schmerica: (is anybody out there)
[personal profile] schmerica
YOU GUYS, I DON'T KNOW IF YOU KNOW THIS OR NOT, BUT THE PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM IS CRAZYCAKES.

Seriously, seriously, their consonant system omigosh! There are FOURTEEN STOPS and ONE FRICATIVE. There are five places of articulations, labial and dental and velar but also palatovelar [k', g'] and labiovelar [k^w, g^w], and they are all come in both voiced and unvoiced EXCEPT the labial voiced stop [b] which just DOESN'T REALLY EXIST. And then there are the aspirated stops [b^h, d^h, etc] which come in all of the points of articulation but ONLY VOICED. There are no aspirated unvoiced stops at all!

And [s]. That is IT, fricative-wise. No affricates, either. It gets voiced to z when a voiced stop follows, but STILL.

And we're not even going to TALK about laryngeals, because dude, Ferdinand de Saussure made them up with HIS PSYCHIC MIND POWERS. I'm serious! He was all "I'm a 19th century linguist, ha ha ha, and I think historical linguistics would make much more sense if Indo-European had some weird random sounds occurring RIGHT HERE." And then everybody laughed. And then FIFTY YEARS LATER HERE COMES HITTITE and everybody is like "..............OK. LARYNGEALS FOR EVERYBODY?"

UGH YOU GUUUUUUUUUUUYS I LOVE MY MAJOR OKAY.

(...[livejournal.com profile] etben, this makes me want more THEY'RE ALL LINGUISTS. Hee.)

(PS NEW ICONS. This entry is made by me, 'is anybody out there'. [livejournal.com profile] lordessrenegade made me 'frank needs a hug'.)

(no subject)

15/1/08 05:05 (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] speshope.livejournal.com
Awww, I wish we were sitting in the EMU right now and you were telling me all about this and I was nodding along until you got done so I could go "I totally didn't understand any of that, but cool. What's a fricative?"

And then I'd spend the rest of lunch making weird noises.

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