[pieml] Re: IE: likely home, India

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2002 3:55 PM
> Subject: [tied] [pieml] Re: IE: likely home, India
>
>
> */e/? So I-I has */a/ > */e/ > */a/ and */a:/ > */o/ > */a/ ? BTW,
> isn't <&> in itself front enough to cause palatalization (the fact

of

> which I haven't disputed)?

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> The ante-PIE state of things (I mean the "origin" of the PIE vowel
system) is a a matter of speculation and debate. Not so the Indo-
European quality of *e. The vowel is normally reflected as mid-low to
mid-high front /e/ in Old Hittite, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic
(with a partial shift to /i/), Slavic, Baltic and Armenian. It causes
the palatalisation of various consonants in several branches and
individual languages. Tocharian and Albanian show complicated
developments, but these are strictly local affairs, and the reflexes
in question point to a mid front vowel as well (consonants are
palatalised before it in both branches) *e. In Indo-Iranian the
reflex is /a/, but again velars are palatalised before it. Being a
former schwa-like vowel is not enough to cause palatalisation in IIr
at least, where velars are _not_ palatalised before any /i/ that
reflects syllabic laryngeals or epenthetic vowels.
>
> To sum up, the comparative evidence for *e = /e/ is absolutely
overwhelming. Only someone with an urgent non-linguistic agenda could
have a reason to ignore it. The lapse of time between the
disintegration of PIE and the Indo-Iranian merger can only be guessed
at, but must have been pretty long. My private estimate is ca. 2500
years or slightly more. There is no reason to suppose that during
that period the vowel was anything else but /e/-like (middish front).
>
> Piotr
>
>

I am duly overwhelmed. Actually, what Cuny proposed was (approx.) a:ä
for o:e, the latter fitting nicely in the range of "mid-low to mid-
high front /e/".

Torsten