Re: Octha or Ohta?

W dniu 2012-02-06 21:42, dgkilday57 pisze:

> Marginal ablaut series are hard to accept. I prefer to look for a way to
> justify the standard ablaut series, obscured by unusual phonology or
> morphology. After all, that is what brought us laryngeals in the first
> place. For diachronists, system should take precedence over surface
> structure.

There are other departures from the "classical" vowel gradation system
that don't involve laryngeals: the Narten pattern (*e: ~ *e) and the *o
~ *e ablaut. They may form a system of their own. If *o ~ *e reflects
something similar to Narten ablaut in pre-PIE (e.g. *o: ~ *o), *a: ~ *a
would fit into this pattern rather nicely: a triad of pre-PIE tense
vowels producing three types of acrostatic roots.

The laryngeals are a bit like British English /r/, which also gets
vocalised in some syllable positions causing compensatory lengthening or
diphthongisation, colouring vowels and giving rise to new vowel
phonemes. True, most instances of /a:/ in Received Pronunciation go back
to /ar/, which however doesn't exclude other origin (like pre-fricative
lengthening in <bath> or <fast>, pre-nasal developments in <dance>, etc.)

> ... The example of Sanskrit <vájra->, Avestan <vazra-> is the 12th of the 14
> cited by Lubotsky, "Laryngeals before mediae in Indo-Iranian", MSS
> 40:133-8 (1981), in which a laryngeal appears to have vanished before an
> inherited voiced unaspirated stop. In this paper L. does not distinguish
> *h2 from *h4, and wherever he can determine the laryngeal, it is *h2 (or
> *h4). His form for 'break' is thus *weh2g^-. His explanation is that a
> laryngeal was lost in InIr before a voiced unaspirated stop plus another
> consonant. Apparent exceptions, in his view, resulted from later
> processes, primarily the thematization of originally athematic presents.
> It is worth noting that *sweh2d- and *pleh2g- are two of L.'s other
> examples. Since I now regard these roots as probably *weh4g^-, *sweh4d-,
> and *pleh4g-, I intend to examine the remaining examples for evidence of
> *h4.

Of course I'm aware of "Lubotsky's Law", but have my reservations about
it. What looks like *a: ~ *a ablaut is by no means restricted to roots
ending in a media. For example, I find myself unable to accept the
Leiden analyses of 'nose' or 'goose' as plausible real-world patterns
and much prefer straightforward reconstructions like *(h)na:s-, *g^Ha:ns-.

Are you sure that what you reconstruct as *eh4 is not a mere notational
synonym of *a:?

Piotr