Cross posted from: Latin@lemm.ee
lingua latina pater linguarum dimidum est 😎
I hope it's okay for me to crosspost here.
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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How come everybody dropped the h sound?
Those are placeholders. "We don't know what this sound is supposed to be, so we plop h+number there and call it a day." You'll see some reconstructions using *ə₁ *ə₂ *ə₃ instead, same deal.
That said, the Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian etc. - the whole branch is extinct) preserved a few of those laryngeals; compare for example Latin ⟨ouis⟩ and Hittite ⟨𒇻𒅖⟩ ḫāwis, from PIE *h₂ówis (sheep). Since Anatolian split way before the other languages, this makes me wonder if they weren't vocalised already in Late Proto-Indo-European.
Those aren't H's, they're Laryngeals (They use the same letter, but there is a small number next to it; that makes it a different consonant). As for why they were dropped or how they sound, nobody knows.
There is a Wikipedia page on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory?wprov=sfla1
TIL, thank you!
Follow up question, since it's not reconstructable, and nobody knows what it sounds like, how did we figure out they were there, and which PIE words had them and which ones didn't?
Mostly by the effect in the nearby vowels - often, a sound triggers changes in nearby sounds, before being dropped.
Here's an example. Greek often shows an initial vowel where other IE languages show none. Like this:
Disregard for a moment the last line, focus on the first four. Why is Greek showing "random" initial vowels where Sanskrit and Latin have none? There's no underlying pattern; it's probably inherited then.
However, you can't simply claim that Greek inherited the vowel and the other two lost it, without causing a problem: why didn't Sanskrit and Latin delete the initial vowel from अज्र / ájra and ager?
The solution that a linguist called Saussure found to oddities like this was to propose that PIE had three sounds, not directly inherited by the descendants. He called them *ə₁ ə₂ ə₃; nowadays we call them *h₁ h₂ h₃. In that specific environment (word start, before a consonant):
And the initial vowel in the fifth line (that pops up in all four) is actually inherited.
(The ancestors of those five words are nowadays reconstructed as *h₁lewdʰ-, *h₁régʷos, *h₂stḗr, *h₃dónts, *h₂éǵros. Sure, the fifth one has a laryngeal... but also a vowel, that's the vowel being inherited by Sanskrit and Latin.)
That hypothesis also helps in quite a few other situations, like:
Also, note that, when Hittite was discovered, all that "laryngeals" talk stopped being just a conjecture - because Hittite did preserve at least *h₂ and *h₃, and probably also *h₁ (it depends on how you analyse the cuneiform spelling).
That's an awesome explanation, thank you!
PIE might not actually even exist, there is no proof of it. The hypothesis is that there used to be only one language in the Indo-Europes 4500-2500 BCE, And and as speakers were mose isolated, regional dialects began to form, and thousands of years later they became distinct languages. But we don't know anything about PIE itself. It's a mess.
Anyways, as for your question: they noticed things off about some words, and it was theorized that there were other letters. These are the Laryngeals.