Talk:Laryngeal theory

Pretty hard to understand

It's a pity that this article with its rather fascinating (for language freaks) content should be so hard to understand in parts, especially starting from "Whatever caused a short vowel to disappear". This may be because it's late in the evening and I'm too tired for reading that kind of stuff, but still, I feel this is too hard to understand even for someone who, having an M.A. in (English and French) language and literature, has done some linguistics before. I would be very grateful if you could rephrase / explicate your ideas to make them more easily understandable. Robin.r (talk) 22:06, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

you are right, the article contains much valid material, but it needs to be edited for clarity and structure. --dab (𒁳) 07:04, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

if this is a start class them i am in deep trouble. it's another article that requires that you fully understand the subject in order to read and understand the subject, usually writtn by bright minds that can no longer relate at any level other than his/hers, or an academic who is trying to impress other academics. i only hope the author does not write textbooks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lndench (talk • contribs) 04:22, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Discussion of reflexes

I would appreciate it if there were a more detailed discussion of specific reflexes. How does and Indo-Europeanist know when to reconstruct a laryngeal. Tibetologist (talk)

There are a number of reasons for inferring a laryngeal: Roots are believed to contain one ablauted vowel preceded and followed by at least one consonant. So a laryngeal is reconstructed for a root that begins with a vowel like *es- (<*h₁es- 'be'), *ag- (<*h₂eg- 'lead'), *orn- (<*h₃ern- 'eagle'); or ends with a vowel like *dʰē- (<*dʰeh₁- put), *stā- (<*steh₂- stand), *dō- (<*deh₃- give); or for roots with a prosthetic vowel in Greek like *(e)rewdʰ- (<*h₁reudʰ- 'red'), *(a)ster- (<*h₂ster- 'star') or for a disyllabic root like *ḱera- (<*ḱerh₂- 'mix').

A laryngeal is also reconstructed for a long vowel where lengthened-grade is not expected like *bʰū- (*bʰuh₂- 'become'); or for an *a or an *o where o-grade is not expected (examples above)

I have heard that laryngeals can also be inferred from metric anomalies in Vedic text. —teb728 t c 23:33, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

That's true. There are places in the Rig Veda where ā seems to want to be two syllables; in these places, people infer that that it was earlier *aHa < *eH{e/o} or *āHa < *oH{e/o}. Another place you can infer a laryngeal is where Sanskrit has i corresponding to Greek e, a, or o, such as pitā(r) "father" = Greek patēr < *ph₂tēr. But I suspect Tibetologist meant we should add this discussion (with sources) to the text, rather than inform him here on the talk page. +Angr 05:11, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Another type of evidence from Vedic are compounds with an unexpected long vowel preceding an element starting in a consonant, which suggests that the element originally started with a laryngeal before the initial consonant that is directly attested (schematically: -Vː+C- < -V+HC-), but perhaps that's a bit too advanced for an introduction to the subject. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:44, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Neuter plural

In the article, it says "the nom.sg. is probably in origin a neuter plural." Isn't this backwards, esp. as in Greek (and some other languages?), the neuter plural takes a singular verb (as the article states)? It would seem to be more correct to say "these neuter plurals were probably originally (abstract) singulars". Comments? Jpaulm (talk) 15:23, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

I think what it is talking about there is that the feminine singular is derived from the neuter plural. There is another theory (not really expressed in the article) that both were at origin collectives, and that collectives were extended to feminines because female animals were kept for breeding and/or milk while the males were slaughtered for meat. —teb728 t c 21:24, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that is what it is saying - I just think the derivation went the other way: that the neuter plural is derived from a feminine singular. However, I have always thought this was because feminine singulars were used for collectives, and the neuter plural could be thought of as collective, e.g. particles of neuter sand becoming the collective 'sand'... I hadn't heard about the breeding/milk theory, though. Do you have a reference? Jpaulm (talk) 01:13, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Do you have a reference for your feminine-first theory? I don’t need a reference because I don’t want to change the article: I was just explaining to you. (If you go on a farm today, you see many hens but few roosters and many cows but few if any bulls.) —teb728 t c 08:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, no! It just seems to make more sense, also given that in Greek neuter plurals take a singular verb, which I take to be a holdover from an earlier usage. If it had gone the other way, I would expect to see feminine singular nouns take a plural verb! Jpaulm (talk) 14:17, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, that only points to the fact that in PIE neuter plurals were collective nouns (i.e. grammatically singulars - inflected as singulars, but semantically plurals) which agreed with the verb in singular (and which has been preserved in Ancient Greek, Avestan and Hittite, e.g. in the famous dictum of Heraclitus πάντα ῥεῖ, where you see nom. pl. binding 3PS). However, Hittite neuter nominoaccusative plural ending -a is also regularly derivable from PIE *-(e)h₂, and Hittite didn't have the feminine gender at all, so the derivation (if there is a derivation of the post-Anatolian feminine-gender marker from the neuter nominative plural marker at all? It's more like reinterpretation of the old collectives as feminines once the feminine gender became morphologized..) must be in the way the article currently states..

My favorite theory on the origin of feminine gender is that arose "by accident", because the PIE noun for woman *gʷen(e)h₂-" ended in *-h₂, which caused old collectives in *-eh₂ and old nominalized adjectives in *-ih₂ to become reinterpreted as "feminine" singulars by agreeing with their ending, e.g. *so wesus gʷenh₂ > *seh₂ weswih₂ gʷenh₂. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:37, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

That makes a lot of sense! Maybe someone could clarify that item in the article... Jpaulm (talk) 14:19, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Encyclopedic style?

Given the subject, the fact that this article is "written like an essay" with "no sufficient inline citations" is perhaps more a quality that a defect.

The article is fine the way it is, I thoroughly enjoyed the detail! William Vroman 04:23, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

The article would probably be extremely difficult to read (and to write!) if each individual point would have to be argued pro and contra.

More in-depth discussion can be found in the works quoted in the bibliography, where most of the important works are referred to. One may wish to add Mayrhofer's 1986 Lauthlehre and Meier-Brügger's Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft, and a couple of other important books or papers on the reflexes in daughter languages, but right now I am in a hurry.

