Laryngeal theory

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 7 related

1. Story
2. The proposal that Proto-Indo-European contained a small set of consonants — conventionally written h1, h2 and h3 — which had disappeared from every language known when the theory was framed, leaving behind only their effects on neighbouring vowels. Ferdinand de Saussure argued in his Mémoire of 1879 that the vowel alternations of the reconstructed language became regular if one posited abstract elements, which he called coefficients sonantiques, in specific positions. It was a purely internal argument: the entities were required by the system, and no language attested any of them. That is precisely what made the theory falsifiable in a way linguistic reconstructions rarely are, and it is why the decipherment of Hittite is treated as the discipline's decisive test. Hittite, written down in the second millennium BCE and read only from 1915, turned out to preserve a consonant conventionally transcribed h in a large share of the places Saussure's system demanded one. Jerzy Kuryłowicz identified the correspondence in 1927. The number of laryngeals, their phonetic realisation and their behaviour in individual environments are all still argued; that they existed is not.
3. Knowledge
4. Laryngeal theory
5. Ferdinand de Saussure
6. Connections
7. Ferdinand de Saussure
8. Hittite
9. Saussure posits consonants no language attests
10. Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients
11. Laryngeal theory
12. Saussure posits consonants no language attests
13. Evidence
14. Supports the attribution to Saussure of the coefficients sonantiques — the abstract elements later identified as the Indo-European laryngeals. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The 1878/1879 discrepancy between issue and imprint is stated as it is conventionally reported and was not checked against the volume.
15. Supports the identification of the Hittite laryngeal with Saussure's posited coefficients, which is the corroboration of laryngeal theory. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. Cited without pagination; the title is given in the form conventional in the Indo-European literature and was not verified against the volume.