmann's law
Brugmann's law
Brugmann's law, named for Karl Brugmann, states that Proto-Indo-European in non-final syllables became *ā in open syllables in Indo-Iranian. Everywhere else the outcome was *ǎ, the same as the reflexes of PIE *e and *a...
for further discussion.)
Other roots
There are also roots ending in a stop followed by a laryngeal, as *- "spread, flatten", from which Sanskrit - "broad" masc. (= Avestan pərəθu-), - fem., Greek platús (zero grade); Skt. prathimán- "wideness" (full grade), Greek "flat stone". The laryngeal explains (a) the change of *t to *th in Proto-Indo-Iranian, (b) the correspondence between Greek -a-, Sanskrit -i- and no vowel in Avestan (Avestan pərəθwī "broad" fem. in two syllables vs Sanskrit - in three).-
- Caution has to be used in interpreting data from Indic in particular. Sanskrit remained in use as a poetic, scientific, and classical language for many centuries, and the multitude of inherited patterns of alternation of obscure motivation (such as the division into and roots) provided models for coining new forms on the "wrong" patterns. There are many forms like - "thirsty" and tániman- "slenderness", that is, formations to unequivocally roots; and conversely aniṭ forms like píparti "fills", - "filled", to securely roots (cf. the "real" past participle, -). Sanskrit preserves the effects of laryngeal phonology with wonderful clarity, but looks upon the historical linguist with a threatening eye: for even in Vedic Sanskrit, the evidence has to be weighed carefully with due concern for the antiquity of the forms and the overall texture of the data. (It is no help that Proto-Indo-European itself had roots which varied somewhat in their makeup, as *ǵhew- and *ǵhewd-, both "pour"; and some of these "root extensions" as they're called, for want of any more analytical term, are, unluckily, laryngeals.)
Stray laryngeals can be found in isolated or seemingly isolated forms; here the three-way Greek reflexes of syllabic *h₁, *h₂, *h₃ are particularly helpful, as seen below. (Comments on the forms follow.)
- in Greek ánemos "wind" (cf. Latin animus "breath, spirit; mind", Vedic aniti "breathes") < *anə- "breathe; blow" (now *h₂enh₁-). Perhaps also Greek híeros "mighty, super-human; divine; holy", cf. Sanskrit - "vigorous, energetic".
- in Greek "father" = Sanskrit pitár-, Old English fæder, Gothic fadar, Latin pater. Also * "big" neut. > Greek méga, Sanskrit máha.
- in Greek árotron "plow" = Welsh aradr, Old Norse arðr, Lithuanian árklas.
Comments
The Greek forms ánemos and árotron are particularly valuable because the verb roots in question are extinct in Greek as verbs. This means that there is no possibility of some sort of analogical interference, as for example happened in the case of Latin arātrum "plow", whose shape has been distorted by the verb arāre "to plow" (the exact cognate to the Greek form would have been *aretrum). It used to be standard to explain the root vowels of Greek thetós, statós, dotós "put, stood, given" as analogical. Most scholars nowadays probably take them as original, but in the case of "wind" and "plow", the argument can't even come up.Regarding Greek híeros, the pseudo-participle affix *-ro- is added directly to the verb root, so *- > *isero- > *ihero- > híeros (with regular throwback of the aspiration to the beginning of the word), and Sanskrit iṣirá-. There seems to be no question of the existence of a root *eysH- "vigorously move/cause to move". If the thing began with a laryngeal, and most scholars would agree that it did, it would have to be *h₁-, specifically; and that's a problem. A root of the shape *h₁eysh₁- is not possible. Indo-European had no roots of the type *mem-, *tet-, *dhredh-, i.e., with two copies of the same consonant. But Greek attests an earlier (and rather more widely attested) form of the same meaning, híaros. If we reconstruct *h₁eysh₂-, all of our problems are solved in one stroke. The explanation for the híeros/híaros business has long been discussed, without much result; laryngeal theory now provides the opportunity for an explanation which did not exist before, namely metathesis
Metathesis (linguistics)
Metathesis is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence. Most commonly it refers to the switching of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:...
of the two laryngeals. It is still only a guess, but it is a much simpler and more elegant guess than the guesses available before.
