Comments/Questions 1/30

• Max asks if there are any Hittite speakers left?
• No. There are several languages typically listed as Anatolian. They are Hittite, Luwian, Lydian, and Lycian. There are also Crian, Pisidian, and Sidetic. None survived past the first millennium BCE.
• Eggy G asks if it is enjoyable that there are times when there is no right answer in PIE linguistics or is it more frustrating?
• It is enjoyable exploring what people think they know, some of which seems quite certain indeed. But it is also enjoyable realizing there is a lot of work to be done. It seems like most areas of human knowledge where there is active research.
• Eloise P asks if Indo-European penetrated into the Levant or as far as Egypt.
• The Mitanni were in the Levant, I believe.
• The Persian empire stretched to Egypt, where some Old Persian language has been found as well, I believe.
• So yes, the Indo-Iranian branch stretched that far.
• Andrea A suggests more writing of the answers on the board.
• Will do: but don't anyone be shy about asking for things like that. I'm not always aware of what might be most helpful.
• Andrea A also says she found a root for milk in Mallory's PIE roots.
• Fortson claims at 2.53 that there is a PIE root for milking, but not one for milk. I don't have Mallory here. Fortson is careful in what he says: "while we can reconstruct a verb for the act of milking, we cannot reconstruct a word for the liquid itself: the terms in the daughter languages are apparently related (Greek galak-, glak-, Latin lact-, English milk), but differ too much from one another to allow precise reconstruction."
  
• Wiktionary confirms what Andrea claims: *h₂melǵ- is listed as a root of both the verb "to milk" and the noun "milk," and various derivatives of it are listed. It is interesting that most do seem to be verbal, but there are some nouns. 
• On the other hand, *glakt is hypothesized as the PIE root of Greek galakt- and Latin lac-, and I don't find a bridge suggested between *glakt and *h₂melǵ-.
  
• Patrick found the homework hard, but that it made sense in class: he would like more in-class examples.
• Point taken.
• The quandary is that it's really exciting to get to the point where we can talk about individual daughter languages, and if we go slow enough to really master all that Fortson packs into the first 6 or so chapters, we'll never get there.
• The hope is that we can thread the needle: pick up enough concepts and patterns so that when we get to a daughter language, we'll be able to understand the material enough so that we can then dig back into Fortson's previous chapters to explore what we need.
• No one ever got this completely the first time around: we get what we can, and then go back and use these chapters as a reference to explore where we need to as we need to.
• Briggs H asks about syllabification and if all the daughter languages have their own set of syllable rules.
• What is most important is to get the idea that each vowel is the heart of each syllable. Vowels typically have a consonant before them, and that is part of that vowel's syllable.
  
• But the resonants (including laryngeals) can go either way: they can be vowels or consonants.
• So once you have identified the clear vowels and attached any preceding consonant to them, you mop up the resonants and usually the word falls into neat syllables.
• WHen it doesn't, I think it's enough for now to note that it doesn't.
• The next chapter will introduce the idea of a PIE root and its typical shape, which will build on this syllabification and clarify it somewhat.
• Corynne asks what makes people think there were 2 versions of H1, the first laryngeal.
• In Hittite, conflicting evidence was found about h1's reflex, and so Lehmann hypothesized two different ones to explain why the evidence seemed to show more than one reflex.
• Alexandra J asks if we should be making more quizlets.
• I think they would help.
  
• Annie finds it interesting that Old Norse uses a short a where PIE also has a short a: some elements remain unchanged in one language while others change a lot, and then in another language the PIE short a might change (many vowels became short a in Sanskrit, for example).
• Yep, that's what we're trying to track.
• It's a huge web and puzzle. Once you get the hang of a few of the threads, you can start surfing around the web to see many unsuspected reflexes (I currently love the one that says that *h₃rḗǵs is part of English 'drake' (male duck).
  
• Oxford English Dictionary list Germanic comparanda: " Old High German antrahho, antrehho, Middle High German antreche, German enterich, 1599 endtrich, German dialect endedrach, antrek, antrecht, entrach, Swedish (from Low German) anddrake, the first element usually explained as eend, end, ente, and, ant, anut ‘duck’"
• Note that those comparanda are all compounds of a word for 'duck' (Ente/ant/ende, etc. 'duck' + a second element). The second element has been identified as *h₃rḗǵs 'king' by some, but Oxford English Dictionary says " The notion that Middle English drake was shortened from an Old English *andrake has no basis of fact, and the conjecture that the word contains the suffix -ric, -rich, ‘chief, mighty, ruler’, is absurd." and yet OED does not say why it is absurd.
• There's an old saying ' si non e vero, e ben trovato.' which means something like "it's too good not to be true."
• Abbie M notices that it seems as though English, Welsh and Armenian vary more than other languages from PIE.
• It's very dangerous to generalize like that, I think. That's because one language (Greek) preserves rather nicely three separate reflexes of the laryngeals, and is a nice argument for there having been three of them originally, but in Sanskrit so many vowels turn into short a that such a distinction between laryngeal reflexes is harder there. On the other hand, Sanskrit preserves those aspirated stops incredibly well. PIE linguists try to separate out what is an ancient remnant and what is an innovation, and they find ancient remnants in every branch. They are simply different from branch to branch in many cases. And truth to tell, there's a lot of disagreement beneath the surface of Fortson: but there is obviously enough agreement that what Fortson says is a sort of "state of the field."
• Abbie also wants to know what 'English' is being referred to when PIE folks talk about English.
• Basically, Old English, Old Icelandic, Old Frisian, etc.: PIE linguists look for the oldest evidence from each Germanic language. Modern English preserves some traces from Middle English and Old English that go right back to proto-Germanic and through that to Proto-Indo-European, but since we have direct evidence of Old English, Old Icelandic, etc., there is no need to try to use Modern English to justify their claims. They can use an earlier version.
• Jonathan T wants to know how people reasoned that laryngeals were syllabic consonants like resonants.
• That's a big ask, to explain laryngeals, and this "quick answer" format is not the place for it, just as it was not for Corynne's great question above. For now, I'll send you to wikipedia's "laryngeal theory" page. Look in particular at the specific roots that are discussed a ways down the page.