The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian

2. Phonology, Writing Systems, Texts 29
Proto-Indo-European when the stress-conditioned loss of former contiguous vowels left them
between two non-syllabics, thus: *CVRCô > *CəRCô > *CÇCô.
The laryngeals will be written here as: *H÷, *Hø, *Hù, *Hú (= Lehmann’s */"/, */x/, */γ/,
and */h/, respectively). Both Fortson and Clackson write *h÷, *hø, *hù.
Clackson (2007:34) reconstructs the following vowels: short: *e, *o, *(a); long: *ē, *ō,
*(ā). 60 He notes (2007:36):
We shall see later in this chapter (section 2.5) that the loss of laryngeals in most of the PIE
languages also had concomitant effects on the vowel system, and there is still debate about whether the
reconstructed system really needs the vowels *a and *ā, which accordingly have been bracketed in the
phoneme inventory given in table 2.4. Over the last fifty years the scholarly consensus has swayed
between accepting these vowels in the parent language and rejecting them. Some Indo-Europeanists have
gone even further and reconstructed an original vowel system with only one vowel, *e. At present, the
balance of opinion has settled in favour of reconstructing *a and *ā, principally supported by
correspondence sets such as the word for ‘nose’, which in different IE languages derives from a stem *nas-
or *nās-.
60 For different (and conflicting) interpretations concerning the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European vowels,
especially on the phonemic status of *i and *u and diphthongs, cf. Beekes 1995:137—142, Brugmann 1904:66—
109, Fortson 2004:60—62, Lehmann 1952:7—21, Meillet 1964:98—126, Szemerényi 1996:37—45.