>It seems to me that these two theories could be combined, [...]
>
>-Some time when unstressed short wovels disappeared and long
>unstressed wovels rendered a schwa-sound, thus creating the
>quantitive ablaut. In the presense of some consonants - espesially
>laryngeals the process rendered a shwa-sound instead of zero-wovel
>also from short wovels.
Okay, it seems to me that quantitative ablaut (*?es-/*?s-) is motivated
by an earlier stress accent fixed on what was once the penultimate
syllable before the loss of all unstressed vowels, including those at
the end of a word. As a result of this pre-IE event, the fixed accent
came to appear "mobile" and irregular.
There appear to me to be three main origins for what is lumped together
as "qualitative ablaut" on the other hand. If we speak of the alternation
seen between "non-stative" verbs in *-e- versus their "stative" o-grade
counterparts, then here I feel that this is an ancient phenomenon going
back thousands of years, since the process is not transparently
explainable like the quantitative ablaut above.
In regards to the qual.ablaut seen in roots like *po:ts "foot" (gen *pedos),
this appears to be due to preservation of earlier unstressed vowels caused
by paradigmatic alternations of accent resulting in an unstressed schwa in
the root in weak cases. The early Late IE forms would have been *pat(-s&)
in the nominative and *p&d-as in the genitive. Thus we can see that *-&-
only occurs in the root when the accent shifts. Rather than disappearing,
*& was strengthened to *e in order to avoid obscurity in the paradigm.
Afterall, if this hadn't taken place, we'd end up with **pdos with an
asyllabic root **pd-, however things like this just don't happen in IE
morphology. This is the exception to the loss of unstressed vowels in
Mid IE, all to avoid obscuring the paradigmatic pattern too much.
The third origin of qualitative ablaut is to be dated to the Late IE
period. After the loss of unstressed vowels was over, and after IE's
accent shifted in some respects (ie: acrostatic regularisation), IE
temporarily developed more schwas in any unstressed syllables that
remained. So in thematic roots, the "thematic vowel" was always
unstressed *&. Later, *& automatically lengthened before voiced phonemes
and the paradigmatic alternations between *[&] and *[&:] that developed
as a result eventually became phonemic distinctions. After a vowel
shift, *[&] fronted to *e and *[&:] became *o. This is why we observe
*bHer-o-mes "we carry" versus *bHer-e-ti "she carries" (since the *m in
*-mes is a voiced consonant and *t in *-ti is not). Also the feminine
ending is *-ah2 (< *-eh2 < *-&h2) and not **-oh2 since *h2 is _unvoiced_
and *& becomes *e.
- gLeN
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