[tied] Re: IE lexical accent

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

> Jens:
> > Thus, if you leave it up to the metrical indications supplied by

the

> > Rigveda to decide whether the first syllable of pada's is longer

or

> > shorter than that of apa's 'from the water', you can only find

that

> > they are both short.
>
> Yes, they are, but then they both would have closed first syllables
> because we'd be talking about */ped.dos/ and */xep.pos/.

No, the vowel of an open syllable may be short or a long. These
words have short vowels followed by single consonants and so have
metrically short initial syllables. This is not English.

> What if there is a constraint on _every_ syllable that there is at

least

> one consonant in the onset. A syllable can be either light (CV) or

heavy

> but it must have an onset.

Then we should have some evidence for it. What pertinent evidence we
do have is against it. Why do I have the feeling that you will not
accept this statement as relevant?

> Now, each word has a root in the word. We know that there is a

restriction

> on a root syllable such that there must be a coda. (I'm speaking

more

> specifically of noun, verb and adjective roots, of course.) With

*pedos,

> we may syllabify the word as */pe.'dos/ but this destroys

constraints on

> the root syllable.

It does nothing of the kind. There is no overriding demand that the
material of the root be always located in the same syllable in all
forms made from a given root. The theorem "the root forms a
syllable" only means that the structure of roots is such that, if
mentioned in isolation, every root forms a syllable with a certain
amount of sonority symmetry in it. What you dictate out of your
dream world just distorts the meaning of the very concept of
syllable when applied to whole words.

>
> However for reduplicated presents, we'd see */bHi.'bHer.ti/ from
> eLIE *bebérti /bHe.'bHer.ti/. This is because the first syllable

is not

> the root syllable and therefore is allowed to be CV. This leaves a

longer

> pretonic *e to rise to *i while the *e in the root syllable of

*pedás

> remains as is because it is in a closed syllable.

Even assessed on its own premises this looks very strange indeed:
Why would a *longer* pretonic *e be raised to *i, if a shorter *e
remains? Surely *i is a vowel of smaller volume than *e. On top of
it all the root vowel of "foot" does not at all exhibit the same
ablaut properties as the vowel of reduplications as you seem to
presuppose. This looks completely fouled-up.

> This would also work on thematic stems in compounds which occur
> pretonically because the thematic vowel is not part of the root

syllable,

> hence it is free to be CV and thus open. Since it is in an open

syllable,

> it rises to *i without problems.

Now, where *do* you find such pretonic i-variants of thematic
vowels? Have you *any* basis for saying any of this in the first
place?

Jens