PIE /e/-laryngeal colouring
When next to laryngeals h₂ and h₃, underlying short /e/ has allophones indistinguishable from underlying /a/ and /o/ respectively.
- /eh₂/ or /h₂e/ :: ah₂ or h₂a
- /eh₃/ or /h₃e/ :: oh₃ or h₃o
Naturally this complicates reconstruction, however the underlying vowel can often be deduced using clues in other forms, for example if another form of a stem with h₂a exhibits o-grade ablaut h₂o, the underlying phonemes of the former must be /h₂e/, since a cannot take on o-grade.1
tidy | sembr | phonotactics
Footnotes
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For further discussion and examples, see 2017. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 16 ↩