The syllabic * in *- "father" might not really be isolated. Certain evidence shows that the kinship affix seen in "mother, father" etc. might actually have been *-h₂ter- instead of *-ter-. The laryngeal syllabified after a consonant (thus Greek , Latin pater, Sanskrit pitár-; Greek thugátēr, Sanskrit duhitár- "daughter") but lengthened a preceding vowel (thus say Latin māter "mother", frāter "brother") — even when the "vowel" in question was a syllabic resonant, as in Sanskrit yātaras "husbands' wives" < *- < *-).
Evidence from Uralic
Further evidence of the laryngeals has been found in UralicUralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
languages. While Proto-Uralic and PIE have not been demonstrated to be genetically related, some words reconstructed into Uralic 'proto-dialects' (such as Proto-Finno-Ugric, Proto-Finno-Permic etc.) have been identified as likely borrowings from very early Indo-European dialects, such as Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
méz, Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
mesi 'honey' ← Proto-Finno-Ugric *mete-, and English mead, Greek methu 'wine', Slavic medъ and Sanskrit mádhu 'honey' etc.; and Finnish porsas, Mordvinic
Mordvinic languages
The Mordvinic languages, alternatively Mordvin languages, or Mordvinian languages, are a subgroup of the Uralic languages, comprising the closely related Erzya language and Moksha language.Previously considered a single "Mordvin language",...
purcos 'piglet' ← *porćas, and PIE *porḱ- that gives Latin porcus 'hog', Slavic porsę 'pig', OE fearh (> Engl. farrow 'young pig'), Lithuanian par̃šas 'piglet, castrated boar'. There are several criteria to date such borrowings, the most reliable ones coming from historical phonology. For example the Finno-Mordvin form *porćas (Permic
Permic languages
Permic languages are a branch of the Uralic language family. They are spoken in the foothills of the Ural Mountains of Russia.* Komi** Komi-Permyak** Komi-Yodzyak ** Komi-Zyryan...
and Ugric
Ugric languages
Ugric or Ugrian languages are a branch of the Uralic language family. The term derives from Yugra, a region in north-central Asia.They include three languages: Hungarian , Khanty , and Mansi language...
forms may be separate borrowings) presupposes a source for the word predating the depalatalisation of centum languages or predating the later development into the Baltic *š, which is reflected as Finn. h in borrowings.
Work particularly associated with research of the scholar Jorma Koivulehto has identified a number of additions to the list of Finnic loanwords from an Indo-European source or sources whose particular interest is the apparent correlation of PIE laryngeals with three post-alveolar phonemes (or their later reflexes) in the Finnic forms. If so, this would point to a great antiquity for the borrowings, since no attested Indo-European language neighbouring Uralic has consonants as reflexes of laryngeals. And it would bolster the idea that laryngeals were phonetically distinctly consonantal.
Three Uralic phonemes have been posited to reflect PIE laryngeals. In post-vocalic positions both the post-alveolar fricatives that ever existed in Uralic are represented: firstly a possibly velar one, theoretically reconstructed much as the PIE laryngeals (conventionally marked *x), in the very oldest borrowings and secondly a grooved one (*š as in shoe becoming modern Finnic h) in some younger ones. The velar plosive k is the third reflex and the only one found word-initially. In intervocalic position the reflex k is probably younger than either of the two former ones. The fact that Finno-Ugric may have plosive reflexes for PIE laryngeals is to be expected under well documented Finnic phonological behaviour and does not mean much for tracing the phonetic value of PIE laryngeals (cf. Finnish kansa 'people' ← PGmc *xansā 'company, troupe, party, crowd' (cf. German Hansa), Finnish kärsiä 'suffer, endure' ← PGmc *xarđia- 'endure' (cf. E. hard), Finnish pyrkiä ← PGmc. *wurk(i)ja- 'work, work for' etc).
The correspondences do not differentiate between , and . Thus
- PIE laryngeals correspond to the PU laryngeal *x in wordstems like:
- Finnish nai-/naa- 'woman' ← PU *näxi-/*naxi- <= PIE *[] = */-/ > Sanskrit gnā́ 'goddess', OIr. mná (gen. of ben), ~ Greek gunē 'woman' (cognate to Engl. queen)
- Finnish sou-ta- ~ SamicSami languagesSami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...
*sukë- ' to row' ← PU *suxe- < PIE *sewh- - Finnish tuo- 'bring' ~ Samic *tuokë- ~ SamoyedSamoyedic languagesThe Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 30,000 speakers altogether....
tāś 'give' ← PU *toxe- <= PIE *[] = *// > Greek didōmi, Lat. dō-, Old Lith. dúomi 'give', Hittite dā 'take'
- Note the consonantal reflex /k/ in Samic.
