Re: [tied] How to prepare **udon soup

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

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2001 8:48 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] How to prepare **udon soup (was: PIE rhotacism)

 

Hi, Glen and Miguel,

 

I'm following your exchange with keen interest, though with few comments. Here is one:

> [Miguel:] If you have /a/ and /a:/, the tendency is for one to front, and the other to back.  Cf. Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Hungarian, etc. etc.

... or in many Modern English accents, for that matter. It is also common for the short vowel to remain relatively unchanged and the long one to shift away (a: > O: in Early Middle English and dialectally in Baltic; a: > E: as part of the Great Vowel Shift, or in Attic Greek in most positions).

 

There are lots of ways for a vowel system to evolve, though certain symmetries are enforced by the existence of a universal system of features (or "colours") available for encoding vowel phonemes. Those symmetries, plus demands of economy, constrain the freedom of vowels to be reanalysed phonemically and make some "states of equilibrium" preferable to others.

 

Miguel's pre-PIE changes look plausible to me, except in one important respect: I find a system with no high vowels typologically implausible, even as a transitional stage. Whenever /i/ and /u/ (or their long counterparts) vacate their slots in any system (as a result of lowering, diphthongisation or whatever), other vowels _immediately_ rise to fill the empty positions. It doesn't matter if you declare vocalic [i] and [u] to be allophones of /j/ and /w/. Such allophones at least (or independent high-vowel phonemes) should exist in a vowel inventory that has diphthongs like [ai] and [au]. Even a really rudimentary vertical system like Kabardian, in which there are no diphthongs and monophthongs have given up whatever colour they once had to the consonantal shell of the syllable, retains minimally a [+/- low] contrast.

 

I must say Miguel's explanation of ablaut and stress patterns looks convincing, but he does seem to me at times to stretch typological plausibility while striving for formal elegance. The evolution of "his" vocalism begins with a triangular arrangement of vowels -- so far, so good, few things could be less common -- and culminates in the geometrically perfect "classical PIE" system; however, the intermediate inventory (*a, *a:, *ai, *au, *a:i, *a:u) is embarrassingly "marked" despite its fearful symmetry.

 

Piotr