On the other hand, the part "Evidence in Uralic" should more appropriately be titled "Possible reflexes in Uralic loans" and be kept shorter here (it could be devoted a separate article), since these Uralic words do not contribute to proving the existence of PIE laryngeals (as the word "evidence" would suggest); rather, the laryngeal theory offers a possibly of explaining these Uralic words as IE loans (IMHO this is often more a mere possibility; this may be a personal opinion, but after all the whole section on Uralic reflects Koivulehto's individual work more than a general consensus). The question is certainly interesting, but the answers are not ascertained enough to make up about 15 % of an introductory exposition of the laryngeal theory, that's why I've suggested a separate article. --Zxly (talk) 17:05, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

I think I wrote most of this article several years ago, and it hasn't been trashed too badly in the meantime. The second paragraph, though, is an incoherent mess, and I will try to rewrite it to make sense.Alsihler (talk) 18:16, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Too much info on ablaut

The section "Explanation of Ablaut ..." includes a lot of text simply describing the normal ablaut phenomenon in PIE. I'm aware that Saussure's discovery was crucially based on examining ablaut patterns and figuring out how to fit the non-standard patterns into the standard pattern, but still, there is way too much text here. It would be better to move some of the text here to Indo-European ablaut and link to that article, rather than describing ablaut in detail. In other words, just mention the fact that ablaut is usually of the e/o/nothing variety, with a link to the appropriate article, and then discuss how to fit the exceptional patterns into this variety. Benwing (talk) 01:46, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

There is no criticism section

--77.37.199.19 (talk) 17:08, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

If you have any reliable sources that criticise the laryngeal theory you're free to add them. I'm sorry I don't though. CodeCat (talk) 17:12, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

German-speaking scholars have tended to resist the laryngeal theory for a long time, but nowadays (also thanks to the appearance of Evidence for Laryngeals in 1965) it's the consensus and all the younger scholars work with it as a matter of course. The current handbooks (i. e., those which are younger than Szemerényi's introduction, whose first edition was in 1970) present the laryngeal theory as established lore. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:13, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Note that the two sceptical scholars named in the article belong to the older generation, too. Bonfante was born in 1904 – and is no longer with us, as he died in 2005 (sic!) – and Mańczak was born in 1924. Which makes me wonder if we should only name living sceptics, and note year of birth. Seriously, I can't think of any Indo-Europeanist born after (say) WWII who doesn't work with laryngeals. It's the classic case of a theory gaining acceptance because its critics are either converted or disappear. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:33, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

I just went ahead and rid the article of Bonfante. The Moscow School does seem to treat laryngeals as an afterthought, but I don't know if any of its members has ever explicitly argued against the idea – Illich-Svitych accepted them and proposed they were [xʲ x xʷ], possibly for the first time. David Marjanović (talk) 14:35, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

If you're interested in fresher criticism, we have in Helsinki one J. Pyysalo who in his PhD thesis argues for only a single laryngeal /h ~ ɦ/, as well as all sorts of other wacky reinterpretations (there was no laryngeal lengthening, voiced aspirates come from voiced stop + /ɦ/, there was only one series of velars, etc.) I'd wait though until he manages to distill his criticism into a couple of peer-reviewed articles… condensing 500 pages into a couple paragraphs of coherent key points of criticism sounds difficult. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 17:05, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I'll outline you some most critical failures of the theory (for the rest, consult https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/41760) and begin to write the criticism when with little extra time for that: 1. De Saussure's compensatory lengthening rule is overstated. When postulating this rule Saussure compared the traditional ablaut schemata *eA : A to that of sonorants (e.g. *ei : i, en : n, etc.), but this scenario is erroneous: The PIE ablaut of the latter has three quantities *ēi : ei : i, and so has the correct schemata for A viz. *ēA : *eA : *A the correct equivalent of Neogrammarian *ā : *a : ǝ. 2. The laryngeals (h1 h3) are not postulated on the basis of the data, but by an auxiliary hypothesis of Möller, a Semitic linguistist, who believed that the Indo-European and Semitic languages were genetically related. Due to this the languages had to had a common root structure of 2-3 consonants C1C2·(C3) on the basis of which "laryngeals" are added to the roots displaying only a single consonant to make the roots 3. The usual number of laryngeals is three (3), but in Anatolian (the oldest of languages) there is only one, which can always be identified with h2. This is the reason why the main article does not contain any examples of h1 and h3 with Anatolian data.Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 11:39, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

I've seen a lot of criticism sections on Wikipedia and they mostly turn out to be cesspits. I think it's better to weigh the pros and contras in the main text as you encounter them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.82.82 (talk) 16:29, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

There is now a recently published article of mine, titled The Laryngeal Theory has no Theory: Incompatibility with the Anatolian Data excludes a Viable Model, published in Wékwos 2 (2016:195-215). I will help you in outlining the main criticism for this Wikipedia article during the summer. I am not aware of how strict the rules, especially regarding the published peer-review content, are, but if I will explain any problems you might see in the criticism during the writing process.Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 11:41, 2 June 2016 (UTC) I was now able to deliver the missing criticism section (10) I promised you earlier, all set in place. In the final editing I noticed that the article as a whole is not unified with regard to italics, only occasionally used in the reconstruction. Would you like me to fix that – and how (with or without italics)?Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 20:08, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

H4

The article as it currently stands states that "h₄ differs from *h₂ only in not being reflected as Anatolian ḫ. Accordingly, except when discussing Hittite evidence, the theoretical existence of an *h₄ contributes little." This is untrue. h₂ and h₄ develop differently in other stocks. H₄, but not H₂, appears as /h/ in Albanian when word-initial before an originally accented vowel. (E.g. PIE *h₄órǵʰii̯eh₂ —"testicle" and Alb. herdhe "testicle" but PIE *h₂ŕ̥tkos "bear -> Alb. ari "bear") In Armenian, h₂ sometimes turns up as /h/ (e.g. *h₂euh₂os "grandfather" -> Arm. haw "grandfather") whereas h₄ never does (incidentally *h₄órǵʰii̯eh₂ "testicle" -> Arm. orjik "scrotum".) Szfski (talk) 17:46, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Update: I have edited the article appropriately. Szfski (talk) 17:46, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

The idea that h- in Armenian and Albanian has any kind of etymological significance is not widely believed, at least by experts in Armenian and Albanian historical grammar. Usually, it's simply considered prosthetic, as far as I'm aware. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:09, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Is the testicle word literally the only example of h4? Lollipop (talk) 08:50, 24 December 2019 (UTC) an alt account of —Soap—

One more possible word is h₄eryós. —Soap— 19:16, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Having looked at this, though, it seems the only evidence for h₄ being in this word is negative ... that is, it's because it *doesnt* produce a laryngeal reflex where it should, and not because it produces /h/ in Albanian. So I would say that the testicle word is in fact the only word and that all examples of "some" should be rephrased to use singular words. I also dont believe there is any good reason to reconstruct a phoneme for just one word. —Soap— 04:08, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Root *ǵen, *ǵon, *ǵṇn-/*ǵṇ̄