- PIE laryngeals correspond to Pre-Finnic fricative *š in wordstems like:
- Finnish rohto 'medical plant, green herb' ← PreFi *rošto <= PreG *groH-tu- > Gmc. *grōþu 'green growth' > Swedish grodd 'germ (shoot)'
- Old Finnish inhi-(m-inen) 'human being' ← PreFi *inše- 'descendant' <= PIE }(i)e/o- > Sanskrit jā́- 'born, offspring, descendant', Gmc. *kunja- 'generation, lineage, kin'
- PIE laryngeals correspond to Pre-Finnic *k in wordstems like:
- Finnish kesä 'summer' ← PFU *kesä <= PIE } > Balto-Slavic *eseni- 'autumn', Gothic asans 'summer'
- Finnish kaski 'burnt-over clearing' ← PreFi *kaske / *kaśke <= PIE/PreG *[] = *// > Gmc. *askōn 'ashes'
- Finnish koke- 'to perceive, sense' ← PreFi *koke- <= PIE *[] = *// > Greek opsomai 'look, observe' (cognate to Lat. oculus 'eye')
- Finnish kulke- 'to go, walk, wander' ~ Hungarian halad- 'to go, walk, proceed' < PFU *kulke- <= PIE *kʷelH-e/o- > Greek pelomai '(originally) to be moving', Sanskrit cárati 'goes, walks, wanders (about)', cognate Lat. colere 'to till, cultivate, inhabit'
- Finnish teke- 'do, make' ~ Hungarian tëv-, të-, tesz- 'to do, make, put, place' ← PFU *teke- <= PIE > Greek títhēmi, Sanskrit dádhāti 'put, place', but 'do, make' in the western IE languages, e.g. the Germanic forms do, German tun, etc., and Latin faciō (though OE dón and into Early Modern English still sometimes means "put", and still does in Dutch and colloquial German).
This list is not exhaustive, especially when one also considers a number of etymologies with laryngeal reflexes in Finno-Ugric languages other than Finnish. For most cases no other plausible etymology exists. While some single etymologies may be challenged, the case for this oldest stratum itself seems conclusive from the Uralic point of view, and corresponds well with all that is known about the dating of the other most ancient borrowings and about contacts with Indo-European populations. Yet acceptance for this evidence is far from unanimous among Indo-European linguists, some even regard the hypothesis controversial.
Laryngeals in morphology
Like any other consonant, Laryngeals feature in the endings of verbs and nouns and in derivational morphology, the only difference being the greater difficulty of telling what's going on. Indo-Iranian, for example, can retain forms that pretty clearly reflect a laryngeal, but there is no way of knowing which one.The following is a rundown of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European morphology.
-
- h₁ is seen in the instrumental ending (probably originally indifferent to number, like English expressions of the type by hand and on foot). In Sanskrit, feminine i- and u-stems have instrumentals in -ī, -ū, respectively. In the Rigveda, there are a few old a-stems (PIE o-stems) with an instrumental in -ā; but even in that oldest text the usual ending is -enā, from the n-stems.
-
- Greek has some adverbs in -ē, but more important are the Mycenaean forms like e-re-pa-te "with ivory" (i.e. elephantē? -ě?)
-
- The marker of the neuter dual was *-iH, as in Sanskrit bharatī "two carrying ones (neut.)", nāmanī "two names", yuge "two yokes" (< yuga-i? *yuga-ī?). Greek to the rescue: the Homeric form ósse "the (two) eyes" is manifestly from *h₃ekʷ-ih₁ (formerly *okʷ-ī) via fully regular sound laws (intermediately *okʷye).
-
-
- -eh₁- derives stative verb senses from eventive roots: PIE *sed- "sit (down)": *sed-eh₁- "be in a sitting position" (> Proto-Italic *sed-ē-ye-mos "we are sitting" > Latin sedēmus). It is clearly attested in Celtic, Italic, Germanic (the Class IV weak verbs), and Baltic/Slavic, with some traces in Indo-Iranian (In Avestan the affix seems to form past-habitual stems).
-
-
- It seems likely, though it is less certain, that this same *-h₁ underlies the nominative-accusative dual in o-stems: Sanskrit vṛkā, Greek lúkō "two wolves". (The alternative ending -āu in Sanskrit cuts a small figure in the Rigveda, but eventually becomes the standard form of the o-stem dual.)
