Indo-European laryngeals in Afro-Asiatic perspective

Václav Blažek (Masaryk University, Brno, blazek@phil.muni.cz)

Journal of Language Relationship, № 5, 2011 - p.1-22

Abstract: The paper represents an attempt to verify the reconstruction of laryngeal consonants in Proto-Indo-European through external comparison with Afro-Asiatic languages. Working from a standpoint of genetic relatedness between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic, the author has assembled a set of 80 binary comparisons that contain laryngeals both in their Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic constituents. Analysis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that (a) Indo-European *H1 generally corresponds to Afro-Asiatic *ʔ; (b) Indo-European *H2 and *H3 correspond to all the other Afro-Asiatic laryngeals, with the much rarer *H3 possibly representing just a positional variant of *H2.

Keywords: Indo-European languages, Afrasian (Afro-Asiatic) languages, Nostratic, long-range comparison, laryngeal theory

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