Is the form *ǵṇn- correct? If yes, how is it explained? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.57.100.32 (talk) 22:24, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't really get that form either, it should be just *ǵn- (with a circle). It seems like it's based on the idea that laryngeals lengthen vowels, but they only lengthen sonorants in some languages so it's not a general PIE thing. CodeCat (talk) 23:18, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Epiglottal consonants

are not an option for at least *h₂ and *h₃: rather than drawing vowels towards [ɑ] as pharyngeals and uvulars do, they draw vowels towards [æ] – which must, incidentally, be where the Akkadian e comes from. Examples with sound: 1, 2

While I am at it, surely it must have occurred to someone that the Anatolian cuneiform usage of signs with ḫ, which is mostly [χ] in Semitic languages today, is evidence that the Anatolian reflex of *h₂ and *h₃ was [χ] (and [χː]) as well, which in turn would be evidence that *h₂ and *h₃ were uvular – presumably [χ] and [ʁ], with the voice contrast lost in Anatolian together with the voice contrast between plosives? Cuneiform didn't allow for direct, unambiguous notation of velar or pharyngeal fricatives, but surely the most parsimonious hypothesis is to take ḫ literally? I haven't written that into the article because I'm not aware of any references I could cite, but surely I can't be the first one to notice this?

David Marjanović (talk) 14:57, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

There's no competing prediction on what we'd expect to see if Anatolian had had [x] instead. Both [x] and [χ] would have been equally likely to have been written as ḫ. Similarly: not even Semitologists with a conservative view on PS phonology think that Anatolian š was actually [ʃ] and not [s].

As for laryngeal coloring, it needs to be accounted for that it is an internally reconstructed change. The fact that late PIE has a synchronic phonological alternation //e// + /h₂/ > /ah₂/ does not imply that the original sound change was exactly [e] > [a] / _h₂ — much like e.g. the synchronic Finnish alternation between orpo 'orphan' : orvot 'orphans' does not imply that there ever existed a sound change [p] > [ʋ]. Laryngeal coloring might well have been something like [e] > [æ] or [ə] > [ɜ] or whatever when it first came into being, followed by a degree of later drift in the vowel system. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 16:48, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Full names at first appearance...

...just as in real life. For instance wouldn't "Müller and Cuny" actually refer to Hermann Müller and Albert Cuny?- These aren't household names like Beethoven Dante and Einstein. -Wetman (talk) 12:28, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Voyles

Joseph B. Voyles seems to have been born in about 1940.

Arabic word for "wind"

Are we certain that the Arabic word ھواء is of Semitic origin? Wiktionary points to this word as coming from Persian — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.125.173.118 (talk) 21:21, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

No ablaut for -kap- "take"?

Laryngeal theory#Possible other uvulars says «It has been pointed out that PIE *a in verb roots, such as *kap- "take", …doesn't as a rule participate in ablaut, …»

Oh yeah? What about Latin capio "I take", cepi "I took", accipĕre (ad- "to, toward" + capĕre ""to take") "to accept" ? — Tonymec (talk) 13:41, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

That vowel alternation is assumed to have arisen within Italic since it is not found in the other IE languages. Latin regularly reduces unstressed vowels to /i/ (e.g. facere > inficio) and while I dont know the origin of the other alternation, it is missing from other branches and pssibly also missing even from the other Italic languages. Perhaps it, too, arose from some kind of stress-based reduction at a time when the verbs still used reduplication. We could certainly figure this out if we need to. —Soap— 01:53, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

This section seems to have been lost by now, but that may not be a problem for this article, it sounds like it instead belongs in Proto-Indo-European ablaut. Any claim like this should definitely be sourced, though (and there are contrary opinions too). FWIW de Vaan thinks cēpī is analogical from faciō : fēcī, iaciō : iēcī, which have a < *h₁ : ē < *eh₁. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 12:12, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Criticism section

The criticism section, which presents the Pyysalo & Janhunen model as the "only remaining option", was written by a team led by Pyysalo & Janhunen themselves, as publicly announced by their project, PIE Lexicon: "The criticism section of the Wikipedia article (§10) has been absent for years. I promised to write one already back in 2016, but was only able to complete the task last week in collaboration with our team." This violates the neutrality policy (by directly drawing conclusions in the Wikipedia article instead of reporting conclusions and attributing them a source) and might be in violation of the "No original research" rule. While these criticisms have been published, the criticism section was written by the original authors of the cited sources themselves. The undue weight tag was added since much of the criticism presented is based on the work of Pyysalo & Janhunen, which has so far not been accepted (or cited) by any other scholarly publication and thus by definition constitutes an extreme minority view. 82.168.229.134 (talk) 17:41, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment, all to be accounted for as soon as possibleJouna Pyysalo (talk) 17:21, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

It’s shocking that J. Janhunen, a respected Uralist, took part in that unspeakable idiocy. The whole section must be deleted; every letter in it is more fringe (and wrong) than should be even possible. 176.213.12.200 (talk) 13:07, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

The ‘journal’ ‘Proto-Indo-European Linguistics’ is run by Pyysalo himself. All references to this self-published online source must be deleted as well. 176.213.12.200 (talk) 13:25, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Prof Janhunen is the leader of the PIE Lexicon project, not myself, so there is no need to be shocked at all. Regarding the idea that something is not been accepted would justify its deletion is, of course, very, very naive, because the new openings are never first accepted in science. Doing so tells volumes about those doing so, especially when most of the criticism has been published elsewhere and only the final piece, unpublished anywhere else, was from our project's journal. Sincerely, Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 17:45, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

I now looked into this new Criticism section of yours and see that you have not grasped what criticism means: The aim is to point the critical problems of a scientific model (or a theory), all of which has been wiped off and replaced with irrelevant details with a fitting conclusion "Today the laryngeal theory is almost universally accepted in this new standard form." Accordingly we are now back in the square one: There is no criticism section in this article. I will discuss this with Prof Janhunen and other monolaryngealists I personally know and whose criticism you wiped out as well, and then return to this business. But I can readily say that in order to be in science you have to learn to take and especially think the criticism, because it has a key role in making progress in science. Amateurs. Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 13:29, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

@Jouna Pyysalo: There were several flaws on your criticism section. First, it should be written in a neutral way. You stated opinions of your own in the criticism, as if they were self evident facts or an unquestionable consensus. Instead, you should state the opinion, and attribute it to the source, specially when these are heterodox views. For example instead of saying:

Only one option remains on the table: Oswald Szemerenyi's monolaryngealism and its further revisions.

