[tied] Re: Syncope

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

> Jens:
> > The original form of the causative developed into the
> > structure *luk-éye-.
>
> Ah. Why would it? Did the O-fix jump out this time?
> Maybe it couldn't get along with the "k". No, honestly,
> why would it?

It's the sole remaining possibility I can see. I am not asking you
to accept it, I am only informing you about how I have got things to
avoid internal contradictions.

>
>
> > The fool then began forming new causatives with over /o/
> > in them all,
>
> Erh, is this "fool" you mention here meant to be a
> long-deceased Indo-European speaking hunter, or a
> particular Indoeuropeanologist you've read?

That was some wise-ass whose speech habits other speakers saw fit to
follow. He seems not to have been too smart, but such are the turns
language change takes.

> > But if you have a predictable accent on a specific
> > syllable counted from the end, should the accent not
> > move to the following vowel if a syllabic ending is
> > added?
>
> Yes. Actually I admit that it sounds like a ramble and
> I was paying attention to more than one thing while I
> was typing that. However, strangely it does make some
> sense. If we form a hypothetical compound taking, say,
> *kawana (which we know to have *-a at the end

(I see no evidence for that "a" and feel no inclination to accept
it; stem-final vowels are thematic vowels, which do not ablaut the
normal way, so I see no way I could accept it; but go on ...)

> because
> this does regularize the accent to the penultimate in
> its paradigm) and we take, say, *werta, we might end
> up with a senseless compound like *kawana-werta. Don't
> worry about what it means. We're merely exploring
> accentuation in compounds in this example.
>
> So, you're trying to goad me into reconstructing
> *wert with CVCC structure in MIE when I'm telling you
> that CV(C) works just fine. So let's see what happens
> here. We then would have *kawana-wert and guess
> where the accent would be -- perhaps on the last *-a of
> *kawana. Unfortunately for you, that kind of accent
> pattern doesn't happen, so we can forget that.

My fate does not depend on the prehistory of PIE. In this case I can
just calmly say, I told you there is no stem-final vowel in
IE 'dog'. BTW the word is an exceptionally poor choice for we do not
know how it is made: is *k^won- a root (underlyingly then //k^we:n-
//??), or is it a derived stem with generalized zero-grade of the
root? Normative examples should have as few dark corners as
possible.

> The
> other possibility is to have the accent on *wa but
> this still places accent on the FIRST element which
> is not what we find in IE unless accent has been
> altered by later rules like Acrostatic Regularization.

I know many IE stems with accent on their first morphological
element. Of course anybody could claim that they have changed their
accent so that his accent rules come out regular. But such a
maneouvre makes them arbitrary. Where did the stem *pér-tu-s 'ford'
(ON fjo,rdr) have its accent-and-fullgrade if not on the root? If it
was not there to begin with, where was it then, or what else is
wrong with the example?

> We then are stuck with *-a in *werta unless we want to
> complicate our lives or destroy the regular accent
> that we've achieved with CV(C) syllabics. Both actions
> are anti-Occam.

Occam has complicated my life far beyond reasonable measures
already, so an anti-Occam move will serve him right. As for
the "regular accent", it is nice as a thought. I believe we have all
have thoughts in that direction, but, contrary to you, the rest of
us have had the decency to give them up when we found they could not
be substantiated or were even contradicted by things that could not
be given up. It is m general impression that your accent regularity,
for which I only have your word, only works in the few examples I
have seen you use if you either perform gross acts of violence on
the morphological analysis or you simply invent enough unmotivated
vowels for the account to look straight.

> Further, since we initially have a choice of *wert-
> or *werta- underlying our *wert-, and since
> compounding seems to favour a CV(C) structure with
> *werta-, we have *wert- < *werta-. So if this is
> true for this example, it must be true for all
> relevant examples until evidence shows otherwise.

And if it is not true of this example, can it not be equally untrue
of others?

> Again note that I'm not denying the other
> possibilities but we need to prioritize what is
> likeliest otherwise we won't be able to move on.

That's life on the edge. The minute the least little unexpected
thing turns oout to be true the entire edifice is turned into dust.
That does not happen nearly so easily if you go by evidence that has
been substantiated by facts and not only by your own sense of
balance in a dream world.

> To boot, even suspected Semitic loans would seem to
> indicate that a final vowel may have been present
> because they exist in the donor language. It seems
> strange that IE speakers forgot to pronounce the
> final vowel all the time. (eg: *s^idc^u > *sweks)

In my guesses about the prehistory of Semitic inflection, which was
instigated by the fate of 'seven' in IE, the *-u was not there. We
have been over this before I believe. I did not know it would take
care of 'six' as well. Nice to see.