-
-
- -h₁s- derives desiderative stems as in Sanskrit jighāṃsati "desires to slay" < *gʷhi-gʷhṇ-h₁s-e-ti- (root *gʷhen-, Sanskrit han- "slay"). This is the source of Greek future tense formations and (with the addition of a thematic suffix *-ye/o-) the Indo-Iranian one as well: bhariṣyati "will carry" < *bher-ḥ₁s-ye-ti.
-
-
-
- -yeh₁-/*-ih₁- is the optative suffix for root verb inflections, e.g. Latin (old) siet "may he be", sīmus "may we be", Sanskrit syāt "may he be", and so on.
-
-
- h₂ is seen as the marker of the neuter plural: *-ḥ₂ in the consonant stems, *-eh₂ in the vowel stems. Much leveling and remodeling is seen in the daughter languages that preserve any ending at all, thus Latin has generalized *-ā throughout the noun system (later regularly shortened to -a), Greek generalized -ǎ < *-ḥ₂.
-
- The categories "masculine/feminine" plainly did not exist in the most original form of Proto-Indo-European, and there are very few noun types which are formally different in the two genders. The formal differences are mostly to be seen in adjectives (and not all of them) and pronouns. Interestingly, both types of derived feminine stems feature *h₂: a type that is patently derived from the o-stem nominals; and an ablauting type showing alternations between *-yeh₂- and *-ih₂-. Both are peculiar in having no actual marker for the nominative singular, and at least as far as the *-eh₂- type, two things seem clear: it is based on the o-stems, and the nom.sg. is probably in origin a neuter plural. (An archaic trait of Indo-European morpho-syntax is that plural neuter nouns construe with singular verbs, and quite possibly *yugeh₂ was not so much "yokes" in our sense, but "yokage; a harnessing-up".) Once that much is thought of, however, it is not easy to pin down the details of the "ā-stems" in the Indo-European languages outside of Anatolia, and such an analysis sheds no light at all on the *-yeh₂-/*-ih₂- stems, which (like the *eh₂-stems) form feminine adjective stems and derived nouns (e.g. Sanskrit devī- "goddess" from deva- "god") but unlike the "ā-stems" have no foundation in any neuter category.
-
-
- -eh₂- seems to have formed factitive verbs, as in *new-eh₂- "to renew, make new again", as seen in Latin novāre, Greek neáō and Hittite ne-wa-aḫ-ḫa-an-t- (participle) all "renew" but all three with the pregnant sense of "plow anew; return fallow land to cultivation".
-
-
-
- -h₂- marked the 1st person singular, with a somewhat confusing distribution: in the thematic active (the familiar -ō ending of Greek and Latin, and Indo-Iranian -ā(mi)), and also in the perfect tense (not really a tense in PIE): *-h₂e as in Greek oîda "I know" < *woyd-h₂e. It is the basis of the Hittite ending -ḫḫi, as in da-aḫ-ḫi "I take" < *-ḫa-i (original *-ḫa embellished with the primary tense marker with subsequent smoothing of the diphthong).
-
-
- -eh₃ may be tentatively identified in a "directive case". No such case is found in Indo-European noun paradigms, but such a construct accounts for a curious collection of Hittite forms like ne-pi-ša "(in)to the sky", ták-na-a "to, into the ground", a-ru-na "to the sea". These are sometimes explained as o-stem datives in -a < *-ōy, an ending clearly attested in Greek and Indo-Iranian, among others, but there are serious problems with such a view, and the forms are highly coherent, functionally. And there are also appropriate adverbs in Greek and Latin (elements lost in productive paradigms sometimes survive in stray forms, like the old instrumental case of the definite article in English expressions like the more the merrier): Greek ánō "upwards, kátō "downwards", Latin quō "whither?", eō "to that place"; and perhaps even the Indic preposition/preverb â "to(ward)" which has no satisfactory competing etymology. (These forms must be distinguished from the similar-looking ones formed to the ablative in *-ōd and with a distinctive "fromness" sense: Greek ópō "whence, from where".)
Pronunciation
Considerable debate still surrounds the pronunciation of the laryngeals and various arguments have been given to pinpoint their exact place of articulation. Firstly the effect these sounds have had on adjacent phonemes is well documented. The evidence from Hittite and Uralic is sufficient to conclude that these sounds were "guttural" or pronounced rather back in the buccal cavity. The same evidence is also consistent with the assumption that they were fricative sounds (as opposed to approximants or stops), an assumption which is strongly supported by the behaviour of laryngeals in consonant clusters.*h₁
The assumption that *h₁ is a glottal stop [ʔ] is still very widespread. A glottal stop would however be unlikely to be reflected as a fricative in Uralic borrowings, as appears to be the case, for example in the word lehti < *lešte <= PIE *bhlh₁-to. If, as some evidence suggests, there were two *h₁ sounds, then one may have been the glottal stopGlottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
[ʔ] and the other may have been the h sound [h] of English "hat".