You should say:

Because of this, some minorities have returned to Oswald Szemerenyi's monolaryngealism and its further revisions.

This way the text itself does not appear to be biased or contradictory, while presenting a wide variety of opinions. Secondly, your criticism focused way too much on the historical details of the Laryngeal theory, which does not have much to do with it's flaws. The only argument I grasped was that it was too ambiguous, which of course cannot be taken as a serious critique unless you were accusing LT to be unfalsifiable. You started from the point of view that LT is incapable of explaining "IE vowel and laryngeal problem", which was never explained in-depth. Is it a problem of inconsistent correspondences? Or maybe a problem of typology? Does it have to do with dubious etymologies or a lack of consensus? In the hole section the incapability of LT to explain IE vocalism was mentioned multiple times, but the problem itself was never laid out.

There were also some terms that are never used in the field, such as "revisionist theory" and "orthodox theory", which I believe are expressions of your own. If you still want to contribute to the article I would encourage you to read Neutral point of view. --Tom 144 (talk) 03:01, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Tom, thank you for your comments:

1) As you can see from my comment above, I promised to fix these problems – and when entering to do that I found the criticism section deleted.

2) The historical approach in the criticism section was, because it detailed all errors in the actual order they were made, including the author of the error. This is what criticism means, identifying and explicating the errors down.

3) The reason why you might not understood ambiguity could be because you are not in the field (IE linguistics), or have not studied it thoroughly enough: I assure you that the leading figures of the LT understand the situation perfectly well: After all, I hold a PhD in IE linguistics and know the laryngeal theory better than its supporters themselves.

4) The ambiguity problem is that the LT reconstructs laryngeals that are not attested in the data at all. Due to this different models can choose whatever laryngeals they please in the CC·C slots. Accordingly all of them disagree by now on which laryngeals should be reconstructed, and because these are not in the data, it is impossible to solve this problem,.

5) The terms ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ theory are introduced in a peer-reviewed journal (Wekwos), which by the way also PIE Linguistics is, and are well-defined items in terms of the laryngeal theories themselves: An orthodox theory has only a single PIE vowel *e (or *a), while revisionist theories assume at least two pwoto-vowels.

I have discussed the deletion of the article with our team, including monolaryngealists involved, and we have agreed that we have just now no time to waste in Wikipedia edit wars with amateurs (and a couple of fanatics as I learned when looking into edits), so for the moment we leave the article as it is, i.e. without criticism section at all (or a phoney one you compiled).

What your editors have written belongs to a quite different genre, namely under the title "(history of) reception of the laryngeal theory", which is a quite different from criticism.

As I was advised just a half an hour ago to consider the following: Perhaps you could open a new section, title "reception of the laryngeal theory" and restore the criticism section in its own place?

Then we could seriously start to fix the problems that originally caused trouble around.

All the best, Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 15:54, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

@Jouna Pyysalo: I'm sorry your edits were deleted, I hope this doesn't deter you from contributing further in wikipedia. I wouldn't think Wikipedia is a waste of time though, this article gets 3000 views a month.

I own various introductory books to the field and I enjoy reading papers from IE linguists, of which, some were mentioned in your Criticism section. I have not studied linguistics formally, but I am a lot more educated in the field than the average reader of this article. In spite of that, I've never come across with this "IE vocalism and laryngeal problem", and couldn't understand how sometimes laryngeal reflexes being ambiguous disprove LT. If an informed reader does not understand your point, then it's probably because you should explain it more thoroughly.

However, I honestly don't have much faith in monolaryngealism. The Brugmannian vowel system was incapable of providing consistent correspondences in the daughter languages, it was only with laryngeal theory that the reflexes could be explained. Given that laryngeals were lost, they of course would have ambiguous outcomes in certain environments. It's common practice that whenever the specific laryngeal is unknown, to write "H" or "hₓ". To have a consistent phonological system with a single laryngeal you would need at least eight vowels : *i, *ī, *e, *ē, *o, *ō, *u, and *ū, plus two schwas ə₁ and ə₂, which would correspond to the syllabic forms of *h₁ and *h₃. Although you could make such system "work", it wouldn't be morphologically as simple and regular as Laryngeal PIE is. Besides the fact that it would also have a much grater phoneme inventory, with long and short resonants, and voiceless aspirated stops.–Tom 144 (talk) 04:58, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Tom, the article has been without comment section for 6 years, and I delivered complete Criticism section thorough the history from 1887 up to the end of 2018, some 8-9 pages, so no ‘edits’, but the entire Criticism was gone, now replaced with "Historical reception of the laryngeal theory"-article, an unrelated human interest story, and a pretty flawed version of that, if I may say.

I already noticed yesterday that you do not understand the situation in the field, but since you seem to be a friendly chap, I do this exception and answer to your questions, but do note that I should be actually writing science, educating scientists, not wikipedia editors, so do not wonder if not hearing from me at least for a time after this. Nothing wrong with you as a person, I have to follow the instructions of the project leadership.

Laryngeal theory, originally, is an attempt to explain the IE vowel colourist with an alternative theory. Neogrammarians (see Criticism) comparatively explained the IE vocalisms with vowels *e a o ē ā ō. These were replaced (see Criticism) by Møller with *h1e h2e h3e eh1 eh2 eh3, i.e. with a single vowel *e and h1 h2 h3. This was not enough, because in Hittite (Old Anatolian) there are actually six (if we restrict ourselves to the prothetic rules *h1e- h2e- h3e-), not three sets sets shown below with Puhvel's six laryngeals below:

Old Anatolian: ḫe- ḫa- ḫa- e- a- a-

Indo-European: e- a- o- e- a- o-

Puhvel *H1e- *H2e- *H3e- *h1e- *h2e- *h3e-

This did not suffice, because Puhvel ‘orthodox theory’ (i.e. assuming only *e) has no *o and failed to explain even the basic ablaut *e/o, so something else had to be done.

That alternative was the ‘revisionist theory’, in which the six sets above are now explained both with the neogrammarian vowels *e a o AND the laryngeals *h1 h2 h3. As a result, there are now three main revisionist models that try to explain the six sets both with vowels (as the neogrammarians did) and the laryngeals (as the laryngeal theory did). The situation is thus the same as if you tried in Physics to explain gravity both with Newton's laws of gravity and with evil fairies drawing the objects down and smashing them to the ground once you release your grip of them.

