This is the linguistics weblog of Christopher Culver, who graduated with a B.A. Classics from Loyola University Chicago and is currently doing an M.A. in Finno-Ugrian linguistics at the University of Helsinki.

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LaTeX primer now includes glottalic stops

I have added a small section to my LaTeX for Classical Philologists and Indo-Europeanists primer on the typesetting of postulated glottalic stops. Even as late as 2000, Winfred Lehmann (in his Pre-Indo-European) has thought the theory has some viability, so I think that there may be demand for typesetting their representation. Unfortunately, the latex-unicode package still does not include a translation for Unicode character U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, which is semantically meaningful for glottalisation in a way that plain apostrophe is not.

2 Responses to “LaTeX primer now includes glottalic stops”

  1. language hat Says:

    “Even as late as 2000, Winfred Lehmann… has thought the theory has some viability”

    Huh? Are there still Indo-Europeanists who don’t accept the laryngeal theory? I thought it had been pretty well proved decades ago.

  2. CRCulver Says:

    The glottalic theory doesn’t contradict the laryngeal theory. Laryngeals were added to the inventory of consonants to explain irregularities in ablaut and the origin of long vowels. The glottalic theory, on the other hand, is an attempt to have a more typologically-probable view of the proto-language by replacing voiced unaspirated stops with unvoiced glottalic stops, so that instead of b we have pʼ etc.

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