Evidence of laryngeal coloring in Proto-Indo-Iranian

Bibliographic Data

ID22311630
AuthorsAndrew Ollett (0000-0002-2425-2806, Columbia University, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume127
Issue1
Pages150-165
Publication date2014-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistorical Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0935-3518 • E-ISSN: 2196-8071
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.13109/hisp.2014.127.1.150
OpenAlexW2321355210
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited4

Past scholarship has made almost no mention of the effects in the Indo- Iranian languages of ‘laryngeal coloring’, the putatively Indo-European development according to which */e/ is ‘colored’ into */a/ or */o/ by an adjacent */h2/ or */h3/, respectively. And for good reason: the merger of nonhigh vowels in Proto-Indo-Iranian would have effaced these distinctions in any case. In this paper I survey the etyma in which laryngeal coloring could have interacted with Proto-Indo-Iranian palatalization, which (in part) preceded the merger of nonhigh vowels, and find that palatalization in almost every case has not occurred to inputs involving */Keh2/ or*/Keh3/, where coloring may be assumed to have taken place. This strongly suggests that laryngeal coloring – not as a discrete ‘sound change’, but as a phonological rule which requires additional sound changes (such as palatalization) before it can ‘show itself’ by affecting the distribution of phonemes in the lexicon – was present in the early stages of Proto-Indo-Iranian, giving further support to the hypothesis that laryngeal coloring was a feature of Proto-Indo- European itself

Lexicon · Linguistics · Physics · Sound change · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy