Indo-European Linguistics 6 (2018) 69–94 brill.com/ieul Anatolian evidence suggests that the Indo- European laryngeals *h2 and *h3 were uvular stops Alwin Kloekhorst Leiden University
[email protected] Abstract In this article it will be argued that the Indo-European laryngeals *h2 and *h3, which recently have been identified as uvular fricatives, were in fact uvular stops in Proto- Indo-Anatolian. Also in the Proto-Anatolian and Proto-Luwic stages these sounds prob- ably were stops, not fricatives. Keywords Indo-European – laryngeals – phonological change – Indo-Anatolian 1 Background It is well-known that the Indo-European laryngeals *h2 and *h3 have in some environments survived in Hittite and Luwian as consonants that are spelled with the graphemes ḫ (in the cuneiform script) and h (in the hieroglyphic script).1 Although in handbooks it was usually stated that the exact phonetic interpretation of these graphemes is unclear,2 in recent years a consensus seems to have formed that they represent uvular fricatives (Kümmel 2007: 1 Although there is no full consensus on the question exactly in which environments *h2 and *h3 were retained as ḫ and h: especially the outcome of *h3 in Anatolian is debated (e.g. Kloekhorst 2006). Nevertheless, for the remainder of this article it is not crucial in which environments *h2 and *h3 yielded ḫ and h, only that they sometimes did. 2 E.g. Melchert 1994: 22; Hoffner & Melchert 2008: 38. © alwin kloekhorst, 2018 | doi:10.1163/22125892-00601003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at the time of publication.