One day, I felt the need to learn more about how syllables are
treated in other languages and about moraicity. I then came across
stuff about "light syllables" and "heavy syllables". Oh, of course,
I had come across this terminology before but I paid little heed
to the intricacies of it.
When I actively read into it, I started thinking about how this
might apply to the vrddhi grade in IE. I'm just tinkering with an
idea but...
Is it possible that a "heavy syllable", at a stage just before
Common IE, might be described as either monosyllabic CVC, or
a syllable of the form (C)CVCF(C...) where C refers to any consonant
and F refers to all voiceless continuants (*x, *xW, and *s)?
Further, could this hypothetical vrddhization caused by voiceless
continuants have anything to do with the fact that _voiced_
continuants such as *m, *n, *l and *r are syllabic? That is to say,
is it possible that the vrddhi is compensation for the fact that
voiceless continuants lack the same syllabicity as voiced
continuants? Does that make sense?? Am I being clear at all? Have
I gone ripe with madness?
I know that this still leaves the Narten presents to explain,
which I still have to explain as late derivations from automatically
vrddhied monosyllabic CVC roots but, by adopting this rule, there is
less fuzzy analogical change and more automatic phonetic processes.
That seems a little more favourable, I admit.
Should this pattern be reasonable at all, vrddhi would have
logically commenced after the loss of unstressed vowels and
coincidentally at around the same time as the development of
syllabic *m, *n, *l and *r from earlier unstressed *�m, *�n, *�l
and *�r. That would be around Early Late IE.
Thoughts?
- love gLeN
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