Jens Elmegård Rasmussen
Jens Elmegård Rasmussen
Jens Elmegård Rasmussen is associate professor of Indo-European Studies and head of the Roots of Europe research center at the University of Copenhagen. He is an expert on Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European languages in general, especially morphophonemics, but he has also published articles on...
suggests a consonantal realization for *h₁ as a voiceless glottal fricative
Voiceless glottal fricative
The voiceless glottal transition, commonly called a "fricative", is a type of sound used in some spoken languages which patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant phonologically, but often lacks the usual phonetic characteristics of a consonant...
, [h], with a syllabic allophone [ə], i.e. a mid central unrounded vowel. This is supported by the closeness of [ə] to [e] (with which it coalesces in Greek), its failure (unlike *h₂ and *h₃) to create an auxiliary vowel in Greek and Tocharian when it occurs between a semivowel and a consonant, and the typological likelihood of a [h] given the presence of aspirated consonants in PIE.
*h₂
From what is known of such phonetic conditioning in contemporary languages, notably Semitic languages, *h₂ (the "a-colouring" laryngeal) could have been a pharyngealPharyngeal consonant
A pharyngeal consonant is a type of consonant which is articulated with the root of the tongue against the pharynx.-Pharyngeal consonants in the IPA:Pharyngeal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet :...
or epiglottal
Epiglottal consonant
An epiglottal consonant is a consonant that is articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis. They are occasionally called aryepiglottal consonants.-Epiglottal consonants in the IPA:...
fricative such as [ħ], [ʕ], [ʜ], or [ʢ]. Pharyngeal/epiglottal consonants (like the Arabic
Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
letter ح (ħ) as in Muħammad) often cause a-coloring in the Semitic languages. Uvular fricatives however may also colour vowels, thus [χ] is also a noteworthy candidate.
Rasmussen suggests a consonantal realization for *h₂ as a voiceless velar fricative
Voiceless velar fricative
The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The sound was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English....
[x], with a syllabic allophone [ɐ], i.e. a near-open central vowel.
*h₃
Likewise it is generally assumed that *h₃ was rounded (labialized) due to its o-coloring effects. It is often taken to be voiced based on the perfect form *pi-bh₃- from the root *peh₃ "drink". Based on the analogy of Arabic, some linguists have assumed that *h₃ was also pharyngeal/epiglottal [ʕʷ ~ ʢʷ] like Arabic ع (ayinAyin
' or ' is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic . It is the twenty-first letter in the new Persian alphabet...
, as in Arabic muʕallim = "teacher") perhaps plus labialization, although the assumption that it was velar [ɣʷ] is probably more common. (The reflexes in Uralic languages could be the same whether the original phonemes were velar or pharyngeal.)
However, since the defining effect of this phoneme is vowel-rounding rather than vowel-lowering, a pharyngeal value is unnecessary. Thus, a velar value of voiceless [xʷ] or voiced [ɣʷ] is also quite possible given the evidence. A voiced realisation also matches more neatly when seen in the context of Cowgill's law
Cowgill's law
Cowgill's law, named after Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, refers to two unrelated sound changes, one occurring in Proto-Greek and the other in Proto-Germanic.-Cowgill's law in Greek:...
and Grimm's law
Grimm's law
Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...
in Germanic. Along this vein, Rasmussen has chosen a consonantal realization for *h₃ as a voiced labialized velar fricative [ɣʷ], with a syllabic allophone [ɵ], i.e. a close-mid central rounded vowel.
Possible similarities with the Semitic languages
Common assumptions or not, it is obvious that rounding alone did not color vowels in PIE; some additional (or alternative) feature like "lowered larynx" (as appropriate for "laryngeals" in the Semitic sense) might well have had the appropriate influence on the formants of adjacent vowels. It has been pointed out that PIE *a in verb roots, such as *kap- "take", has a number of peculiarities: it doesn't as a rule ablaut, and it occurs with noticeable frequency in roots like *kap-, viz., with a "plain velar" stop. But there is a chicken-and-egg problem here: if there is in fact any significance to this co-occurrence, does the plain velar articulation account for the a-vocalism, or vice-versa?The same is shown by some IE-Semitic correspondences, whether these are due to prehistoric borrowing or to a common ancestor (see Nostratic theory):
- Greek οδυσσομαι (odyssomai) = "I hate", from IE rootRoot (linguistics)The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
:: Arabic ʕadūw = "enemy". - Greek αϝησι (awēsi) = "it (= a wind) blows", from IE root :: Arabic hawā' ="air".
