Re: [tied] Nominative: A hybrid view

Okay Jens, back to my questions, since you wanted to answer :-)

> > They are listed as separate phonemes.
>
> Yes; what I mean is that /d/ and /t/ were even opposed to each

other in

> word-final position in PIE, or at least in that prestage of it in

which

> the "thematic vowel" was split up into /e/ and /o/ depending on the
> phonetic character of the following segment (being /o/ before

[+voice],

> /e/ elsewhere).

Question: who says this and where? Or if it is your theory, what is
it based on. I just have a problem with mere statements, I usually
want to know where they come from. Nothing new to science, or to
journalism, for that matter.

The two phonemes, however, *are* neutralized in

> Indo-Iranian and Italic.

Examples? In what way are they neutralized?

It is often forgotten, even in historical

> grammars, that Sanskrit is incapable of showing whether a final

stop was

> voiced or voiceless, since the opposition is neutralized in *all*

sandhi

> position.

That should be so, assuming what you said above about voice/voiceless
is true or at least a point of scientific agreement.

> > But if you take the case of a voiced vowel becoming voiceless at
> > the end of a word, you will end up with lots of languages on the
> > list. Isn't this simply a case of allophones and why should this
> > exclusively concern the phoneme-system of PIE?
>
> I take this to read "consonant".

That already cleared up.

If *-d and *-t are opposed to each other

> in PIE, there is a phonemic contrast even in that position.

Okay, to make it clear, what do you mean by opposed? Do you mean
exclusive? And *in what position* exclusive?

A form like

> *kWod > PGmc. *hwat (Germ. was) would appear to reflect the old

voicing,

> if in a funny way.

How does it reflect it? How can you draw a conclusion from just one
example reflecting something? It could be so coincidentially. Don't
get me wrong, but in the area of IE linguistics it is full of people
who are simply being awfully creative. One has to be careful.

Not to mention that, I am wondering why

> > this particular ending in Abl. Sg. is taken as indicative of the
> > ending in PIE. I would appreciate any ideas.
>
> It is a very good candidate for a direct reflexion of the PIE

abl.sg. form

> of o-stems because it matches Latin lupo:, older -o:d, Oscan -ud

very

> well.

That clear.

It apparently also matches the gen.sg. of o-stems in Balto-Slavic,

> Lith. vil~ko, OCS vlUka.

I am not sure about Ablative in OCS. I will look it up. I suspect
it is just another borrowed genitive ending, as in Sanskrit.

Recently the Celtiberian form has been found to

> be -uz (perhaps with a fricative d at the end).

Who and where?

It may aso be identical

> with the Greek adverb type seen in kalo:~s 'beautifully' (except

for the

> -s which may have been taken over from other stem-classes which

used the

> genitive form also as ablative).

You can have an -os in all possible other cases. As with the other
stems in Sanskrit, which have an ablative coinciding with genitive
(which was -os/-es in PIE). You take a single word in Greek and draw
theories from it? I just don't get it, sorry.

And another important point is, I am usually very busy, while the
volume of the list is challenging. So I do not always have time to
go in depth with questions and comments, etc. In such cases I just
say: le'me read it somewhere to save us both the time. If I don't
agree in the end, I will tell ya. That was the portion of
Hochenglisch for today :-)

Eva