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• Corynne asks if it matters whether a word is colored before the laryngeal drops out or can it be the other way around?
• Oh, excellent question. Yes, it does matter.
• If the laryngeal were to drop out first, how could it still be the case that there are 3 different effects? h1 doesn't color, *eh2 colors to *a, and *eh3 colors to *o? There would be no different laryngeals left to condition the "coloring" and so no good reason for three different reflexes.
  
• Patrick says that the homework was very hard but in class he was learning a lot.
• Please please please pay attention to the following, because it is true of everything you will ever learn that is hard: the first efforts can be  confusing, and you might think you are getting NOTHING out of them, no right answers, but you are getting a lot out of that puzzling. When the answer does come, whether from a book, a teacher, or your own brain, all that puzzling you did beforehand has gotten your brain ready to understand the answer.
• This is based not only on some quack theory of Prof. Bailly, but also on neuroscientists studying learning. I was excited to read about this, because it confirmed a suspicion many people have always had: puzzlement is an important stage of learning.
  
• If you just wait until someone hands you the answer, your learning will not be as reliable, your understanding will be inadequate, and you will always feel shaky about the material.
• It is simply vital that you try these homeworks, no matter how hard they are, and no matter whether you feel that you are not sure of any of the answers.
• Puzzling over something is an incredibly important step.
• That said, don't bang your head against the wall for more than a couple hours: if you aren't "getting it," do what you can, WRITE DOWN YOUR QUESTIONS, and go on. Then come back to it and see if something clicks. Then ask in class.
  
• Max is amazed at how many sounds he makes in his mother tongue that he doesn't even notice.
• Yeah. It sure is amazing: a whole new world. A phonologist could blow your mind with how deep this goes. We're only scratching the surface.
• Annie feels that she is starting to hear the sound correspondences between PIE and its reflexes.
• Excellent: that "hearing" is a very important thing!
• Chaz wants to know if that ee in *dhedheeti is a glottal stop. Andrea wanted to know whether it's a long *e or a glottal.
  
• You are talking about exercise 3k, where *dhedheh1eti has the laryngeal drop out and turns into *dhedheeti.
• §3.20 tells us that it is called a "laryngeal hiatus" without telling us more. A hiatus is where two vowels are next to each other with no apparent consonant between them. It occurs between words all the time, as in "to it" or "no aardvarks."
  
• But §3.20 also refers us to §10.26 and §11.23. If you go there, you learn that both Indic and Avestan texts have hiatuses where PIE reconstruction tells us there was a laryngeal, and they call it "laryngeal hiatus." And both of them say the it was "probably a glottal stop."! Nice work: you both made a great conjecture based on what you know, and "experts" confirm that you may be right.
  
• Michael D wonders how often basic PIE theories change or are rejected.
• Good question.
• There is a lot of controversy around many of these theories. Much of it concerns details, of course, but sometimes something major re-adjusts.
• Hard to answer this confidently.
• What would happen if we found an old IE language that had symbols supporting glottalic theory? Well, we'd have to really rethink a lot. Could happen.
• There is another introductory textbook to PIE that tries to "teach through controversy": instead of presenting what "most" PIE linguists think is right, James Clackson's Indoeuropean Linguistics presents a series of controversies and the evidence on both sides. An interesting approach, not taken in this class, but that shouldn't stop you from finding it and reading it.
  
• Jonathan T asks what the process for determining the sound of the laryngeals was.
• Before Hittite was deciphered, all that there was to go on was the environment of these hypothetical sounds in later reflexes: comparisons between reflexes and looking for similar phenomena lead to the idea that they were gutturals/glottals, etc.--back-of-the-mouth and throaty sounds, to put it non-technically.
  
• Once Hittite was deciphered, there was some additional evidence of a different nature: confirmation that this was the right track, a symbol that was clearly "laryngeal" in some way.
  
• Actually, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory#Pronunciation is not a bad place to start: it's pretty up-to-date and has good recent bibliography.
  
• To give an instance, because h3 colored to o, linguists looked over in nearby languages, non-IE semitic ones, to see what created that sort of coloring over there, and by analogy hypothesized what h3 might have sounded like (all humans have the same basic sound-making apparatus, and so, ceteris paribus, similar phonological developments are likely to happen in different languages). A labial-laryngeal would make sense, because o is a vowel made with lip rounding: a labial element in h3 could naturally lead to o.
  
• There are several competing theories, and the evidence is pretty advanced, which I why Fortson quite reasonably dodges this question.
• Want to dive in and give a presentation?
• Thomas W hypothesizes that the laryngeals were glottal/pharyneal fricatives that were distinguished based on tongue shape much like vowels.
• NICE!
  
• See above: there's a lot to read and a lot to do in this area.
• Eggy G wonders if laryngeals were kept anywhere other than Hittite.
• Just Hittite, Luwian, and Lycian (all Anatolian) show actual symbols that represent laryngeal sounds.
• But other languages show trace evidence (coloring, vowel lengthening), among which the neatest may be the so-called "triple reflex" in Greek, where Greek has different vowels for each of the three hypothesized laryngeals. Look in the Greek chapter of Fortson for this.
  
• Eloise asks if I have any resources for beginners?
• Well, I don't imagine you want to buy a phonology textbook and an intro to comparative linguistics textbook (Campbell's is a standard), but that would be useful.
• Actually, wikipedia is quite good on lots of this. Try looking up "Indoeuropean phonemes" or "phonology" and following the links. You'll learn a lot of basic material pretty quickly. Some will be confusing, but some will be helpful.
• Briggs H asks if Greek is the second oldest after Hittite.
• Fortson has his chapters in pretty much chronological order, so it goes Hittite, Indo-Iranian (i.e. Sanskrit and Avestan, among others), Greek, Italic, Celtic... But some of these are quite close to each other chronologically, and there is a difference between when our first written evidence for a language occurs and when that language split off as a branch.
  
• Alexandra J. asks which of these rules we should be memorizing.
• Well, they are all important in various ways.
• It's very hard to choose, and there are no truly right or wrong answers.
• I assume you are asking from a purely practical point of view: you have finite time and can't memorize everything we've read in Fortson. That's reasonable.
• It seems to me that I need to give you some guidance on that. At a minimum, you should memorize the rules that are involved in doing the homework, so the laryngeals, coloring and dropping out, syllabification, voicing assimilation, applying a given phonemic inventory list with later reflexes to a set of words from various languages (3.1).
• Annie finds it interesting how much sound affects memorizability and that people were able to memorize poems as long as Homer.
• Many of you have easily that much stored up in terms of pop songs, movie lines, movies, etc. All of those are full of memorable things, just not connected into one extremely long thing.
• Homer is not long compared to some oral traditions: explore the Indic tradition. But I'm not saying Homer isn't long. I'm amazed too.
• Patrick wants to know more about the timeline for all of these languages in the IE family.
• Yes, that's one key to parts of this huge puzzle. They cover a range of at least 3 millennia. It's worth getting a picture of that into our heads.
  
• Max B wants to know if Greek acts as some sort of benchmark here, in the middle chronologically and geographically.
• Greek has some very important aspects to it: it preserves lots of sounds and forms better than many other branches, but I'd need to hear more about what you mean. I think the question would fragment into sub-areas and subquestions. Phonologically, some languages are interesting for certain reasons (Sanskrit has the aspirates!) while others are interesting for other reasons (Greek verbs and laryngeal reflexes).
• Abbie M wants to know about the approach to poetry in PIE and IE languages.
• The poetry that we have is certainly examined as literature by philologists, but when they don their historical linguistics hats, linguists focus on the relations to other languages and hints as to the proto-language or lost transitional phases.