Laryngeals

[Anthony Appleyard]

For the Nostratic and/or Indoeuropean lists as you think suitable:-
....................................
  "Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote (Subject: Re:
Laryngeal symbols) replying to nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk:-

>>> I believe that the "laryngeals" in IE stem from earlier /?,h,?,H/, ...

>> ... use another symbol for ayin, Patrick! It's throwing everybody
>> off. Suggestion: /`/ or /3/

>Well, I plead in my defense that the upside down question-mark is generally
>used in print for 'ayin, and, before I  changed to MSN 2.5, it came through
>when produced by Alt-168.

  And this should go in the FAQ: High-order characters (= with code values
over 127) in email are the Chaos Bringer, don't use them; DOS and Windows and
Mac etc all are liable to display or corrupt them differently; some emailers
transmit them modulo 128, e.g. turning DOS e-umlaut into tabulate.

> How about [2] and [3] for the pharyngals, from the Arabic letters?

I agree, particularly as I believe also that the H2 laryngeal was the {h.}
sound as in Arabic {h2aram} = "sacred, forbidden", (Muh2ammad}, and H3 was the
ayin (e.g.root H3-D-W in Arabic {h3aduuw} = "enemy" and Greek {odussomai}).

I believe that the usual H1 was the glottal stop. If anyone needs a second
different H1, it was likely the ordinary {h} sound.

And we need a reasonably compact name for the {h.} sound, like we have for
its voiced counterpart `ayin'.

> In view of the fact that [3] is used for the Egyptian vulture, which was
> really an /r/, .I am reluctant to adopt that suggestion.

  I thought that the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) was the glottal
stop. The 3-like sign that Egyptologists use for that sign is specific to
Egyptology. The Egyptian letter sign for {r} was the mouth or the lion.
(Distinguish from the `Gyps fulvus' vulture hieroglyph, which has another
use.) Likely also the reason why single-reed is sometimes glottal stop and
sometimes {y} is that it used to me always {y}, but some time in predynastic
or Old Kingdom times in Egyptian initial {y} became silent like it did in the
Old Norse branch of Common Germanic. In emailing we are restricted to the
standard 95 reliably emailable ascii characters and may need to adjust usage
accordingly.

>>The X-SAMPA symbols for fricatives are:
>>palatal [C] [j\] ...
>> and [H] is the semivowel in [French] <huit>.

> I sure do not like that one.

  I don't either. This `H' probably got in because whoever invented the IPA
(International Phonetic Alphabet) had (in those days of hand typesetting) much
more consideration for printers than many maths and nuclear science etc men
did, and e.g. for this sound chose `h' set upside-down because it looked
rather like `y'. It would have helped linguists if Microsoft Word etc had
had an option "set next character upside down".