> Strangely then, yes, the lack of *-a WOULD destroy
> the regular pattern we've attained with QAR and
> would ignore a lot of other facts for no reason.
>
> Didn't see THAT one coming, didja :)

Miles away. I haven't seen any facts being handled by your ablaut
concept, and I am now being shown one that revolts against it. There
is one thing your system purports to do - in your sales-talk -, and
that is predict the underlying position of the accent of paradigms.
However, you only say accent is penultimate (or whatever), and so
you have produced a few examples that have the accent there. But
that is very far from constituting proof that other words cannot be
accented differently. It would indeed be a major breakthrough if we
could predict the accent on the root in 'ford', but on the suffix
in 'father'. Sometimes we have the same stem with both, then with a
functional difference, as s-stem substantives with root accent
opposed to s-stem adjectives with suffixal accent. Surely that
cannot be a simple consequence of the phoneme sequence alone which
is the same in both cases, so there apparently was a functional
parameter involved in the accent assignment already. That is an
ongoing process seen in the attested languages, but in cases where
thee ablaut grade follows suit it will appear to have begun before
the rise of vowel gradation. In such cases you can only get a
counting rule to work if you take the unscholarly liberty to
disregard anything that does not fit. That strips your rules of any
interest they might otherwise have had.

> > That is explained already: The accent moves to the
> > following vowel if a flexive containing a vowel is
> > added to the stem, but not if an added desinence has
> > no vowels in it.
>
> Wrong. The nominative ending originally contained a
> vowel and was *-sa since it derives from a demonstrative,
> remember? However it does not steal accent. Neither does
> 1ps perfect *-ha (> *-xe).

The nominative had no vowel that anybody can see if they do not
dream it up and put it in as you do. The perfect endings are odd,
but unexplained. Almost the entire rest is fine and leads to the
said rule, so it looks unwise to start from the few forms we cannot
understand.

>
> The actual rule is: The accent remains on the penultimate
> syllable of the stem unless a _polysyllabic_ suffix is
> appended to it, like partitive *-ata, for example. The
> result is a regular accent in a complete word that falls
> either on the penultimate or on the antepenultimate.

"Either - or" is not a very good rule. Why not say, "somehwere
inside the word", that would be safer. The words are not so very
long anyway, so the difference is small. The polysyllabicity of the
mobility-triggering endings is entirely of your own making, I have
seen no serious evidence for it.

>
> You might have confused this rule with the resulting
> conclusion of the rule: that the instance of accent on
> the final syllable suggests a terminating vowel that
> has been lost. (eg: genitive *-os < *-asa)
>
>
> >> > The IE word consists of root + suffix + desinence,
> >> > sometimes with multiple suffixes, and the ablaut worked
> >> > on the lot.
> >>
> >> But it wasn't always this way so it's absurd to impose
> >> these same rules on Mid IE or your version of Pre-IE.
> >
> > It definitely was that way already when the Schwundablaut
> > (syncope) worked. If you do not accept the morphology on
> > which we observe that the ablaut works, you are limiting
> > your scope arbitrarily to the small parts of the language
> > that fit your preconceived ideas.
>
> Yes, but I wasn't denying IE morphology. I was simply saying
> that the underlying morphology is different than the last
> layer IEists reconstruct. The analysis of IE morphology
> too can be looked at different through preceding layers
> of it. For example, we speak of "thematic vowels" in verbs
> which are, as far as I see, unanalysable in MIE since they
> are part of the root that is being conjugated or the suffix.

Yes , you are dismissing the application of the ablaut rules to an
IE of the typological make-up we observe. Your rules only work if
you change the evidence accordingly. Why don't you put in a funny
vowel /U/ right before the accent and say, "The accent lands just
before /U/, whereupon /U/ is lost". That would produce a complete
hit. I put it to you that you are in fact doing something of the
sort, only with a bigger smokescreen to get us fooled.

>
> We can analyse a form *bHeronti within IE itself as
> *bHer-o-nt-i but its presumed MIE ancestor *barena can only
> be analysed as *bar-ena, where the *e that would become the
> thematic vowel *o was once part of the suffix. Within that
> layer of MIE, a grammaticist could not speak of a "thematic
> vowel" in these paradigms. That's all I was trying to get
> across.

No, if the root was athematic at the outset it would have become
*bhr-ént-i, not *bhér-o-nt-i. Again, your analyses are disqualifying
the language you are trying to attain insight into.

