Odp: IE 6 (schwa) = Indo-Iranian i ???

From: Piotr Gąsiorowski
Message: 18
Date: 1999-09-14

 
----- Original Message -----
From: proto-language@...
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Saturday, September 11, 1999 5:31 PM
Subject: [cybalist] IE 6 (schwa) = Indo-Iranian i ???

Dear Indo-Europeanists:

I have thought for some time that the traditional equation of

IE 6    =    Indo-Iranian i


as in IE *p6te:'r = Old Indian pita'r

is incorrect. I believe a likelier explanation is that Indo-Iranian
had a series of roots with -y that corresponded to non-Indo-Iranian
roots without -y (pe/o- vs. pey-).

Does anyone think this is even worth discussing?


Pat Ryan
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Dear Pat,
 
Unfortunately, the correspondences that lead to reconstructing PIE 'schwa' are very regular, and there is sometimes additional evidence for the presence of a PIE laryngeal next to the zero-grade vowel. If you are interested in the details, I can give you a number of examples. In order to make your point, you would need to posit improbably massive alternation between Skt roots with i and cognate non-Indic roots without it. I do not think you would be able to provide any plausible motivation for adding a glide here and there apparently at random, sometimes in root-internal position. Note that even Iranian reflexes of schwa involve no i, so the alternation would have to postdate common Indo-Iranian!
 
On the other hand, it's likely that the differentiation between *a and schwa is not PIE but restricted to Indic and conditioned by stress. More precisely, an unstressed *a would have been raised in Proto-Sanskrit, ending up as a high vowel. W. F. Wyatt (1970) defends this position in his Indo-European /a/ (University of Pennsylvania Press). In this way we could do without a phonemic schwa in PIE, if that's what you'd like to achieve.
 
Piotr Gasiorowski