At this point there are three main revisionist models, not only often allowing multiple (ambiguous) reconstructions in themselves, but also conflicting each other those of Eichner, Melchert and Kortlandt. The ambiguity can be illustrated with pair Hitt. ades- ‘ax’: OEng. adesa ‘idem’. In Eichner's model you can postulate h1odhes-, h1adhes-, h3edhes- h3adhes- or h3odhes for this, but are unable to decide between these alternatives (ambiguity). Melchert's model similarly both *h1adhes- and h1odhes-. In Kortland's model you can reconstruct here h1odhes-, h2odhes- or h3odhes-, but cannot decide between the alternatives. Put together, for the simple correspondence Hitt. a- = OEng. a- there are six alternative reconstructions, h1o-, h1a-, h2o- h3e- h3a- h3o- in three theories. None of these can actually be proven to be correct, since there is no initial laryngeal in the data (Hitt. a- = OEng. a-) based on which the character (1-2-3) of the laryngeal could be decided. This is what the ambiguity means: Since the LT uses both the neogrammarian vowels *e a o and the laryngeals h1 h2 h3o to explain the vowel colourings the result is an undecidable ambiguity problem.

The reason for me quoting myself and Prof. Janhunen in this was quite simply because we have been analysing the laryngeal theory, including its post-1970s ‘revisionists’ form, and presented this situation, something you will not be able to read anywhere else, because we exposed it first. Accordingly, there is no one else to quote on that, as is the case always, when you are the very first to make any discovery or finding, positive or negative.

In monolaryngealism one only needs the following set:

PIE *ɑ/ɑ̄? *e/ē *o/ō *i/i̯ *u/u̯ *l̥/l *r̥/r *m̥/m *n̥/n *k/g *p/b *t/d *h/ɦ *s/z, see https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/41760 (Pyysalo 2013)

This system is far more economic than any of its precedents, and provably sufficient, because in PIE Lexicon, the digital version of this ‘glottal fricative theory’ the code reader is denied of using any other phonemes in the reconstruction except the ones given above and simultaneously the mechanised system already generates data of more than 120 most archaic Indo-European languages by means of digitised sound laws with an accuracy rate exceeding 99% as you may confirm yourself here: http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi

But all this is actually belongs to a separate article, not to the criticism of the laryngeal theory, something the main article now does not have at all.

Also, I am instructed not to use my time in this, our team is really not impressed about the platform, 3,000 readers or not, if the editors do not have sufficient knowledge on the topic, but also lack capability to draw distinction between ‘criticism’ and ‘history of reception’.

It took me almost an hour to write this to a single person, and as there are hundreds of others no doubt deleting the criticism also in the future, I feel that this is a futile exercise: Science, as pursued by our team, aims at the highest bid, not the lowest.Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 10:10, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

@Jouna Pyysalo: I'm sorry, but I find quite difficult to believe that voiced aspirate stops are just the result of a voiced stop + a voiced laryngeal. Secondary aspiration due to an adjacent laryngeal next to a stop is an innovation exclusive to the Indo-Aryan family, while voiced aspirates are attested in almost all language families, so it's impossible they all independently changed *dɦ > *dʱ. Secondly, the sequence "VCHV" was syllabified in PIE as "VC.HV". This is important because it affects the outcome of Brugmann's law in Indo-Iranian. Looking at the distribution you can see that aspirate stops do not close the syllable, and therefore, must be a single sound. Note that laryngeal aspiration of preceding stops post-dates Brugmann's law. There are also root-constraints that prohibit having both a voiceless stop and an aspirate one in the same root. This framework would only make that rule more arbitrary, and harder to explain. This idea would also raise the question of why can't "*b" exist without "*ɦ".

I also noticed you don't reconstruct a distinctive series of front and back velars. I believed this position was no longer a popular one, since it has been shown that Armenian, Anatolian, and Albanian have a conditioned three-way contrast. Although it is evident that they used to be a single phoneme once, but by the time PIE had them, they weren't allophones anymore, as one could argue with "*e" and "*a".

Concerning the voiceless and voiced variants of *h, I suppose the primary evidence I would look for such hypothesis would be Hittite. It's a well known fact that etymological voiceless obstruents were represented with gemination in Hittite, regardless of whether that notation represents geminate consonants or not. The phoneme "ḫ" is also preserved with voiced and voiceless variants (i.e. single "ḫ" and geminate "ḫḫ"). However, the distribution in which it's geminate and simple counterparts appear does not reflect PIE's. It corresponds to Eichner's lenition/voicing laws, which are:

1. A voiceless obstruent is lenited/voiced if it's in intervocalic position, and if it follows a long vowel.
2. A voiceless obstruent is lenited/voiced if it's in intervocalic position, and between to unaccented syllables.

So single "h" in Hittite does not go back to another phoneme.

Because I cannot grasp how would you be able to reconstruct basic PIE vocabulary with such narrow set of phonemes and still have regular correspondences would you provide your reconstructions for the following cognates containing "h₁", I will show the standard reconstruction too:

1.- PIE: *h₁sónt-s ~ *h₁sn̥t-ós ("being"), participle of *h₁es- ("to be")

Latin: sont- ("guilty"), (ab)sent- ("absent")

Sanskrit: sánt- ~ sat- ("being")

Ancient greek: eónt- ("being")

Hittite: ašānt- ("being")

This should be tough to reconstruct without laryngeal theory, because you need a phoneme that is lost word initially in most languages, but preserved as "e" in Ancient greek, and "a" in Hittite. However LT solves this simply, since it's just a regular outcome of syllabic *h₁ in LT, (it is also unambiguous).

Here I have some examples of the root *ǵenh₁-, *ǵonh₁-, *ǵn̥h₁, ("to be born").

2.- PIE: *ǵn̥h₁-tó-s ("born")

Latin: gnātus ("born"), (ab)sent- ("absent")

Sanskrit: jātá- ("born")

Gothic: -kunds ("-born")

Monolaryngealism would have problems explaining the absence of the nasal in Sanskrit without recurring to long resonants. you could try to assume a form of *ǵn̥h-tó-, However this root is attested in Hittite, and it does not have an "ḫ", so "h₂" cannot be assumed for this case, besides, this laryngeal shows no colouring effects.

3.- PIE: *ǵn̥h₁-tí- ~ *ǵn̥h₁-téi- ("birth")

Latin: gnāti-on- ("birth")

Sanskrit: jātí- ("birth")

Ancient greek: génesis ("begining")

Old norse: kind ("race")

The same problem but with a Greek descendant, which shows that it cannot be reconstructed as *ǵnātí-.

