h- in Turkic

[manaster at umich.edu]

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I must say that I am somewhere between Sasha Vovin
and Stefan Georg on the question of Turkic h-.  I agree
with Sasha (and like him am surprised anyone would not
agree) that the examples cited by Doerfer from languages
other than Khalaj have all the earmarks of sporadic
secondary developments of no great antiquity.  By the way,
does anybody know why so many languages have these
weird "inorganic" initial h's--and has there been any
work on this? (What I mean is that some languages, e.g.,
Tubar in the Uto-Aztecan family, Polish or at least some
dialects of it, and any number of others) prefix h-
to some but not all words that etymologically begin
with a vowel, without any regard to the doctrine of
regularity of sound change.  Why?
 
Anyway, there is one Turkic language where I am not
sure that I would share Sasha's view entirely, namely,
Khalaj.  It is obvious if one looks closely that even
here the initial h- cannot be simply the reflex of
Altaic (for anti-Altaicists, pre-proto-Turkic)
*p- that Doerfer (the anti-Altaicist) as well
as Poppe and Dolgopol'skij (pro-Altaicists) took it
to be.  There are altogether too many cases where
Khalaj has h- but where the non-Turkic Altaic languages
do not have (reflexes of) *p-.  I have long suspected
that the other h-'s in Khalaj are reflexes of an
otherwise unreconstructed Altaic *w-, but have not
done the detailed work required to see how well this
idea works.  One problem with this idea is that the
only good test of it I know of at the moment is
to compare Khalaj to Nostratic, which of course
will not please people who are closed-minded on the
subject of Nostratic.  But of course no one on this
list could be closed-minded, could we, so perhaps
I can get someone to look at this problem...
 
Alexis