Value of h2 in Anatolian

2001

The purpose of this book is to examine the evidence of the Anatolian languages, and, on that basis, to attempt to reconstruct the phonological systems of their immediate ancestors, namely, Proto-Anatolian and Proto-Indo-Anatolian. (Revised 27 August 2024.)

This paper honours BEDŘICH HROZNÝ's discovery of the Indo-European character of Hittite by dedicating the solution to the Proto-Indo-European laryngeal problem to him: (i) Proto-Indo-European had a single laryngeal *ḫ (ZGUSTA 1951), a glottal fricative (SZÉMERENYI 1970) with voiceless and voiced variants PIE *h/ɦ (PYYSALO 2013 = SPIE). (ii) The proto-language also had a vowel PIE *ɑ (*ǝ = *A), not identical with Hitt. ḫ (versus KURYŁOWICZ 1927) but a low/open back unrounded vowel. (iii) PIE *h/ɦ and *ɑ always appeared together in diphonemic pairs PIE *hɑ/ɑh/ɦɑ/ɑɦ (strict phonotactic selection). (iv) These hypotheses suffice to solve the problems of the entire segmental Indo-European sound law system, completely revised in SPIE. The outcome is internally and externally consistent, and surpasses the earlier models in accuracy. (v) PIE *h/ɦ and *ɑ constitute the missing link of the proto-sound system, and imply the primary Proto-Indo-European phoneme inventory: PIE *o/ō *e/ē *ɑ/ɑ̄ ? *h/ɦ *i/i̯ *k/g *l/l̥ *m/m̥ *n/n̥ *p/b *r/r̥ *s/z *t/d *u/u̯ These revisions are now digitally tested and proven with the foma programming language at http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi: The success rate in generating more than a hundred most ancient Indo-European languages exceeds 99%.

Indo-European Linguistics 6 (2018), 69-94., 2018

In this article it will be argued that the Indo-European laryngeals *h₂ and *h₃, which recently have been identified as uvular fricatives, were in fact uvular stops in Proto-Indo-Anatolian. Also in the Proto-Anatolian and Proto-Luwic stages these sounds probably were stops, not fricatives.

Historische Sprachforschung / Historical Linguistics 133 (2020), 111-143.

My postulation of a phonemic glottal stop in Hittite as the outcome of PIE *h1 (Kloekhorst 2006, 2008, 2014) has been criticized by several colleagues. In the present paper I will reassess the evidence and argue that most of the points of criticism cannot withstand scrutiny, and that Hittite did indeed contain a phonemic glottal stop in the environments /°VʔV°/ and /ʔV°/. Moreover, it will be argued that the spelling practices employed by the Hittite scribes to note down the glottal stop in these environments perfectly match the Old Babylonian scribal practice for indicating an ’aleph (= [ʔ]) in these positions.

100 Jahre Entzifferung des Hethitischen Morphosyntaktische Kategorien in Sprachgeschichte und Forschung Akten der Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft vom 21. bis 23. September 2015 in Marburg, 2018

This paper first reemphasizes a graphic and a morphological distinction between the neuter stems in -aš- and stems in -ašša- (pl. tantum) in both Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Luwian. Then, attention is turned to the existence of a Cuneiform Luwian common gender suffix -ašša- (c.), for which an inflectional, derivational and semantic analysis of its derivatives is offered. In the second part of the paper, a new consideration of the Lycian B suffix -asa- (c.) is presented, which sheds light on the meaning of two passages of the Xanthos Stele. As a result of these two analyses, CLuw. -ašša- (c.) and Lyc. B -asa- (c.) are etymologically equated and, thus, a new reconstruction is proposed. Overall, this paper provides additional information on the properties of the common gender suffix *-eh2 in the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family.