Re: [tied] Re: Short and long vowels

At 3:32:41 PM on Wednesday, July 27, 2005, Richard
Wordingham wrote:

> I am very sure that Brian is objecting to the word
> 'perpetuate', which implies that Old Irish has *retained*
> an ancient system, whereas it is far more plausible that
> it has *returned to* an ancient system, much as Jens makes
> the point that Sanskrit has returned to the one-vowel
> system of pre-ablaut PIE.

Yes. My comments on <macc, maicc> explicitly acknowledged
the existence in OIr of the different qualities, but in a
context in which they were obviously the result of PrimIr
conditioning, not ancient inheritance.

Brian