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The mysterious sounds of ancient Indo-European languages: What secrets do the lost guttural sounds hold?
In linguistics, there is a theory that has attracted much attention - the glottal theory - which argues that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) consisted of a series of glottal consonants that cannot be directly reconstructed through comparative methods. The specific pronunciation locations of these "missing" sounds have not yet been determined, but scholars believe that these sounds contain a lot of important information about language evolution.
Behind this search lies the question of how these lost sounds influenced the vowel system of Proto-Indo-European and why they disappeared in many of their descendant languages. All this means that the evolution of language is far more complicated than we thought.
Supporters of the laryngeal sound theory try to use this theory to explain some phenomena that cannot be explained by the traditional comparative method. They believe that the presence of these laryngeal sounds would have made the phonemic system of Proto-Indo-European more regular and allowed the presence of vowel phonemes other than *e or *o in syllables.
This theory is crucial to our understanding of the phonological structure of Proto-Indo-European languages, especially since the decipherment of Hittite, which revealed that it was an Indo-European language and that many Hittite words were related to Proto-Indo-European The roots of the language are directly related. The Hittite phoneme ḫ is thought to represent one of the hypothesized Proto-Indo-European sounds.
This allowed the scholars to deduce a set of rules, through which more and more subordinate languages could be derived from the Proto-Indo-European roots through these new phonetic phenomena, and the extension of this theory made the increasing number of examples to make it clearer and more widely accepted.
The glottal theory, which is widely accepted by scholars today, holds that there were three glottal phonemes in Proto-Indo-European: h₁, h₂ and h₃. As for descendant languages such as Hittite, they did not retain these glottal sounds themselves, but inherited the sounds produced by the merger of these glottal sounds with the short vowels in Proto-Indo-European. This situation further triggered heated discussions on the specific pronunciation of glottal sounds.
This theory was first proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879. Although it was not widely accepted at the time, it was accepted by the academic community with the discovery of Hittite. The degree has been greatly improved. The unique phonemes in Hittite prompted scholars to rethink the old relationship between spelling and phonetics.
The discovery of the Hittite language has provided new explanations for many previously difficult-to-explain phonetic changes and has also made the promotion of glottal sounds possible. This theory solves the mysteries in the minds of many linguists, especially the phenomenon of vowel harmony within syllables.
Several major glottal versions followed, including the voiceless glottal of h₁, the a-colored glottal of h₂, and the o-colored glottal of h₃, all representing different phonemic variabilities. Some scholars have suggested that the formation of glottal sounds is closely related to the role they play in speech. Especially when glottal sounds appear before short vowels, they often lead to the production of long vowels. This phenomenon is particularly obvious in the Indo-European language family.
The evolution of a language may lie in these subtle but crucial changes. In the texts left by various ancient civilizations, the existence of guttural sounds is still a yearning and reconstruction of the old voices. In today's linguistic research, exploring the specific pronunciation and evolution of glottal sounds remains a hot topic.
Can tracing these ancient phonetic memories give us a deeper understanding of the nature of language and how it evolved?
