The phonetic value of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals

Abstract

Discussion of the exact phonetic value of the so-called ‘laryngeals’ in Proto-Indo-European has been ongoing ever since their discovery, and no uniform consensus has yet been reached. This paper aims at introducing a new method to determine the quality of the laryngeals that differs substantially from traditional techniques previously applied to this problem, by making use of deep neural networks as part of the larger field of machine learning algorithms. Phonetic environment data serves as the basis for training the networks, enabling the algorithm to determine sound features solely by their immediate phonetic neighbors. It proves possible to assess the phonetic features of the laryngeals computationally and to propose a quantitatively founded interpretation.