4.- PIE: *ǵénh̥₁-tōr ~ *ǵn̥h₁-tr-és ("progenitor")

Latin: genitor ("parent")

Sanskrit: janitar- ("parent")

Ancient greek: genétōr ("parent")

The problem here lies on Sanskrit and Greek, that do not agree on the quality of the second vowel. However, "*i" is the regular Sanskrit outcome of syllabic "*h₁". Latin could reflect “*e”, “*o” or “*a” in this position.

5.- PIE: *ǵónh₁-o-s ("offspring")

Sanskrit: jána- ("race, people, group")

Ancient greek: gónos ("fruit, product")

This one requires a consonant after the nasal to close the syllable, given that *ǵóno- would have given Sanskrit jāna-. This example is specially fructiferous because it shows that "h₁" cannot be analyzed as some kind of schwa, but is instead consonantal in nature, disproving the Brugmannian reconstruction *ǵənə-. It also serves against the two velar series theory, showing palatalization in a non-fronting environment. I look forward to your response –Tom 144 (talk) 22:24, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Tom, I dealt all the issues you mention years ago in my dissertation quite unrelated to the Criticism section of the LT, so please find out the answers from here: https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/41760. There is also a draft article in which the phonemes and the rules of the dissertation are simply stated in a catalogue form: https://www.academia.edu/26016863/THE_SOLUTION_TO_THE_PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN_LARYNGEAL_PROBLEM_THE_GLOTTAL_FRICATIVE_THEORY_OF_HITTITE_ḫ_PIE_h_ɦ As the rules of the GFT stated here have been already coded in PIE Lexicon and they suffice to generate data of 120 most archaic IE languages you don't have to doubt whether this is actually the case, just click the reconstructions in PIE Lexicon and you'll see how it is actually done.

As I told you, we are working in the very frontline of the Indo-European linguistics, pushing forth there, so I am instructed to focus on this sector where we keep delivering, most recently in this article, published a couple of days ago, so if interested in the criticism of the LT, please read this and related papers yourself: http://pielinguistics.org/pdf/optimizingthelaryngealtheory.pdf Having done this we are now basically ready with the entire criticism of the theory was well as pointing out an exit of the problems in a form of a new type of LT defined here: Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 09:57, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Tom, I have a couple of minutes, so here some responses:

1. There ‘laryngeal h₁’ does not belong to the root *ǵenh₁-, *ǵonh₁-, *ǵn̥h₁, ("to be born"). You can see this from the identity of the stems Gr. γέν- (√aoM.) ‘geboren werden, werden, entstehen’ (GEW I:306-8, ἔγεντο [3sg]) = RV. jan- (aoM.) ‘seiner Geburt/Art nach bestimmt sein zu’ (WbRV. 466, janatā [3pl]). 2. In the identity Lat. genitā- = Gr. γενετή- (f.) ‘Geburt’ (GEW 1:307) no ‘h₁’ appears either, because this should appear in Italo-Celtic not weakening the 2nd syllable like Latin as /a/. Instead we have IE e exactly as in Greek in Osc. genetā- (f.) ‘genita’ (WH 1:591, Deívaí Genetaí) matching with OGaul. genetā (f.) ‘Tochter’. The vocalic – not laryngeal – character of the 2nd syllable is finally confirmed by LAv. zī·zanat- (pt.pl.m.) ‘Junge’ (AIWb. 1658 zīzanatąm [plG]. The Skt. i in RV. jánitar- can always reflect an original *·i-extension of the root, commonplace in all branches (thus e.g. in Lat. prīmi·genio- (a.) ‘zuerst geboren’ (WH 1:600, prīmigenius [sgN]), Gr. γόνιμο- (a.) ‘zeugungskräftig, lebensfähig’ (GEW 1:320): RV. jániman- (n.) ‘Geburt, Ursprung, Nachkommenschaft, usw.’ (WbRV 475-6) and so forth. 3. On your comment "*ǵóno- would have given Sanskrit jāna-" (in Gr. γόνο- (m.) ‘Erzeugung, Nachkomme, Geschlecht, Same’ (GEW 1:320, γόνος), the lengthened grade, exactly as anticipated is actually attested in RV. jā́na- (m.) ‘der Mensch, Geschlecht, das Volk’ (WbRV. 472-3, EWA 1:566, jā́nās, jā́nān). Unlike in Greek, Sanskrit also preserves the corresponding neuter *o-stem in RV. jā́na- (n.) ‘Geburt, Ursprung, Geburtstätte’ (WbRV. 483).

The laryngeal theory is build on ‘optimisation’ (or cherry-picking) of couple of forms fitting to the theory and dropping everything else out, including referring to this kind of problems. That kind of approach, of course, is less satisfying, if you actually happen to philologically master the Indo-European languages... Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 14:27, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

@Jouna Pyysalo: I replaced your ‘Criticism’ section because it was almost entirely based on your own work, which is often self-published and barely cited. Encyclopedias are based on accepted knowledge, they are not a place for scholarly debates. If your views are correct, and become received in the academia, then there will be no problem with including them. You are also free to expand the section based on other existing criticism, of which there is plenty (I already named some of them; in addition there are Misra, Jonsson, Pokorny etc., and especially contemporary Lehrman and Voyles & Barrack), with consistent attribution, and not giving them undue weight.

Besides, your assumption that any of the ‘orthodox laryngealists’ disputed the existence of qualitative (*e ~ *o) or quantitative ablaut, including roots with laryngeals, is entirely wrong. Either you misunderstood them and the term ‘monovocalism’, or had something else to say (in which case you were very unclear). Guldrelokk (talk) 14:59, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

@Guldrelokk: 1. Not my work, most quotes directly from others, only the final passage by myself – and our team, because that is where the front iine is. 2. Replacing it was pretty bad work, because – as I pointed out above – you now have there a fairy story belonging to a quite different scientific genre, the ‘reception of X’ instead of ‘criticism’. 3. As I said I have not the least interest in storyline, myself dealing with these matters directly with other developers of the laryngeal theory, of which only Kortlandt, Puhvel, Eichner and Melchert remain – and we actually have dealt with their models already. 4. Regarding the ‘orthodox’ theory you clearly do not understand the matter. Best, Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 17:17, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

@Jouna Pyysalo: 1. The only secondary sources you used, directly and indirectly, were authored by you. These publications do not appear ‘front line’, certainly not judging on the amount of citing they get.

2. It is a short survey of the critique and revision of the subject theory. It does not contain any original criticism, for which there is no place in an encyclopedia.

