Abstract
It has been established with a great amount of certainty that PIE *#Hu- > Gr. #Vὐ- and that PIE *#Hi- > Gr. #ἰ-. It still remains to be demonstrated what happens in other Western Indo-European branches, including Germanic. In this article,1 I reject the statement by Ringe (1988: 433) that PIE *#Hu- becomes PG *#uand propose the possibility of differentiated outcomes dependent on the timbre of the PIE laryngeal, viz. that PIE *#h1i- > PG *#i- and PIE *#h1u- > PG *#u- as assumed by most scholars, but that PIE *#h2i- and PIE *#h2u- might yield PG *#ai- and PG *#au-, respectively. Furthermore, I tentatively propose that PG *#au- > PG *#uwhen followed by a labial consonant; a development partially paralleled in Greek and in English.
© 2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
