Indo-European Linguistics
Proto-Indo-European Roots
PIE */b/
Glottalic */p'/
Entries in the table below show Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots, rendered as Pokorny etyma where the reconstructed phoneme */b/ (glottalic */p'/) appears in final position. Each root is linked to a page showing the PIE etymon and Indo-European (IE) reflexes thereof.
Note: Pokorny's etyma as spelled on this page have been rendered in ISO-8859-1, but links lead to pages rendered in Unicode 3 -- with other renderings available via links there. [Unicode pages generally render Pokorny's etyma and non-English text more faithfully than is possible in ISO-8859-1, so they are much preferred.]
| Final Position | ||
|---|---|---|
| PIE *lab- 'to lick, smack (the lips), etc.' | ||
| PIE *leb- 'lip; to hang down slackly' | ||
| PIE *ghreib- 'to grab, grip' |
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) words beginning with *b (glottalic *p') are missing from the lexical inventory. In addition, PIE roots lack the consonant combinations dVb and gVb -- suggesting a constraint on roots with two voiced stops. If voiced stops were originally [pronounced as] glottalics, these apparent oddities would have a typological explanation: glottalized labials tend to be anomalous in human languages, and two glottalized stops seem not to co-occur in the same root.
Re: "Glottalic Theory," see the section on phonology in Thomas V. Gamkrelidze & Vjaceslav V. Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans (1984 Russian original translated by Johanna Nichols; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995, 2 vol's).