From: Rob
Message: 40811
Date: 2005-09-28
> glen gordon wrote:Are you sure that that English sound change was incomplete? If so,
>
> > This is why we should alleviate this phone[m/t]ic
> > confusion by writing *h2e, not *h2a. Afterall, if the
> > apophony is patterned the same way as *pod-/*ped-,
> > then clearly the phoneme is *e in genitive _*h2ep-ós_.
> > We can plainly see that if *e is ever next to the
> > "marked" class (*h2, *q, *G, *GH) that we should
> > pronounce it as /A/ anyways. And who says that
> > coloured *e is the same vowel as non-coloured *a?
> > I don't. Food for thought.
>
> One should be careful with adverbs like "ever". The colouring by
> the *K series was inconsistent. We have well-attested roots like *s)
> ker-, *sek- or *legH-, which don't show any a-colouring. It may
> have been a capricious, incomplete sound change, like the lowering
> of Early Modern English /u/, which took place in <butter> but not
> in <butcher>.