Re: Syncope

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

> Quantitative ablaut is regular quantitative ablaut as
> we normally define it in IE... but only when we're
> talking about IE itself. Not every stage before it!

I am trying to get you to inform me about your use of terms, not how
you don't use them.

> If you can't understand that, either someone else has
> written all of your works or you are pretending to
> be daft just to ennerve me. I'm so tired of you
> twisting my words into some anti-IE statement when
> everything I'm saying is in its defence!

In defence of Indo-European? Not as I know it. And yes, I can't
understand, and I am not pretending. If you are so sure of what you
keep hammering out it may even deserve being presented in
comprehensible terms.

> New morphemes had no choice but to acquire accentual
> allomorphy because that was the rule for ALL forms
> even during postSyncope stages.

Surely you don't know that.

> No, not all suffixes
> are dated to this time as you rant and it would be
> helpful that you stop this emotional rhetoric. Please
> try to paraphrase me more fairly next time.

Well, this is a new message; your preceding posting have given me
the impression that suffixed formations were to be considered of a
post-ablaut age in their totality. Over many messages you have not
had the grace to reply to my very straight and constant question
until now. But now we got that far.

>
> In Mid IE, it is merely a reductionary ablaut without
> the zerograding because Syncope hasn't happened yet.
> Not hard to understand.

>
> > I'm not getting through to you, [...]
> > You are talking of new morphemes, i.e. morphemes with no
> > allomorphy.
>
> Have another espresso. Maybe this one will wake you up.

I am clicking away on it, but it does not really have the nice
effect I like. Nor did the first one really, but I was too polite to
say so then.

> There are no morphemes without allomorphy, you crazy
> fool. Think about it deeply, not superficially like
> you normally treat my ideas.

Well, the message is not all that deep. The question was: Are there
tri-consonant clusters in pre-ablaut IE? If *wért-men (prestage of
PIE *wér-mn.) is rotten because it may have been formed only at a
later date by analogy, then surely one of its many models would
qualify. Or did the particular stage of the prehistory of IE here
referred to only form suffixed derivatives from roots ending in a
single consonant? Did the many root that end in clusters just wait
till Syncope was complete to begin forming suffixed derivatives like
the lighter roots? And if that is your opinion, on what can it
possibly be based?

>
> If ablaut is an ubiquitous all-pervasive process, then
> even new morphemes will have accentual allomorphy
> because ablaut is a rule applied to ALL morphemes at
> that stage.

You don't know that. It's a mere possibility, a remote one at that.
Another is that speakers gave up that nonsense because they did not
care about it. Many speakers of other languages occasionally have
other things on their mind.

> So a word that didn't follow this rule
> would be like having an English word with a glottal
> stop in it.

No, it could also just be the way a young layer of words acted in
PIE. A case in point could be the neuter s-stems which hardly show
any ablaut at all.

Jens