3. An encyclopedia article is not a place to ‘deal with other developers of the laryngeal theory’.

4. Do you have any sources that point to a difference in views on the apophonic *o between e. g. Benveniste and Kuryłowicz? There was none, which is the reason your entire ‘orthodox’ ~ ‘revisionist’ distinction is meaningless (being also OR). Guldrelokk (talk) 17:37, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

@Guldrelokk: 1. Taking your 1st comment as humour. In real science – what Wikipedia seemingly is not – people stand behind their names and especially their products, so I had no reason for not using my name. Of course a mistake was made there by me, because had I chosen a nonsense nick-name none of this would have happened, would it? Only the weak hide between nicks, and that's why their relevance is always to be considered. 2. The criticism is directly from the original sources: We more than doubled the total number of the quotes in the entire article by adding those there. 3. Sounds like there is a misunderstanding in this point: What I said is that it is better that we developers deal with these matters with each other, exactly as we are already doing: We dealt with the ‘Leiden’ school of ‘laryngeal theory’ earlier (now already having understood the response of Mr Kortlandt): http://pielinguistics.org/pdf/onfrederikkortlandtsdistributionaltrilaryngealistmodel.pdf More recently we took an additional effort, dealing with the rest of the models here: http://pielinguistics.org/pdf/optimizingthelaryngealtheory.pdf We have also been looking into this and I think we already know what will happen with our competitors here. 4. That is very, very easy: You just need to read their books: Benveniste (1935) is outright ‘orthodox’, justifying his postulation of h3 on the basis of the ‘*o-colouring’, while Kurylowicz, not only in 1935, but throughout his academic career, far better informed, is very, very sneaky all the way. But both these authors belong to a past, they just repeated Möller's Indo-Semitic hypothesis around ±1880, 140 years ago. I do not live in that reality at all, all past, all lost, all dead in the birth bed.

Finally my apology for not responding earlier, I just happened to check this today – and saw your response, having mysteriously not gotten a note of that (also please excuse my grammatical errors, I am really engaged with our team with Prof. Eichner and the rest of the IE linguistics, so it is really not my cup of tea to explain these matters simultaneously to quite another direction, if you understand).

The matter is two-fold: 1) There is no ‘criticism’ section but something quite different, viz. a fairy tale of the ‘reception of the laryngeal theory’. 2) In Indo-European linguistics we are now in somewhat traumatic situation for everyone, because there seems to be an alternative, built upon Szemerényi's monolaryngealism, but that is a different story. The latter belongs to a quite separate WikiPedia article, of course, having not much to do with criticism of LT – and the absence of of criticism section here is really of no importance either. People like Eichner, Melchert (and his followers) as well as myself (as continuing Szemerényi's tredition) have to handle this first, then, perhaps in some years the actual events become understandable little by little, slowly making their way to Wikipedia as well...) Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 21:45, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Jouna Pyysalo: 1. Wikipedia is indeed not a scientific journal. It is very clear already from the fact that it explicitly forbids original research. It is an encyclopedia, based on received knowledge through mostly secondary sources.

2. I hope you understand that not explicitly linking sources for non-trivial original concepts like ‘orthodox and revisionist theory’ is even worse than linking obscure self-published papers, which was your other option.

3. My point is that Wikipedia is not a place for your ‘competition’ with other scholars. It is an encyclopedia, settled on accepted knowledge and secondary sources.

4. While I am perfectly familiar with their work, it doesn’t appear to me that you are. Long before the advent of the laryngeal theory it was recognised that there were two kinds of Indo-European *o in terms of alternation patterns: *o produced by the qualitative ablaut and *o which also appears in the guṇa grade: apophonic and non-apophonic *o. The latter (as well as the rest of the vowels that appeared in the guṇa grade) was often called ‘original’, reflecting the notion that it predated the Indo-European ablaut, which transformed original *e into *o in a well-defined set of formations. You can look up, for example, Hübschmann’s ‘Das indogermanische Vokalsystem’ (1885), the classic presentation of the Neogrammarian vocalic recontruction. It distinguishes e- and o-Reihen with respective guṇa (Stufe 3) vowels.

This distinction has always been relevant to the laryngeal theory revision of the Indo-European vocalism. Saussure and Møller recasted all of the ‘original’ (non-apophonic) vowels as combinations of the vowel *e with coefficients sonantiques/laryngeal consonants. As the result, only one ablaut row was left: *e ~ *o ~ *∅ (not counting apophonic long vowels). Because this alternation was clearly conditioned (morphologically at least; its former phonetic conditioning is not entirely clear to this day, although it was heavily researched even back then), it was possible to speak of the single ‘original’ vowel *e.

On this matter there is not a slightest disagreement not only between Benveniste and Kyryłowicz, but even between Møller/de Saussure and the modern Leiden scholars, including Kortlandt.

Your comment about how the laryngeal theory ‘fails to explain the ablaut *e ~ *o’, unfortunately, reveals a deep lack of understanding of its purpose and substance. Nobody ever thought that the alternation between different ablaut grades was something for the laryngeal theory to explain; it was always clear to everyone that it was conditioned otherwise. Benveniste (1935) explicitly notes:

La condition préalable à toute reconstruction indo-européenne a été fournie par la géniale découverte de F. de Saussure relative à la nature consonantique du phonème ə. Admise et enrichie par Möller, par MM. Pedersen et Cuny, cette théorie peut aujourd’hui passer pour établie gràce à la perspicacité de M. J. Kuryłowicz, qui a su reconnaître dans le ḫ hittite deux des trois variétés du ə indo-européen. Nous supposerons donc connu et admis que e, a, o (non apophonique de e) et ē, ā, ō représentent e précédé ou suivi des trois formes de ə…

I underlined the relevant part for you.

Kuryłowicz says the exact same thing in his ‘Études indoeuropéenes’ (1935):

Le caractère de ce ə̯ est révélé par le timbre de la voyelle qui subsiste: e- < ə̯₁e-; a- < ə̯₂e-; o- < ə̯₃e- (autant qu’il s’agit d’un o originaire et non pas d’un degré apophonique d’e).

It is simply not a job of the laryngeal theory to explain the origin of the qualitative ablaut. It never has been.

On top of other numerous critical problems with your text, this fundamental misunderstanding makes it completely impossible to include. Guldrelokk (talk) 12:40, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

@Guldrerokk: What you relate above is well known, but not relevant. No amount of morphology can solve ambiguities in examples such as

         Hitt. a- = IE *o : *h3e- ∨ *h1o- ∨ *h1a- ∨ *h2o- ∨ *h3o- ∨ *h3a-.

Perhaps, when reaching a more advanced stage, you will also understand this. But as I said, there is no need for discussing this matter here in any length: We only wanted to provide a real criticism of the laryngeal theory – and have done that. What else there is to discuss?

