Re: [cybalist] SV: Re: avestan and vedic

----- Original Message -----

From: S. Kalyanaraman

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 1:38 PM

Subject: Re: [cybalist] SV: Re: avestan and vedic

If you mean that the Vedic may have retained the original pattern of vowels (a, i, u), and the other IE languages show secondary differentiation of a into (a, o, e) as in Romani dialects, this was indeed the original assumption of early nineteenth-century linguists, who believed that PIE and Sanskrit could virtually be identified.

This theory had to be abandoned when it was found that Sanskrit velars were palatalised (e.g. *k > c) before any a that corresponded to non-Indo-Iranian *e (and also before i and y), but not before a = non-Aryan *o or *a. The only logical explanation of the distribution of Indic palatals is that the vowel pattern visible e.g. in Greek is older, and that the originally distinct vowels *e, *o and *a merged in Indo-Iranian (not only in Indic!), yielding *a. Here are some typical examples, showing both palatalised and non-palatalised reflexes of consonants reconstructed as IE labiovelars (*kW, *gW, *gWH):

*kWe-kWor-e > caka:ra 3 sg. perfect of kR- 'perform, do'

*kWe-kWl-o- > cakra- 'wheel'

*kWe > ca 'and', versus *kWos > kas 'who'

*gWe-gWom-e > jaga:ma 3.sg. perfect of gam- 'walk, come'

*gWHen-ti > hanti (h < palatalised *jH; before *o, *gWH would have developed into Skt. gh) 'he strikes', versus *gWHn-enti > ghnanti 'they strike'

This and some other sound changes demonstrate that whereas Old Indic was a very conservative IE language, it was also innovative in many important respects, and was derived from PIE in a long and complicated process of linguistic evolution.

Piotr

Dr K Kalyanaraman wrote: One evidence is that the Vedic has the merged a, o, e; Gypsy shows the differentiation of Indo-Aryan a into a,o,e sound changes; could a similar pattern of vowel differentiation explain IE patterns of vowels?