In any event, if PIE is regarded as somehow in the same series as the plain velar stops as usually reconstructed, some may adduce that its existence is considerably better founded than the existence of the plain velar stops. However, we must also note that in the traditional account, there is an overabundance of marked velar stops versus plain ones . This suggests that indeed what has been labeled "palatal" is rather "plain" while "plain" is something else, such as a uvular plosive (nb. a 3-way contrast of pharyngeal plosives are typologically very unlikely). This then may add to the evidence in favor of being uvular χ, thus also solving the source of its vowel-colouring tendencies.
Reflexes in daughter languages
Laryngeals trigger a great variety of reflexes in the various daughter languages. The following is a summary of some of the most important reflexes:- Direct reflexes: /h2/ and sometimes /h3/ are directly reflected as consonants in many positions in the Anatolian languagesAnatolian languagesThe Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
. This is especially useful in reconstructing laryngeals preceding vowels, which otherwise have few clear reflexes. - Coloring: An adjacent /e/ (but not long /ē/) is colored to /a/ by /h2/, and to /o/ by /h3/.
- Lengthening: A previous vowel is lengthened by a following laryngeal, unless the laryngeal is directly followed by another vowel.
- Laryngeal schwa: A laryngeal between consonants appears as a sound with unique reflexes (/a/ in most languages, but /i/ in Indo-Iranian and variously /a/, /e/ or /o/ in Greek).
- "Lengthened resonants": In many languages, vocalized resonants with a following laryngeal are reflected quite differently from the same vocalized resonants not in the presence of a laryngeal.
- Laryngeal accent: In the Balto-Slavic languagesBalto-Slavic languagesThe Balto-Slavic language group traditionally comprises Baltic and Slavic languages, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to the period of common development...
, secondary lengthening (either by laryngeals, by Winter's law or in certain other cases) triggers an "acute accent" on the corresponding vowel, whereas originally long vowels or diphthongs trigger "circumflex accent". This can potentially distinguish, e.g. /iH/ from original /ī/, which have the same reflexes in nearly all other languages. - Laryngeal aspiration: A laryngeal directly following a stop turns that stop into an aspirated stop in the Indo-Iranian languagesIndo-Iranian languagesThe Indo-Iranian language group constitutes the easternmost extant branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It consists of three language groups: the Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Nuristani...
; this is an important source of voiceless aspirates in (e.g.) Sanskrit. - Triggering of vocalic resonants: A laryngeal between a resonant and a vowel triggers the vocalic allophone of the resonant; without the laryngeal, the consonantal allophone would appear. This is the major source of vocalic resonants with (apparently) directly following vowels.
- Laryngeal hiatus: A laryngeal between vowels led to a hiatusHiatus (linguistics)In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the same syllable, the result is instead described as a diphthong....
. The two vowels in contact generally contracted, but still appeared as two syllables in Avestan and to a lesser extent in Vedic SanskritVedic SanskritVedic Sanskrit is an old Indo-Aryan language. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian. It is closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved Iranian language...
(especially in the Rig Veda). In Proto-Germanic, they contracted into an "overlong" or "trimoric" vowel that remained distinct from regular long vowels. - Cowgill's lawCowgill's lawCowgill's law, named after Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, refers to two unrelated sound changes, one occurring in Proto-Greek and the other in Proto-Germanic.-Cowgill's law in Greek:...
: A disputed law in Germanic (endorsed by Ringe (2006)) holds that /h3/ and possibly /h2/, when directly followed by /w/, are reflected as /k/. - Laryngeal sharpening: Another disputed law in Germanic claims that a laryngeal following a /y/ or /w/ lengthens the semivowel, eventually reflected in "sharpened" forms in Gothic and Old Norse (/ggw/, and /ddj/ or /ggj/).
External links
- Kortlandt, Frederik (2001): Initial laryngeals in Anatolian (pdf)
- Lexicon of Early Indo-European Loanwords Preserved in Finnish