@Jouna Pyysalo: It is extremely relevant: it renders your OR distinction between ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ laryngealism, something a lion’s share of the text was dedicated to, completely baseless.

What is left, then, is your remark about how e. g. *o- in the traditional reconstruction corresponds to several possible onsets in the laryngeal theory, and that sometimes (when there is not enough comparative data) it is not possible to choose between them; as if the usual cover symbol *H didn’t reflect this universal understanding. However, this is not valid criticism at all. It is simply an obvious limitation of linguistic reconstruction, which always existed and will exist forever. It applies even to very recent reconstructions, such as Proto-Slavic: given Russian and Slovene examples it is not possible to choose between *č and *ť without extra data (either reflexes from other languages, or related words), which does not always exist. Nobody in their sane mind would present this as a criticism of the conventional Slavic reconstruction. Some other reconstructions (e. g. Old Chinese) have some much ambiguous lemmata that scholars have to use complicated notational apparatus to reflect this; yet, as far as I know, no one has ever presented this as a criticism. You need significantly more (qualitatively and quantitatively) authoritative sources than your papers, which have not yet received much attention in academia, to support the extremely bold claim that there is anything wrong with having ambiguities in some forms of the root (like the o-grade), and that this observation constitutes valid criticism. Guldrelokk (talk) 06:06, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

@Guldrelokk: Dear Guldrelokk, as noted above, I or our team have not the slightest problem here: we wanted to deliver a criticism section to this article in order to make it available for those interested in the actual situation in the field. Despite you replacing that article with a ‘History of reception of the laryngeal theory’ piece, we have linked to the original piece in the PIE Linguistics desktop, so our job here is done.

If you do not want ‘Criticism’ section – as the uncritical people taking unobjectively sides on the matters generally do not want, that is certainly not our problem.

I am completely alienated by Wikipedia, getting to wrangling with people, who do not recognise even the most basic pillars of science like criticism and its functions was one of most unpleasant experiences of my life and I certainly do not want to continue this failed experiment.

All the best, Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 12:51, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

p.s. As the things now stand, there is no criticism section at all, so it is totally pointless for me to discuss about criticism of the laryngeal theory, because there is no criticism article available. If you want to restart the discussion on the criticism of the LT with me, then follow these instructions: 1. Relabel this section, now erroneously called ‘Criticism’ with its real name ‘History of reception’. 2. Open a new section, placed after this one, label it ‘Criticism’ – and add the original criticism section we wrote there.

If you do this, then there is something to discuss about under the section, which again exists. Otherwise there is nothing to talk any further. Jouna Pyysalo (talk) 14:01, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Incomplete, criticism section wholly out of date, field in disarray

Optimised Laryngeal Theory of Pyysalo & Janhunen is not mentioned. Criticism section is wholly out of date and ignores much of recent research by Pyysalo & Pyysalo & Janhunen. Proponents of older variants of LT have not been able to respond to the criticsm. The field seems to be in disarray with no clear path forward. 188.217.36.26 (talk) 10:59, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

There seem to be some angry Fins around. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:2DCB:C75F:4EAB:902F (talk) 16:12, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Here is a brief list of respectable contemporary authors in the field. I'd recommend you to study their works before reading fringe theories.

• A. Sihler
• D. Ringe
• R. Beekes
• C. Melchert
• A. Kloekhorst
• J. Jasanoff
• B. Fortson
• F. Kortlandt
• M. de Vaan
• R. Pooth
• J. Clackson
• P. Kiparsky
• A. Yates
• J. Mallory
• D. Adams
• E. Hill
• J. Lundquist

––Tom 144 (talk) 15:27, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Spelling

It seems that this entire article is written using the RP spelling, should this be changed to GA spelling. Because terms such as palatalization,and behavior are spelled palatalisation and behaviour. Macy 18:30, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

There is no such thing as "RP spelling" or "GA spelling". Received Pronunciation and General American are accents. Each can be written (transcribed) with either British or American spelling, and each spelling can be read in either accent.

When an article does not have strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation, it is discouraged to change existing spellings to those of another variety, unless it is to make them consistent within the article. In this case it seems it was largely written with British spellings except -ize/ization prevail against -ise/isation, i.e. Oxford spelling. See WP:ENGVAR for relevant guidelines. Nardog (talk) 03:32, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I apologize, I did want to make the article more consistent. But I now understand that the article uses the British spelling, rather than American spelling Macy 16:18, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Uralic

There is a very helpful preamble in this section about the justification for citing the Uralic evidence. I don't have time to make the new page myself (or more specifically, to argue for months with super-editors about whether such a page is justified), but if in future versions of this page someone decides to unilaterally remove this preamble, please move it to separate page (proto-Indo-Uralic? Contacts between proto-languages?) and link to it before deleting. (Thank you.) 173.48.76.154 (talk) 19:55, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

@173.48.76.154: Which preamble? New page about...? That's a pretty vague request. Please take your time at least to formulate a decent proposal. Thank you! –Austronesier (talk) 07:34, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Might I also factor in the theory of Proto-Uralo-Siberian? Kaden Bayne Vanciel (talk) 05:31, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Useless section

the section "Explanation of ablaut and other vowel changes" is useless and redundant with the ablaut page. If no one objects, I will remove it. Ioe bidome (talk) 19:37, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Oh, and it's written in notation that contradicts current practice on writing the roots as *deh₃-,*steh₂-, *ǵenh₁-, *bʰendʰ-, and *bʰer---Ioe bidome (talk) 19:44, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

I think what you removed was important. Perhaps it could be trimmed, but not deleted. Because of its removal, the comments section brings up the plow word with no context for the reader as to why its important. Lollipop (talk) (●Soap●) 00:34, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

number of such consonants in Hittite

Hittite phonology included two sounds written with symbols from the Akkadian syllabary conventionally transcribed as ḫ, as in te-iḫ-ḫi 'I put, am putting'.

If there are known to be two such consonants, why are both transcribed as ḫ? —Tamfang (talk) 03:12, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

Because the transcription (or rather, transliteration) of cuneiform is based on Akkadian, which only has a single ḫ.

It's actually hard to tell what distinction in Hittite is this is getting at exactly; either /χ/ = ḫ versus /χʷ/ = ḫu / uḫ, or /χ/ = ḫ versus /χχ/ = ḫḫ? Counting also /χχʷ/, Hittite indeed thus has four "sounds" altogether — though only two of them are single phonemes. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 19:24, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

So the Hittite phonemes have contrasting signs in cuneiform (which are consistently distinguished in Hittite) but Akkadian used the same signs indiscriminately? —Tamfang (talk) 23:01, 7 April 2024 (UTC)