Wyatt William F. The Greek Prothetic Vowel

American Philological Association, 1972. — 141 p. — (Philological monographs of the American Philological Association 31).My work on the Greek Prothetic Vowel represents the latest — and I hope final — stage in a series of works which I have directed against the laryngeal theory of Indo-European phonology. That theory holds that certain consonants, lost in all Indo- European languages save sometimes Hittite, were responsible, both for the color of a vowel (a e o = H1e H2e H3e) and for its length (a e o = eH1 eH2 eH3 ), and also, between consonants, for the vowel schwa (a = CHC). As a graduate student I was convinced by Professor Joshua Whatmough of the correctness of this theory, and indeed set out, under his direction, to demonstrate the effects of laryngeal consonants on Homeric scansion. I soon realized that laryngeals had nothing to do with Homer (Metrical Lengthening in Homer, Rome, 1969), and that a purely Homeric answer to Homeric problems was required: I did not, though, yet doubt the existence of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European. Later, while preparing a course in Indo-European phonology at the University of Washington and investigating the theoretical foundations of the laryngeal theory, I found that such foundations were few and weak (“Structural Linguistics and the Laryngeal Theory”, Language 40[1964] 138-52).Hence the laryngeal theory, in my thinking at least, had to be replaced, and in 1970 (Indo-European /a/, Philadelphia), I published my identification of Proto-Indo-European [a] and [a], thus removing from the Proto-Indo-European phonetic inventory a vocalizable laryngeal consonant. Difficulties remained, though, for as Professor Werner Winter had pointed out to me already in 1966, [a] and [a] seemed to contrast initially in cases of so-called Greek prothesis, [a] remaining in Greek and Sanskrit, [a] remaining only in Greek. My first answer to his observation appears on pages 24- 26 of Indo-European /a/, my final answer appears in the pages which follow. Whether or not my views of Proto-Indo-European laryngeals are accepted, I do hope that my work will have shown that laryngeals are not a cure-all, and that by positing them where they do not belong, scholars have frequently frustrated a true, or at least a better, explanation. In short, I hope that something positive will have resulted.