Pronunciation and fonts

CeiSerith at aol.com CeiSerith at aol.com
Sat Feb 27 21:29:30 UTC 1999


   As an amateur linguist, I have been much enjoying the messages and battles
going on on this list.  There are some questions I have regarding PIE that I
hope someone would be able to answer.

1.  How do you pronounce some of these PIE words, especially the ones with
laryngeals?  Note that I'm not necessarily asking how the PIEs did it, just
how you do it.  For instance, say you're at a conference and you want to
discuss *H1en(i).  How would you say that in a lecture or in the halls between
discussions?

[ Moderator's reply:
  Cowgill treated them as palatal, velar and labiovelar fricatives (x', x, x^w)
  when called upon to pronounce them; others have other preferences.  Since
  they acted with known results on adjacent vowels, I think most linguists do
  not pronounce the segments themselves, but rather the vowels in question--but
  I could be 20 years out of date on the habits of other Indo-Europeanists.
  --rma ]

2.  Are two vowels next to each other in PIE considered to be separate sounds,
or are they meant to be dipthongs?  (e.g. *weik-)

[ Moderator's reply:
  Diphthongs--in older texts the <i> in *weik- would have been written with the
  subposed diacritic to indicate non-syllabicity.  Many Indo-Europeanists would
  now write it as <y>.
  --rma ]

3.  Is there anywhere I can find a font to write in the symbols used in typing
PIE words?  Some of them I can work around (although I really don't want to
have to), but others have me at a loss.

[ Moderator's suggestion:
  There are phonetics fonts available from the Summer Institute of Linguistics'
  FTP site at ftp.sil.org in both TrueType and Adobe Type 1 ("Postscript" or
  "ATM") formats.  Please note that while such fonts will work for printed
  matter, they will not be useful for the world of e-mail.
  --rma ]

Thank you.

Ceisiwr Serith



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