Observation on the Laryngeals

[Anthony Appleyard]

  "David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:-
> It is interesting that these affect only /e/, leaving original /o/ alone.
> What this suggests, very strongly as far as I can see, is that the
> laryngeals affected tongue-position, not general acoustics. Otherwise a
> back/rounding (from H3) of /e/ and a fronting (from H1) of /o/ should have
> produced more or less the same result. ...

Hereinafter # is the voiceless version of ayin, as in the Arabic name
"Mu#ammad", and is often written as h with a dot below, and in the Arabic
alphabet as a thing like an inverted (= turned) "2" without dots.

The effects of one sound on another seem to me to vary much according to each
language's speakers' speech habits. E.g. single stop consonants between vowels
stayed as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar in many languages for a very long
time, but in one or another language (e.g. Hebrew and Gaelic) they started
weakening to fricatives. In one language, vowels shift one way; in another
language, the same vowels shift different ways. Likewise how # and ayin affect
sounds around likely can vary between languages. I see no great objection to
H1 H2 H3 being glottal-stop and # and ayin. If there were two H1's, as some
say, the other H1 was likely the ordinary h sound as in English "hat".