> > I'm afraid this is where we go separate ways. If you are
> > not prepared to allow for the existence of suffixed
> > formations in the corpus of wordforms that have been hit
> > by the purely phonetic process of vowel loss caused by
> > the accent (syncope), then there is no communication.
>
> You're putting words in mouth and confusing what can't
> be allowed in a logical discussion of Syncope with
> what doesn't exist. I didn't say that these forms don't
> exist but we can't allow them in a discussion on the
> proof of Syncope because they introduce too many unknowns.

Ah, do they now? I see that quite differently. They introduce too
many knowns for your darling theories to survive. It's this way
every time I point out blatantly contrasting evidence to you; then
the forms either did not exist, or you cannot handle them for
whatever reason. - I admit however that I act the same way when you
base yourself on the singular of the perfect which to me just fails
to show mobility where I would have expected. In other such
instances I have been successful in making analyses from preforms
that do not contain such vowels which are found to be epenthetic,
but I have no analysis of the perfect to show this (one way or the
other). The accent does move in the middle voice where the enddings
are shorter (same endings only with their vowels ablauting e/zero as
we expect).

> It can be summed up in Statistics: lurking variables. So
> let's stop introducing them, shall we?
>
>
> > The causative is included into the full picture of IE
> > morphophonemics if given its proper input form.
>
> Yet I still fail to see the motivation for applying your
> O-fix process here. Certainly, you may apply it but we
> can apply it to everything, if we fly caution to the wind.

Desire to form a causative form ought to be motivation enough. Who
are you to tell speakers of pre-PIE how they should have formed
their causatives? That the causative was formed with the partial
help of a morpheme also seen elsewhere does nothing to alter the
situation you have to accept also, viz. that these formations
present the same kind of vocalization (call it ablaut if you must
distance your self to the extreme). These formations act the same,
so assuming they contain the same morpheme in them is no burden to
the analysis.

> I respect your attempt at regularizing the causative but
> I don't see there being a sweeping general rule here.
> It's not on the same level as QAR, a rule that applies
> to most paradigms, verb or noun, with alternating accent,
> or to our mutually accepted Syncope which applies even
> more generally.

Of course it is not a sweeping rule if it is an analysis of the
causative and whatever formations behave like it. But the picture
this is fitted into is, unlike yours, one that is valid for the
entire language.

> This O-fix rule in comparison just doesn't apply as
> universally in the least, so don't you think it is wiser
> to apply more general rules FIRST before lumping the
> causative into this? If you do, you can better ascertain
> what should be included as being due to this O-fix
> phenomenon and what should not be included because of
> these other more general and conflicting rules.

That's what I did, so the answer is yes, only I did it, you didn't.

>
> > Okay, I went too far. But the introduction of an
> > "initial" vowel cannot have much bearing on the placing
> > of the accent which is oriented relative to the end of
> > the word, can it?
>
> Well, it would affect accent in compounds if it were
> the second element of the word.

Show us how. Accent in compounds is a wasps' nest, so we can do with
some enlightenment.

>
>
> > Is it not a strange thing that this putative initial vowel is

never

> > accented?
>
> Not really, because MIE *esam "I am" shows that there
> are indeed initial vowels that are accented, with automatic
> preceding glottal stop of course.

The root was demonstrably *H1es- with an initial laryngeal.

>
>
> > And is it not strange that the language has no roots of the
> > structure VC- if it has CVC- and CCVC- and VCCVC-.
>
> Hunh? Oh, I see what you mean. You probably would like a
> counterexample such as *en "in", though really because of
> the automatic glottal stop, we're speaking of CVC.
> Technically, a form like *asteh- would be
> CVC-CVC- if you count the glottal stop in [?as'tEh-].
> Lacking alternation as with *es-, there would be little
> need of the *?-. Of course, this is all assuming that it
> did being with a vowel. It could equally have been *sateh-,
> but since *a-Epenthesis doesn't apply here and since the
> causative can be explained as simple *o-grade, things
> are just fine.

But what you call 'glottal stop' is now treated as a manifestation
of zero, and /H1/ which is your glottal stop, is directly opposed to
zero. One yields a prothetic vowel in Greek and Armenian, the other
does not.

> > What *is* your basis for the assumption of an initial
> > vowel before clusters?
>
> Occam's Razor. Since there is nothing conclusively
> pointing to consonant clustering in pre-Syncope MIE but
> everything supporting a simple CVC structure throughout,
> we needn't fret on this supposed clustering that we
> don't find. Or rather, unnecessary complexity bites!

Okay, a decree again. I fear the language does not obey that.

> The rules on syllabics are automatic, so if one were
> to ask a speaker of this language about it, they wouldn't
> have a clue. It would be as second-nature to them as me
> tapping the "t"'s in "little".

I don't see the relevance of these final words.

Jens