Hi, Phoenix, Welcome to Dnghu.org Forum
Yes, you have asked in the right place, but we were very busy revising the old grammar, and no mail arrived when you wrote here, sorry for the delay.
First of all, I invite you to read our new version at
http://dnghu.org/en/Indo-European%20grammar/
About your specific questions:
1.
Especially the orthography is very confusing. In the PDF grammar it seems that long vowels are marked with an underline, but this isn't found back anywhere else, while in a language in which vowel length is of such vital important it seems silly to not mark it.
With our new grammar 2.0, I hope the long vowels question is solved (we had the same feelings about it). We wrote it that way because we wanted it to be read easily by all, and especially because we designed it for a university project, not exactly for linguists or interested people - we planned to write a new, revised one before the summer 2006, but (as you can see) that wasn't the case...
However, the simplified writing system of version 1.0 remains valid (but for the 'c' value) if one has no access to UTF-8, thus the macrons and accents remain a 'learning-mark', so to speak.
2.
Besides that I have a question about the "a". It is said that it is supposed to represent the laryngeal h2. Which seems like a good correspondence. And it is to be pronounced as `schwa'. But in the vowel system in the grammar it also states an "a" and an "a:". Would a correspond to h2e and a: to eh2? And if so, how are these three different sounds going to be distinguished in writing?
We obviously mixed the older "schwa indogermanicum" with the laryngeals' theory, because of the different approaches of our books - we hope that question has been solved in the new grammar, with the a-only approach.
It is indeed a controversial simplification (as we suppose an older IE II laryngeal-stage, from which Anatolian split, and a newer IE III, from which the rest derived), but we still think it necessary to avoid the laryngeals' question, however artificial it may seem.
Where a schwa was reconstructed, we take an a-, and we pronounce a-, as in pater (not ph2ter), or anamos (anemos), or anamalis (animal), or artidhaks (artifice), etc. It is not a final decision, though; we will keep working on its details, especially because of the "purer PIE - loan translations - loan words" struggle that we find in each vocabulary building...
Thank you for your interest. Remember the grammar is now GFDL/ CC-by-sa, just in case you want to make your own improvements and publish your own grammar without having to wait for us to work with you!
Carlos
