Pronounciation of PIE word ḱóymeh

July 4, 2022 3:03 PM

Looking for best-guess pronunciation of the various forms of *ḱóymos/*ḱóymeh. Is there some software I can drop this into and get something generated? Hidden youtube somewhere of someone reciting these? Or can you share something phonetic that I can relate it to?
posted by curious nu to Human Relations (3 answers total)

This is either easier or harder than it looks.

The reason that Proto-Indo-European usually isn't written in phonetic transcription is that, well, we don't have a great idea of what the phonetics were all the time. It's a reconstructed language, and we're more sure about the phonetic identity of some sounds than others. In particular, that "h" represents one of the laryngeals, which is a group of consonants whose pronunciation is still a big question mark. Using a notation system specific to PIE is one way to indicate that these are reconstructed phonemes, rather than necessarily the phonetic reality.

That said, if Wiktionary is using standard PIE notation (which I believe it does), you can transliterate it into IPA or other phonetic transcription system using these values. So that would give, e.g.:

*ḱóymos => /ˈcojmos/ (in IPA)

Or approximately, KOY-mohs, if I'm trying just some English phonetic respelling (which is always a bit ambiguous, you might read that differently than I expect). That /c/ represents a palatal stop, a sound we do not have in English; it is like a /k/ but there is a closure hard palate instead of the velum, in the same place that the tongue raises for the "y" sound. Also, word stress in PIE was probably more pitch-based than in English.

(Also, that palatal stop is not aspirated like it would be in English, so it might sound more like GOY-mohs to you.)

I'm not aware of anywhere you can just drop this in and have the word read aloud, nor am I aware of a resource where someone just reads aloud a PIE dictionary. There are online forums where PIE/phonetics nerds could record requested words for you on a service like vocaroo (e.g. r/linguistics on reddit, but read their rules as it would probably need to go in the Q&A thread). I could do it, but I try to avoid posting my voice publicly.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:45 PM on July 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

I don't know how much you know about PIE, so apologies if this is very basic. This Wikipedia article is a good intro, though it overstates scholarly agreement.

One, we don't really know. These are reconstructions, based on the daughter languages. We are far more confident in the phonemic reconstruction than in the actual phonetic realization.

Two, scholars have been arguing hotly over this for a hundred years. We generally use the 19th century scholars' orthography, because it's widely known and available, but there is widespread agreement that the three series of stops ("voiceless, voiced, aspirated") aren't what the 19th century scholars thought, but little agreement on what they are instead. And you probably don't want to know how convoluted scholarship on the vowels is.

All that said, the only unusual thing in ḱóymos is the ḱ, and that represents a palatal /c/ (as in Hindi; it will probably sound to you like English ch) or a palatalized /kj/, as in Russian. Note that some scholars reject the three-way ḱ/k/kʷ contrast, which no daughter language preserves.

So, if you literally say CHOY-mos no one can really say you're wrong. Just be aware that a given Indo-Europeanist might say something quite different (on preview: like Kutsuwamushi!), and there is no guarantee an actual Indo-European speaker would understand you.
posted by zompist at 3:48 PM on July 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you want to take a stab at ḱóymeh₂... well, read this section on h₂ and pick your favorite linguist. Just pronounce h₂ as something, don't leave it out.
posted by zompist at 4:10 PM on July 4, 2022