New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

Laryngeal refers to the place of articulation (where the air stream is constricted). They are pronounced way in the back of the throat, like the glottal stop. Even further back than things like Greek chi or German ch.

The laryngeal consonants were guttural sounds produced in the back of the throat, like English h, German ch, Arabic `ayn or qaf, etc. We don't know exactly what the pronunciations were, but in other existing languages, laryngeal sounds like this tend to have an effect on the surrounding vowels. This happens because your tongue has to movie continuously between the sounds it produces, and so there's some blurring that happens between adjacent sounds.

In particular, laryngeal sounds tend to make vowels near them become more back, low, and round. So for example before a uvular q sound in Arabic, the sound /a/ which is usually something like English a in cat will become back and low, something more like au in caught. You can get a process like this, playing out over hundreds of years:

1. You start with a form like Hewis, where H is some laryngeal sound.

2. The laryngeal sound makes the following vowel low and back, yielding Hawis.

3. The laryngeal sound drops, leaving just awis.

In fact this is how we get the Indo-European root for "sheep" (reflected in English ewe, Latin ovis, etc.). The Hittite form is hawis.

Sure - and of course let me preface this by saying I am not an archaeologist, merely someone who is interested.

My comment was perhaps overgeneralizing specifically from the early neolithic transition in Europe more broadly than I should have been. One example of the work I am discussing is the work of Cavalli-Sforza (ie https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.94.15.7719). My understanding of the history of academic work on this subject was the prior to the 1970s or 80s or so, it was largely thought the spread of agriculture did not imply genetic population replacement and subsequent genetic research has since proven that is false.

I don't think the article you've linked actually disagrees with me. Excerpting briefly

> Essentially, in the Pueblo Southwest, language became partially decoupled from genes and culture, probably because language is a stronger convention (Young 1966) than are the other two, and can therefore better withstand the blending forces discussed below. A second force for creating zones of cultural similarity, more applicable to the case of phylogenetically distinct groups considered here, is through mixture of groups via movement of people (“demic” diffusion) that also entrained sharing of culture. To the extent that this describes the Pueblo case, once again, such mixing could not to have been so extreme as to undermine the linguistic differences that still survive. Recent research (e.g., Kandler 2009) provides some guidance as to the factors determining which language will prevail when linguistically different groups come into contact. The relative sizes of the populations, their relative status, and the duration of the flow are all relevant. To the extent that emigrating populations were relatively low in status, small in number, and arriving sporadically, it is more likely that they would adopt, rather than displace, the language of any group they were entering. Of course cultural similarities among groups can also emerge without population movement by copying neighboring groups, a process that anthropologists once simply called diffusion (e.g., Sahlins 1960). In the terms used by Collard et al. (2006), both movement of people among groups and this horizontal cultural transmission among groups are blending processes, as opposed to the branching processes discussed in the previous paragraph.

To me, this article seems to be attempting to explain the cultural similarity between (at least originally) disparate linguistic Pueblo groups (that largely, afaict from the article, share common genetics). In the paragraph above, you can see that the author is describing population migration and displacement as one of the key ways for cultural/linguistic transfer (especially when the populations moving are large) that 'can also' emerge without displacement, but I understand the article to be describing this as a minoritarian current - an exception to the broader pattern of pre-modern linguistic & cultural spread through displacement.

> Could these words not have been derived somewhat later independently

That would require that the independent languages maintained the exact same derivational process of reduplication + zero-grade ablaut in the root. We know from the attested history of IE language that derivational processes last only for a while before they die out. That independent languages maintained that particular derivational process (which is inseparable from historical-phonological developments, too) for thousands and thousands of years, is extremely unlikely, which is just one of the many pieces of evidence against the Anatolian hypothesis.

Worth pointing out that Armenian is not a descendent of the Anatolian branch (if you didn't know that already). The whole Anatolian tree of Indo-European (Hittite, Luwian, Lydian, etc.) is extinct; the languages there were displaced completely in the late Bronze age and early Iron Age.