Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients
Jerzy Kuryłowicz identified the consonant transcribed h in Hittite with the abstract elements Saussure had posited in 1879 on purely internal grounds, showing that Hittite preserved a reflex in a substantial share of the predicted positions. A reconstruction made without evidence, forty-eight years earlier, was corroborated by a language recovered from the ground in the interval. The number and phonetic value of the laryngeals remain argued; their existence does not.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Laryngeal theory · concept · not located
- Hittite · cultural practice · Türkiye · not located
- Proto-Indo-European · model · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
ə indo-européen et ḫ hittite
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.
in Symbolae grammaticae in honorem Ioannis Rozwadowski, vol. 1, Kraków · 1927 · Partly verified
Kuryłowicz, J., "ə indo-européen et ḫ hittite", in Symbolae grammaticae in honorem Ioannis Rozwadowski, vol. 1 (Kraków, 1927)
Recorded on Laryngeal theory
- Proto-Indo-European is spoken
- Saussure posits consonants no language attests
- The Boğazköy tablet archives are excavated
- Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language
- Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients
- A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic
- Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
- A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin · 2023
- Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe · 2015
- A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic · 2003
- Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language · 1915
- The Boğazköy tablet archives are excavated · 1906
- Saussure posits consonants no language attests · 1879
- Proto-Indo-European is spoken · ~3000 BCE